cost savings – Page 4 – Michele Christensen

Using an automated scheduling tool

One of the biggest time wasters in business is going back and forth to try to set a meeting time. It’s bad enough with just two people, but add a third person or

Easy meeting scheduling for solopreneurs

even more and it can take hours of time spread over days just to schedule a simple meeting.

What I found is that someone would want to schedule with me “in the middle of next week.” I would email my availability on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and wait to hear back. In the meantime, since I offered those times to someone already I was unable to offer them to anyone else in the meantime. I might even have to put the next person wanting to meet with me on hold. You can see how this one thing could bog down several people for days.

What I switched to was an automated, online scheduler where people who want to meet with me get a link to a page where they can see my availability and book an appointment on the spot. I cannot tell you the hours this has saved me over the last year and a half and I get lots of positive feedback on how easy it is to use.

I researched several tools for automated scheduling, and tried one other before settling on Timetrade. Here are a few things I like about Timetrade:

You can set up multiple types of “activities” that people can schedule and when you send them to the page for that activity they can only schedule that activity. In other words, if you are working with someone in half-hour phone sessions they can only schedule a half-hour session not more or less time and not an in-person meeting.
Your guest does not need to create an account to use your scheduler. He or she will be asked for an email address for the purpose of an email confirmation.
Your guest sees your availability in real time but does not see any details of your other appointments. Timetrade syncs to Outlook and Google calendar (my choice in calendars) so once you schedule an appointment on your own calendar your availability is automatically updated in Timetrade.
Once your guest books his or her appointment, it is confirmed for both of you so that there is no need for back-and-forth communication.
Time zone differences are handled automatically based on the settings on the computer used by each person. Each person gets the time in their own time zone.

Getting used to an online scheduler took some time and effort. People can book appointments with me any time, so I always have to be on top of that. If I want to go to the gym on Monday afternoon, I have to put that in my calendar so nobody can book an appointment in that time. If I’m done an appointment at 3:00, the scheduler sees that I’m free at 3:00 and may offer that time to someone. I have to remember to put in some extra time so that I don’t have another appointment until 3:30 or so. I don’t always like last-minute appointments or jam-packed days, so I have to remember to close my day if I don’t want any more appointments. Overall, the adjustment was not that hard and the payoff has been huge.

Timetrade is just one of several dozen resources I share in my Solopreneur Success Rolodex. You can get a copy of my rolodex as a bonus with my system “The ABC’s of a Successful Solopreneur Business.” Grab your copy here.

How do you handle your scheduling? Do you use an automated scheduler?

Done vs. the elusive perfectly done

Solopreneurs love to do quality work, but perfection is not possible — Done vs. perfectly done

A few weeks ago I attended a workshop with Alicia Forest, one of my business teachers. I’ve been sharing some of what I learned in the workshop and here’s another bit for you to enjoy.

During one of the sessions, we talked about the idea that “Done is better than perfect.” I’ve also heard a variation on this which is “Perfect is the enemy of done.” Both are great sentiments that can help us move ahead in business. There’s something about using the internet for you business that just makes us want to add one more thing, to rewrite it again, to add more to the scope, etc. It makes it really easy to get stuck on a hamster wheel of work where you are going, going, going but not getting anywhere.

The key thing to remember is that your goal is to serve your clients and customers, not to show the world how flawless your work is. Every project you haven’t released into the world is help that people who need you are not getting. It may also be money those people would happily pay you that you are not getting.

I’ve heard all this before and I’m sure you have too, but don’t take it for granted. Take a few minutes to remind yourself of this important principle. Yes, it’s important to do your best and give people what they pay for, but balance this against an endless loop of feedback and improvement that keeps the project from ever being done. It’s a drain on your mental bandwidth and not a service to anyone.

One tip to avoid this is to clearly define the scope of the project before you start. You might not have the exact parameters, but if you are trying to write a $7 ebook, it shouldn’t be 500 pages. You can also change midstream if you find the original scope was too small or too big. You can use time limits that are proportional to the price and expected use of the project – for example, you may decide that $7 ebook has to be written in 5 hours.

Take a look at your unfinished projects and see if any could be moved closer to completion by changing you standards to “What would serve my clients” from “Do this as best as I possibly can.” You customers, clients and readers needs should be one of the biggest factors in defining any project.

Get great results by assuming the worst

One of the best things I’ve learned about business management is to always assume the worst – assume that everything will go wrong and many mistakes will be

Solopreneurs should be prepared for things to go wrong — Solopreneurs should figure out what to do before things go wrong

made. This rule has saved me and saved my projects when I was a project manager in corporate America, in my home renovation and of course in my business.

