One tip that I was given many years ago was to start a project the right way.  It was suggested to me that the best way to do this was through an initial ‘Summary of Understanding’.

Generally, when you start a contract, or meet with a prospect or chat about a freelance job, the client will do a brain dump of what they need.   The term ‘Brain Dump’ is a good description, as in the majority of cases, they don’t have anything on paper – everything they explain comes directly from their brain to their mouth and into your ears.  Because of this flow, their thoughts, requirements and needs can come out as a jumbled collection which you need to put into order to create the project or proposal.

A Summary of Understanding
So before any quotation is produced, work started, or plan put together, it is worth investing the time to quickly create a Summary of Understanding.   This is a short (can be a single page) document which details your understanding of their needs and requirements.  This document can then act as a working plan that everything else is generated from.  Your client or prospect will undoubtedly find it valuable as it documents their muddled thoughts.  And with your branding (logo, name, web site, etc) all over it, your credibility is boosted even before the project begins.

But if you are clever, it can be used to also boost revenue.    Not only should it contain an outline of the project, but it can also be used to check with the client that there is nothing missing, and you can use it to suggest additional options that maybe they hadn’t thought about.  There has been many times that I have produced a summary of understanding, only to have the customer contact me to say that they had thought of 3 or 4 other items they needed (that they had originally forgotten about), or that they liked the sound of some additional options I had suggested and to include those as well.

Format of Summary
When I produce a Summary of Understanding (or Requirements) document, it tends to be either 1 or 2 sides of A4.   They all generally have the same basic layout which includes:

1. An overview (in descriptive text) of what the client is looking to achieve and why (new software because old software is out of date, new web site for a launched product, etc)
2. A bullet point list of the features that the delivery should contain
3. An overview of their dates as discussed (start date, expected delivery date, any other key dates)
4. A list of recommendations (from you) for additional items
5. A list of recommendations (from you) for first steps
6. A list of recommendations for stages (if the project is going to be large, and it is best ‘chunked’ up)

One Word of Warning
I have often found that the Summary of Understanding can lead a prospect to increase the scope of work by 25%, 50% or even 100% of the original requirement; prospects can get very carried away.   So when it comes time to convert this into a quotation or project plan (if already engaged on a T&M contract), it is best to provide figures and time based on the original core requirements, with the additional suggested items added as ‘optional’ extras outside of the original project totals.

It is far too easy to be called in and produce a proposal for a project only to find that the additional elements price you out of the market.    By listing them as optional elements in your cost or time proposals, the customer can select the elements they require based on their budget, and still allow you to keep within expectations where their vision goes beyond their spending limit.

One of the problems that can occur with the feast-and-famine cycle for contractors, freelancers and small business owners is the funny logic that begins when we are in the famine mode.   When we are sitting around, bored, looking for work, sometimes logic can fly straight out of the window.   This is especially true when it comes to maths.

At the end of the famine stage, it may be that a contractor or freelancer is sitting with a variety of paths open to them – with roads leading to different contracts, or with 2 or 3 potential new customers, not knowing which one to take or put the most effort into landing.

The boredom, the need to be active, but also the desperate need for money may cause us to jump in the wrong direction.

Let’s say that a contract or freelance job is offered which pays (for the sake of keeping things simple) a rate of £500 or $500 a day.  But, there is the prospect of another job or contract which pays £600/$600 a day, but won’t come in for another week.

In a world where the chances of getting both are equal, the obvious choice is the one that pays the more money.  Right?

But hold on.  If we have 5 days of unproductive time to wait for the higher rate work – that actually dilutes the value of the 2^nd job – the average day rate is reduced when we factor in the 5 days of unpaid time.

Assuming that the contract or job runs for a month, the immediate start contract pays a day rate of £500/$500 – as no unproductive additional time needs to be factored in.  However, the £600/$600 job is actually reduced to £490/$490 (1 month equals around 23 workable days, PLUS the 5 bench days = 28 days).

So waiting to take the higher paid work would actually cost you £230/$230 in lost revenue over the course of the month.  Whilst this figure may not be high, is still a reduction in earnings.   When you add in the week of sitting around, maybe the choice is not so obvious after all.

When I produce estimates or quotations for customers, I generally produce them quickly and easily using the tools available to me in FreeAgent (the on-line accounts system).  This works for the majority of quotations as I can use the price list system to easily apply standard items, and the quotations are emailed to my customers using my pre-defined template layout.

However, now and again I have to produce more detailed proposals – with lots of text, examples, concepts, terms and payment profiles.  The sort of quotations we all have to produce now and again – the multi page proposals for those ‘larger’ projects.

Recently, I have come across two new cloud based applications which could make the process of quotation generation that little bit easier.  Especially where the quotations are repetitive in nature (where the same text is used over and over again).

