One Year… and Counting

As of today, it’s been one year since I struck out on my own to pursue BizzyWeb full time. It’s been a fantastic ride full of  new clients, networking, new business opportunities and countless new friends.

As I said the day I launched: “I’ve got entrepreneurism in my blood. I always wanted to have my own business, and growing up seeing my father work for himself certainly left an impression. When I got my MBA in 2003, it was in “venture management,” which is a fancy term for entrepreneurship.”

The tools I learned while working for my MBA at St. Thomas have been invaluable at helping me manage cash flow, run projections, market effectively and keep the big picture in mind. I also owe a huge debt to Tim Ferriss and his book “The Four Hour WorkWeek” for getting me off the fence and into the game. I’m not working four hours per week just yet (more like 60), but I’m definitely enjoying the benefits of answering to no-one but my customers.

At times it’s been tough, and I’ve worked far harder than I thought I’d need to in order to keep cash flowing in, but I don’t regret a single second of it. Knowing that every decision I make is going to directly affect the cash in my pocket has definitely sharpened my focus, but it’s also been incredible fun. This company is my baby, and its first steps — though rocky at times — have been forward.

The company has expanded to include another employee (twice the size!), and there’s bandwidth for more. My biggest challenge now that the dust has settled is to find ways to round out my talent, hand off the things I’m not good at and do what I do best more often. That means more client visits, more strategy sessions, more networking and more speaking engagements for me, and more of the back-end stuff to my trusted partners.

There’s also room for improvement, and I’m getting better and smarter every day. Associating with fantastic people who push you all the time to do more, better, smarter will do that. And that’s why I’m so glad I took on the role of President at IABC Minnesota. Without the encouragement, advice and example of some fantastic IABC connections I’m certain I would never have made it this far in just a year — people like Kare Anderson, Steve Crescenzo, Mark Schumann, Barb Gibson, Mary Ann McCauley and Cindy Schmieg have either made a lasting impression, offered me incredibly helpful advice or nudged me in the right direction (and a few even became clients!).

I’d go into a long list of highlights of the year here, but (though it may seem corny) every single day is an achievement that I’m proud of. My favorites run from every new client site to being on the Blue Ribbon Panel for IABC’s International Gold Quill Awards to speaking to hundreds of people on social media topics. I’m standing on my own two feet, making a go of it, and I’ve never been happier, “Bizzy”-er, or more successful.

Thanks for a great year! Here’s to the rest of my career doing the same thing.

52 Creative Ideas for Finding New Clients: Bootstrapper

You should be able to tell where my mind has been recently.

As a bootstrapper, you know that clients equal business. Without them, you’d just be another one-man (or woman) shop with an office trying not to go into debt. Fighting for and retaining clients against your competition can be a struggle, just like recruiting new employees or searching for a job yourself is a frustrating battle.

Bootstrapper » 52 Creative Ideas for Finding New Clients

How To Increase Business While Beating The Summer Heat: Freelance Folder

Start a marketing blitz, or a newsletter with your church, check in with old clients, contact your local chamber — all sorts of great ideas here.

How To Increase Business While Beating The Summer Heat | Freelance Folder | A Blog For Freelancers And Web-Workers

12 Filtering Tips for Better Information in Half the Time: RSS, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon

 Tim Ferriss’ blog is about to help me once again — this time, cutting out some of the “surf time” for information I use every day using RSS, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.

In a digital world, the race goes not to the person with the most information, but the person with the best combination of low-volume and high-relevancy information. The person with the least inputs necessary to maximize output.

I admit I used to use RSS, but I stopped using it as soon as I started using tabbed browsing in Safari (and now Firefox). It’s so simple to just call up all my favorite sites by “opening all tabs” that I just stopped using RSS altogether. However, I’m missing the key timesaver of RSS feeds now –the ability to only read new posts, and skim content on multiple sites simultaneously.

On to the tips, from Ryan Holiday:

Using RSS Effectively:

1) Don’t Use Categories
Organizing all your feeds by genre is tempting but will burn you out.

2) Don’t check it on the weekends

3) Clean House
If an author isn’t delivering consistently, cut them out. If they ever improve enough to be worth reading again, you’ll probably hear about it.

4) If it Piles Up, Throw it Away
Just click “Mark All As Read” and move on. If you’re utilizing Delicious and StumbleUpon correctly, both later in this article, all the important stuff will come back to you.