It may seem that this would lead to negative thinking, but I think it works just the opposite. By always assuming the worst and being prepared for it, things will almost always go better than you think and when they don’t you’ll be prepared. This helps me to keep a positive outlook. Given the complexity of modern living, it’s realistic for things to often get messed up so acknowledging and preparing for it isn’t negative, it’s just realistic. Even when things do go bad, I feel better about it because I know I’ve done everything I can to prepare.

What can you do to save yourself and your projects before things go wrong? Here are some ideas:

Confirm the details at least twice. Don’t give a second thought to offending anyone – communication is tough and your efforts will save everyone later. It may not even be the other party that gets things wrong, so confirm for yourself as well.
Get things in writing whenever you can. I’ve found that it’s much easier for two people to get different ideas from the same communication if it’s verbal as opposed to written. If you are talking to someone, send a follow up email outlining your understanding of the conversation. Having something in writing gives you something to refer to if things do go wrong.
Get clear on a next step. What is to be done, who will do it and by when? If the next step belongs to the other person let them know and get their approval to follow up with them if you don’t hear from them. I say something like “So I’ll call you Wednesday if I haven’t gotten the report okay?”
Always have a backup plan or more than one if you can. I cannot tell you how many times this has saved me when things have gone horribly wrong. Try to think of everything that can go wrong and have a solution before you need it. Before going to great lengths on this one, make sure to weigh the potential damage if things go wrong vs. how much effort it will take to make a backup plan because it’s not always worth it. Some things go wrong and there’s very little negative effect so it wouldn’t be worth it to create a backup plan.
Knowing that things do go wrong, leave slack in all of your projects. Build in extra time and money and any other resources that could sink your project such as technical expertise. If you are depending on someone else such as a contractor or copy shop, give them a deadline well before you actually need it in case something goes wrong.

Do you use this mindset in your work? Does it make you feel more positive? Leave a comment telling me how it works for you.

New free resource for you!

I’m really excited to share a brand new tool I’ve created to help you build your solopreneur business faster and with more ease!
I often get into conversations where people ask me what tools I use in my business. It’s one of my favorite things to talk about, and often people are surprised that there are free or paid tools to do the very thing they need to do.

I’ve compiled a list of the tools I use to run my business into a handy document called the Soloprneur Success Rolodex. It has 32 of my tops picks for services and products that are integral to my success.

Grab you copy on this page:

Solopreneur Success Rolodex

To your success!

How solopreneurs can set income goals

A while back, I had a conversation with a coach I was thinking of hiring to help me with my business. Yes, even a business coach needs a coach! No matter how good we are at what we do, I believe everyone needs an outside person to help them.

This coach began our get acquainted session with “How much money do you want to make?” At first I was stymied because I didn’t have an exact figure but had a range instead, and she required one single number for us to even talk. Her plan was to get a number and then work backward to figure out how to make it happen, thus she needed a specific figure from me to even talk about it. Whether or not my figure was realistic given where I was at the time was not a factor for her.

Overall, it’s not a bad idea to start here but there were two big problems with using this approach so rigidly. First, it’s simplistic to just think you can name a figure off the top of your head and make it so. There’s lots of factors that go into building a business at any level and there are no guarantees that you can get to a revenue figure just because you named it. It seems to encourage an almost absurd level of speculation. I would say it’s more realistic to look at how much business you are doing now, how much you can expect to increase based on specific changes you’ve made and then add on some additional due to working smarter.

The second and bigger problem is that it ignores lifestyle choices. There’s loads of ways to make big money, but I’m not willing to do them all. I’m also not willing to work 7 days a week, spend hours a day in LA traffic or neglect my family. How much money you can make is impacted by what you are willing to do to make it. Since some lifestyle choices are not reversable in the short term, I would even say that this is where any income goal has to start. It’s much more realistic to say “I want to make as much money as I can given the following lifestyle conditions……” If you hate your lifestyle lots of money won’t make you satisfied.

Although I caution against using a specific income goal so rigidly, that doesn’t mean it’s always a bad idea. It’s important to know how much you need every month to keep your business open, to cover your own obligations and on top of those two things to have some fun. If you have no idea what those figures are then you’ve got no way to measure if your activities are working and that’s a recipe for business failure.