Similar Concepts

Both systems are designed around producing quotations.  Both allow you to define customers, define price lists of common tasks, templates for look and feel of quotations (colours, fonts, graphics etc) and allow you to add free text.   Both systems then allow you to quickly generate new quotes by pulling in items from your price list (then saying how many items/hours/days are required) – and will do all the maths for you including adding sales tax/VAT.

Both systems will also allow the quotations to be sent to your customers by email, to view the quotations in web or PDF views, and both will even let your customers accept (or comment) on the quotations on line.

So initially they appear very similar.  However, it’s the way that they generate the quotations, and the integration that sets the two products apart.  Whilst both produce similar cost breakdown in the same way, its how they deal with the text that surrounds the figures that is of interest.

QuoteRoller

Quoteroller is the newer of the two, but for me, has more potential.   The big plus for me is that it integrates with FreeAgent.  Whilst this is currently restricted to pulling your contacts in (which saves a lot of setup time), the developer says it is early days and hopes to push quotes back out to freeagent in due course.  However, it also integrates with Basecamp, Highrise, and Fresh books.

QuoteRoller allows the definition of template ‘pages’ – you can have standard text of any pages which cover any subject required.  Within this text you can paste ‘tokens’, so it can insert the client name, company name, project name, quote number and so on in the text for you.

You can define as many templates as you like to cover all kinds of different quotations – and use the same layouts, words, proposals and information over and over again.  The templates can include text, images, tables, video, HTML and even links to external web sites.  Templates can also be imported from ‘the community’ of users, so regardless of what type of company you run, there will be a template out there to get you going – you just need to customise the text to the way that you prefer to work.

Whilst QuoteRolloer is good, the one thing that is missing for me is a common catalogue of text BEYOND the template that I could pull in before the quotation is complete.  As an example, I could create a template which covers everything I do, but have a section that I wanted to pull in for overseas customers which talks about conversion rates.  If they could include this, it would be perfect.  It also has one major limitation (at time of review) that when entering the cost breakdown, you can only enter whole numbers as a quantity (so if you charge per day, you have the option of 0 or 1, no half day options).

QuoteRoller is free to register and use.  However, once you get past the set limit of quotes per month, you need to pay to add additional quotations.

QuoteRobot

Quoterobot is similar to QuoteRoller, but seems less flexible on the setting of templates.  Whilst it is just as powerful on the pulling in of cost items, you have to enter more text at the time of creating quotations rather than using templates (of standard text blocks).

However, quoterobot is stronger in terms of payment terms planning.  You have the ability to put payment terms per week and it will include a payment plan chart for your customers which is a nice feature.

The one disadvantage with quoterobot is that its price model is designed around a pay to try pattern – so to give it a try you have to have a credit card handy which I didn’t like (although you can cancel after 30 days if you don’t like it).

If you produce enough quotations that you have to pay, quoterobot is significantly cheaper at only $10 a month compared to the $18.99 a month that QuoteRoller charges.

If you have to produce any large or repetitive proposals/quotations, either product could save you an awful lot of time.

There are lots of software tools I use on a regular basis.  Other than the always open email client (I use outlook), Word is generally open, as is Evenote.  However, there has been one tool which I must always have to hand – it’s in constant use and has saved me so much time.  That tool is SnagIt.

SnagIt

Snagit is a Windows and Mac screen capture application.   It sits in the Windows icon tray, waiting to be called in to action.

One click of the mouse (or activation using the alt+printscreen keys) and it produces a control form which allows the capturing of screens, text and parts of screens with ease in a variety of different formats.  It can capture whole screens, windows, multi scrolling windows (perfect for web sites which go beyond the fold) and small areas of screen using a window ‘click and drag’ selection box.

All versions of windows have had their own screen capture methods (such as the Windows 7 snipping tool), but none of them make the process easy, fluid or produce pleasing results.

Snagit’s features also go beyond simple screen capture that makes SnagIt so powerful.   You can add borders (like fade or torn edges to indicate a partial screen is shown), annotation (in the form of circles, boxes, arrows, text, etc) and save captures to a catalogue for future use.

When preparing presentations, proposals, manuals, specifications, user guides or even emails, this tool has been a godsend.   I can quickly include visuals with the minimum of fuss and distraction.

Snagit is not free (£39 or $59), but it is a tool worth having.

GetGreenShot

If you like the features of SnagIt but are not willing to pay for the software, then there is a free alternative in the form of GetGreenShot.

This alternative product has many of the same features as snagit, but is not quite as easy to use and does not support as many options for edging of captures and catalogue storage.

But you get what you pay for.

I am sure that by now, your twitter stream, blog streams and email inboxes are stuffed full of posts and articles telling you that now is the time to review all your freelance and small business achievements in 2011 and plans for 2012.  I know I have seen countless such items.

Well, I am here to suggest to you that now is not the time to do an annual review or plan setting exercise.

The reason for this stems from when I was employed as a senior manager in a software company.  I was told each year to carry out a yearly performance review of all my team (around 35 people) and review what they had done well in the last 12 months, and review any mistakes for areas to consider for improvement.

Well that instruction did not make sense to me.  Why would I review somebody once a year, and talk about things that had happened 11 months ago?

So yes, I did the annual review (as instructed), but I did it only for the purposes of a salary review.

Instead, my management style was to review every month – tell people there and then when they did a good job, and also pick up on mistakes as they happened.  After all, people should be told when they do a good job at any time, and why leave mistakes to fester until the next annual review before corrective steps are taken?

And that is why I suggest if you do go ahead and make plans, budgets, goals, targets or even new year’s resolutions this new year, do yourself a favour.  Go to your diary and pencil in the same reviews at the end of March, June and September 2012.  If you can manage it, also include mini reviews at the end of each month.

Trust me, you won’t regret it.  It will be worthwhile time working ON your company, rather than working FOR your company.

Oh, and a Happy New Year to you.  And I wish you, and your business, the best for 2012.

I am going to share a Contract Search tip which was emailed to me by a long term reader of this blog (so a big thanks to Rob).  It’s a very useful tip for those looking for the next freelance gig or contract job.

Rob says when you are applying to 5 or 6 contract/freelance jobs every day, it can quickly become confusing on what you have applied for, what jobs need what skills, and which agent was used for what position.

To aid in the search, Rob cleverly uses Evernote.   When Rob replies to an emailed job, or just before he hits the ‘apply’ button on the web based job board, Rob highlights the job detail text and uses the Evenote web/text clipper to add a new note into a new Evernote ‘Contracts Applied For’ folder.

If an agent calls or emails him back, it’s a quick task then to pop into Evernote, search on the agents name (or company), and all the posts applied for through the agent are listed.

It’s also a useful tip for checking that you are not applying for the same position again where it is re-listed in the jobs board, or is going through more than one agent.

If you have never used Evernote before, the clipper function is an add-on which installs itself as a tool button into most browsers and MS Office/Mac programs and allows you to quickly highlight text and add it as a new Evernote note.  The clipper can be downloaded from the Evernote add-on site.

Thanks for the tip Rob.

Last week I learnt an interesting fact from a friend who works in a contract placement agency.  Of all the emails he receives in his in tray from people looking for placement in contract or freelance positions, he only ever looks at about 10%.  Put it another way, 90% of people responding for a contract job fall at the first hurdle.

He suggested to me that this was fairly typical now for most of his fellow workers – they all ignored the vast majority of CVs and Résumés that were sent to them.   And this ‘ignored’ number is growing.

When I enquired why this was the case, he shared the following tip, which I now pass on:

Relevance

That was the word he used.   He had no idea if any of the candidates were relevant to the positions he had open.

He was in no doubt that the contract and freelance market was tough – very tough – and getting worse by the week.   Two years ago for every position he had managed to open in the market, he would have between 10 and 20 applicants.   Today, it’s more like 70 to 100.

Of course of these 100 applicants, many are also applying for 5, 6 or 7 contract positions in a day – and there lies the problem.   If he posts 3 contract positions online, by the afternoon he will have around 300 emails with attached CVs – it would take him more than a day to go through all of them.

How could he possibly know which to pick from all of that noise?

Why the Cover Email is King

In his view, the cover email (or letter) was far more important than the CV.  The contract or freelance agent is the first (and main) filter between the candidate and the client.  That is why the cover email needs to give enough reason for the agent to open the CV.

He suggested the following tips are the difference between him calling a candidate, and simply pressing the DELETE key on the email:

1. Keep It Short – The cover email needs to be short – as short as possible.  They don’t have time to read war and peace in an email – keep to the facts.
2. Reference the Position – If you are applying for a contract role, quote the contract reference number or as a minimum, the job title.  He said it was amazing how many emails he got which talked about “applying for the role” when he was juggling 12 or 20 roles.
3. List the skills THAT MATCH – the only way your CV will be looked at is if you have skills that the client needs – so list why you are a match for the position in the cover letter.  Cover the skills required, but don’t expand into unrelated skills.
4. Current Status – Show your current status.  Are you currently in a contract, in a full time job, available now, looking for something in 6 months time – he needs to match your availability with his clients requirement.
5. 5. What you are looking for – Indicate where you will work in terms of geographical location.  Again, this needs to match his clients requirement.  Also, say what your minimum day rate is – most jobs are listed as “Market Rate” – but he needs to know what you would accept.
6. Contact Details – Finally, make his life easy.  Include a telephone number that he can contact you on – mobile is best.