Measurement basics for solopreneurs

One of the key activities in building a successful business is measuring how well your efforts are working. There’s the obvious measurement of whether profits

Michele Christensen on how solopreneurs can measure their efforts — Measuring your efforts is the only way to make sure they work

are increasing but you don’t earn profit in a vacuum. Your profits are directly related to a myriad of other activities you do and many of these can and should be measured. Most solopreneurs I talk to don’t like numbers, so it’s important to keep any measurement efforts simple, quick and informative. Almost nobody gets things right in their business right out of the gate, so the difference between success and failure is to be always measuring and adjusting to what you do.

The first step to measuring is to be strategic about what you decide to do. It’s not enough to say “I’m going to start Tweeting” or “I want to blog more.” There has to be an objective to your activities and preferably it should be one that can be measured in some way. Ultimately, of course, the objective in a for-profit business is to serve more people and make more profits but it’s likely that many of your activities will have results that are intermediate steps to making profit. For example, you may want to increase the number of people you meet through networking, but adding numbers alone will not result in more business. A more strategic way to think about this would be “I want to meet more people through networking so I can have 10 meetings per month with people who can refer business to me.” Your progress on this goal can be measured – how many people did you meet this month, and how many potential referral partners did you meet up with? It’s also an intermediate step to profit – empowering more people with what they need to know to refer to you can result in more referrals which can result in more business. Once you begin measuring these 2 things – people met and meetings set, you can see how well your efforts are working. Later, when you have some data over time you can see how much business you got from these referrals and have a sense of the dollar value of your networking efforts.

Conversely, if you didn’t measure this but only went to event after event and added to that ever-growing stash of business cards, you’d have no strategic goal, no way to measure and no way to know if the time you invested was paying off. This is why it’s so important to measure your results – continuing to invest time and energy into things that are not working will hurt your business. You do have to do this for yourself – you can’t just do what other businesses do because every business is different. As far as how to track the figures, I use a simple spreadsheet which I fill out every Friday. If a measurement has improved, the number is green so even with a quick glance I can see how I’m doing.

What do you need to start measuring in your business? Leave a comment and tell me about your plan.

Solopreneur Growing Pains

Most solopreneurs I’ve worked with start small and bend the rules to establish themselves. It’s common to start by giving away some free services in exchange

for testimonials or referrals and offer big discounts to hone your craft and gain some momentum. Policies are only loosely enforced if they exist at all in those early days. What almost always happens is that at some point the business is humming along and the business owner still has clients who came on board in the early days and this can create tension for the solopreneur who now has to serve those clients under the old rates or service plan even though it’s no longer appropriate for the business. In those early days, it was fine to get a last minute cancellation since your days were wide-open, but now that means lost income from an empty slot you could have filled with more notice. Maybe some of those early clients are only paying about half of what you charge now.

So what do you do? How do you handle these growing pains?

Start by getting clear on what you want. What rate do you want? How much notice for cancellations do you want? What travel reimbursement do you want? What services do you no longer want to do? Don’t worry if you don’t think you can get all these things right away and still fill your practice – it’s important to know what you want so you can at least begin moving toward that model.

Decide on how much you are committed to the model you want. If you adhere strongly to your model, you may lose some clients off the bat. It may be okay to phase things in over time or give someone a grace period. You may decide to keep some clients even though they don’t line up exactly with your desired business model. When making a change like this, you can do it gradually or all at once depending on your comfort level and your market. If there are services or products you’ve offered that you no longer want to do, consider offering them at a premium price instead of not offering them.

This can be a painful and uncomfortable process but it is necessary to continue your business progress. Your policies, fees, business model and array of services will continue to change and grow with you. At least a few times a year, check in with how you feel about these areas of your business and see if it’s time to grow a little.

Product review – Google calendar

The basics

Google calendar is included with all the features you get when you open a free Gmail account. In spite of being free, it’s really robust and loaded with features. I’ve used Outlook and Blackberry calendars before, and I can’t find anything that’s missing with Google calendar. If you have an events calendar for your company, you can use Google calendar to get it published on your website without any programming skills.

What’s to love

Here are just the top 5 features that I love. There’s many more, but this should give you enough incentive to check it out. There’s also some newer features being tested at Google labs which you can enable as well (check under the Labs tab of calendar settings).

It syncs with my Timetrade (timetrade.com) account so clients can schedule their own appointments. Timetrade only shows when I’m available, not my appointments or what I’m doing when I’m not available.
Custom privacy settings make it easy to share as much or as little data as you want with your spouse or assistant.
You can invite other Gmail users to events and when they accept it shows up on their calendar. This is great for getting things scheduled with no confusion.
You can specify multiple calendars to see in your main view. Mine shows appointments in red, birthdays I’ve entered in blue, US holidays provided by Google in blue and business tasks or reminders in purple. This is helpful because I know at a glance what appointments I have and can look just at that if I want. You could use this feature for various family members or company functions.
I love the seamless sync with my Android phone.