What to Take Away from all of this

In a nutshell,  make the cover email specific to the role.  If you are applying through an on-line contract search system, NEVER use the option for a standard cover letter – this is what most people use, it does not cover the points above, and it will mean that your CV will end up in the recycle bin.

As my Grandmother used to say, “A Penny saved is a penny earned”.  That is just as true for business as it is for us in our personal lives.

So let me introduce you to a great money saving application for your smart phone called vouchercloud.   Note before you continue reading… this is currently for the UK only, but there are plans to expand into the USA!

Rather like the much hyped Groupon, the application works by listing different off-line (and on-line) deals available.   The app is available for most brands of devices, and shows you scores of discounts without having to print out vouchers.

I have found that unlike Groupon (which I find disappointing for its range of discounts), vouchercloud has much to offer business users, with discounts at restaurants, as well as many office retailers such as Staples, PC World, Viking etc.

It’s simple to use – just turn it on at any high street and it will use the phone’s GPS system to show the discounts on offer at nearby restaurants and shops.  Discounts are arranged into different groups including hot deals, meals, electronics, office products, entertainment and more.

Currently it has more than 2,500 retailers and chains on board, including Pizza Express, Cafe Rouge, Strada and Coffee Republic. The deals vary ­according to the chain, but in terms of meals, are typically two courses for £10, or a set ­percentage discount on the final bill.   At business supply shops (e.g. staples) it tends to be in the form of £10 off for every £40 spent.

The system works so well that you can check it in the middle of your meal, drink or shopping adventure.

When you go to pay, you show the waiter the code on the phone’s screen and the bill is lowered accordingly.

It’s worth equipping your phone with this app – and saving you (and your company) money when you are out and about.

Download vouchercloud now!

A real quick one from me today on a new resource I have come across.

Predominantly this is for UK business to business (B2B) companies, but will be useful for business to individuals based companies and companies/freelancers from anywhere outside of the UK.

With the economy in such a bad way, with Europe about to implode and with money on everybody’s mind, it is useful to find out where you stand on late payers.

PayOnTime (www.payontime.co.uk) has everything you need to deal with late payers.  It includes the details of UK laws regarding late payers, templates for letters and emails you can use, rules regarding interest and late payment fees, a discussion/advice forum and a late payment interest calculator.

If you have ever had a late payer, a bad payer or think this situation may arise, you need to visit and bookmark this great FREE web resource.

I am sure it has not escaped you that we are less than one month away from Christmas.

Whilst we are all cutting back this year (as the world teeters on the edge of yet another financial meltdown), Christmas still brings the awful few weeks of worrying about what to buy people.  What do they need, what do they want, what will not make us look like a Scrooge?

As a contractor, freelancer or small business owner, we have the advantage of needing gifts that can work both for us, and for our businesses.  So if you are fed up with yet more socks, bath salts or wall calendars, can I suggest a business Christmas list which you may like to consider and pass on to those stuck for something to buy you?

• Business Books – A little boring, but some can be very useful.  Ones I suggest include the Ultimate Small Business Marketing Book, The ultimate Guide to Google Adwords and The Wealthy Freelancer.
• Tablet Computer – If you don’t own one, a tablet can be very useful.   And tablets are coming down in price all the time (you can get tablets for just over £100).   If you don’t yet have one, it will revolutionise your world.
• A scanner – you can do away with all that paperwork and keep electronic files as described here.  Scanners can be purchased from as little as £30.
• A day at a spa – We all need a break from the day to day grind.  A day of relaxation can be used to rest, relax, recharge and most importantly, plan next year’s activities.  Spa days can be expensive, but a ‘trail’ day can be as little as £30.
• Stamps – Again, seems boring but… a) They won’t devalue, b) Purchased now they will be worth more when postage costs go up in the new year (in both the UA and UK), c) They are always needed and d) Can start you off with a new year mail shot campaign.  Much better than gift tokens.
• An extra monitor – If you use your computer a lot and you still only have 1 (or 2) monitor, an extra monitor will increase your efficiency.  Monitors can start from just £60.
• A better chair – If you spend a lot of time sitting and working, a good chair can make all the difference.  Chairs don’t have to be expensive, but avoid the ‘make it yourself’ variety as sold by Staples as these will be uncomfortable after an hour or so.
• An e-book Reader – one of the modern ebook readers (such as the Amazon Kindle) is perfect for catching up on your reading, whether it is novels, business books or blogs.
• A Love Film or Netflix subscription – DVD disks are becoming a little passé.  A much better option is the gift of a LoveFilm (UK) or Netflix (UK or USA) subscription which can allow rental of movies or streaming to your home.   Use it to catch up on movies which will motivate you to new business heights.
• A portable phone charger  - our mobile devices are the communication hubs of our businesses, so to have one low on power is a disaster.   With a cheap portable battery pack, a dead phone is never now a problem.