I could go on and on (and often do!), but you get the idea – it’s a great product that happens to be free. This is one of 32 resources I’ve compiled in my Solopreneur Success Rolodex, which you can download by clicking here. The entire rolodex is a pdf with links to the best resources I’ve found for solopreneurs. See a preview of some of the resources and grab your copy today by clicking below:

Michele’s recommended resources

Why I love my email newsletter service

Today is the first post of many on services that I recommend for your solopreneur business. I’ll also be introducing a brand new resource that will allow you to get a comprehensive listing of all the products and services I use. Today I’ll tell you about the email newsletter service I use and why I love it. If you want to get on my email newsletter and test the service I use for yourself, use the signup box at the right.

I’m going to start by assuming you already know the value of an email newsletter for your business. If you’re not familiar with how an opt-in email newsletter can benefit you, stay tuned because I’ll be discussing that in future posts. If you want to have a newsletter, than you need a newsletter service. Don’t try to do it from an email provider like Outlook, Gmail or from the email address provided by your hosting account. You’ll save the service fee, but in the long run it will probably cost you money because you’ll have to handle things like subscribe and unsubscribe requests by hand. Since I’m committed to giving you good information for you business I feel compelled to tell you that not using a service makes a poor impression as well.

I use Aweber for my email newsletter service. I’ve been with them for over a year, and I’m very happy with the service. They do well with the basics like stats, reports, subscribe and unsubscribe requests, social media blasts, list segments, web forms, etc but that’s not why I love the service as much as I do. On top of the basics, there are 2 things that make Aweber stellar in my opinion.

First, they have a strong anti-spam stance that is woven throughout the entire customer experience. It’s not that you get one anti-spam message in your introductory materials and then it’s done. They obviously value preventing spam greatly so they do all sorts of things to encourage you not to spam and to make sure you don’t do it accidentally. Numerous times, I’ve been added to a newsletter by someone who assumed because they had my email address it was okay to add me to a newsletter and this has never happened to when the sender used Aweber. When I’ve done live events, I manually enter the names of people who fill out a form stating they want my newsletter and even in that situation the software reminds you to only send to people who want you to.

Second, they have great customer service. Their online information base is great, but when you need a person you call or live chat their Pennsylvania offices during business hours and get a live person right away. They figure out who you need to talk to and get you to them without making you jump through hoops just to talk to a person.

These features have made it easier for me to have a spam-compliant newsletter that goes out regularly which has been a boon to my business. Oh, and yes they have an affiliate program and yes the links here are affiliate links!

This is the first of many resources I plan to share with you. If you can’t wait for the rest of them to be revealed, you can grab my entire rolodex by clicking here! This is a brand new resource and as you can see I haven’t even set up a proper opt in page for it but you can still grab it right away. It is updated for 2011 and contains 32 resources I use and love.

The costs of doing business

Do you have a good handle on your costs of doing business? How much revenue do you need just to keep the doors open? How much in costs do you incur each time you sell something?

Lots of solopreneurs don’t have a solid grasp of their cost of business. So often, solopreneurs just want to help others and do what they love. They don’t want to know about or manage the business side of things. In fact, a lot of solopreneurs love their work so much they don’t even think of it as a business – they’d give their services away if they could.

The problem with this is that it doesn’t work. Not paying attention to the costs of business means you are operating in the dark and can’t make sound decisions. Many people start their solopreneur business thinking they just need to print a few business cards, put up a website and start doing their work. Word of mouth and the fact that the world needs their brilliance will handle the rest, right? Wrong.

You are as much as business owner and manager as you are a provider of whatever product or service you provide. You need to handle the business end of things in a manner that supports you and your work. Part of this is always having a handle on the costs of doing business. When I worked for big corporations, the budget was a huge ominous document that took months to prepare and was both revered and feared. I’m not suggesting you do that, but you can start by making a list of the costs of doing business that you incur just to open your doors. These costs are generally fixed, i.e. stable and predictable within the range of business volume you could expect in the near future.

Some examples of fixed costs could include:

web hosting
domain registration
phone and utility bills
rent
ongoing training you are investing in

It helps to know what costs of doing business you have each month so that you know how much you need to cover them. It’s the first step to understanding and managing the profitability of your solopreneur business.

You also incur costs that only happen when you generate revenue. These costs are variable and depend on how much you sell and may vary by product.

Have you ever tallied your costs of doing business? Were you surprised, either in a good way or a bad way?