Stumble Upon Tips

I haven’t used StumbleUpon yet — but from these tips, I think I will:

StumbleUpon is a valuable tool as a reader or a blogger. As a reader, it allows you to hierarchically rank the Internet–thumbs up or thumbs down, Gladiator style. Based on your voting history and interests, it lets you “stumble” on to pages that you’ll like…

1) Actually Joining the Community
… your votes won’t mean anything if you haven’t voted often and voted well for other pages you actually think are worthwhile.2) Guide, but Don’t Direct
…go through your archives and make sure anything that has been submitted is in the right place. By keeping up on this, you can optimize your site for the traffic it deserves.

3) Dial in Your Interest, Let Computers Do Your Work
Every time you vote, tag, and review a story, the Stumble Upon algorithm gets to know you that much better. Start by voting in all your favorites, sites who’s feed you subscribe too, and writers you read everyday…

4) Use Only the Essentials.
…Go to “Toolbar Options?Position Options” and place it anywhere you want …  thumbs up, thumps down button– [is] everything that you need.

Del.icio.us tips

Although (IMO) stupidly named, I actually used del.icio.us for awhile as my personal bookmark aggregator (before I started using Google Browser Sync to handle the same task). When I was using delicious, seems I missed the social part a bit:

Delicious, if you use it right, not only makes your bookmarking system [highlighting good pages for later reference] portable but it hires all your friends as personal news shoppers for you. If you were looking to outsource your morning read, but didn’t want to pay those Indian MBA’s, this is how you do it.

Making your Bookmarks Del.icio.us:

1) Use the “Links for You” section
Delicious’ killer app is its ability to facilitate sharing. When friends read a story they think you’d be interested in, they tag it to you and it shows up in your account to be read at your leisure.

2) Give to Receive
While you’re doing your regular read, keep your friends in mind. If you see an article that’s relevant to a friends business, tag it “To:UserName” and it shows up in their account.

3) Mark them “To_Read”
When you see something that you know you have to read, but don’t have time for now, set up a category that delineates that you’ll go back to it. Think of it as a DVR that saves the stuff you need to watch but didn’t want to be chained to the clock for.

4) Be Simple
Use the Classic Del.icio.us buttons and nothing else. In Firefox, it puts them right next to your navigation bar, one for tagging and the other to view your bookmarks. Use as few tags as possible…  And lastly, only befriend people who provide quality material. The last thing you need is the website equivalent of chain-emails showing up in your account.

Here’s to more efficient browsing!

DO-based resolutions: DO more/less, start/stop DOing

Thinking about what I want 2008 to be like, it occurred to me that there’s some real actions I can take, or shouldn’t take, and that would be an easy way to keep it all manageable. The goal is to make the list more task/next-action oriented, and therefore easier to stick with. Here then, are a few things I’ll be doing more or less of, start or stop doing.

START DOING

1. Work out every day — starting small, then building the habit
2. Implement GTD fully — next actions, 2-minute rule, projects lists
3. Implement a 4 Hour Workweek “muse”
4. Blog regularly here

STOP DOING

1. Procrastinating

DO MORE OF

1. Reading business books
2. Eat healthy foods
3. Play with the kids
4. Go on dates with the wife
5. Visit with friends

DO LESS OF

1. Snacking on junk food
2. Surfing the web without a specific purpose
3. Taking on projects with little/no ROI

Have any others I should add, or care to weigh in on what you would DO? Let me know!

Shave Ten Hours Off Your Work Week

From Where I Sit: How to Shave Ten Hours Off Your Work Week

It takes a ton of time to do the routine things if you don’t keep close tabs on what you’re doing. In light of Tim Ferriss’ brilliant “Four Hour Work Week,” here’s some suggestions from Michael Hyatt to bring big time savings into your day without jumping off the grid or hiring a company in india to do your taxes. My favorites:

1. Limit the time you spend online. In my experience, the Web is most people’s #1 time suck. Yes, I know it is a wonderful tool for research, blah, blah, blah. But I often catch myself and my family members mindlessly surfing from one page to another with no clear objective in mind. Before you know it, you can eat up several hours a day. The key is to put a fence around this activity and limit your time online. Set a timer for yourself if you have to.

I’ve taken to timing my web surfing into 15 minute slots, often as “reset points” between big projects. It’s way too easy to burn an hour or more if you don’t stay mindful of what you’re doing.

2. Touch email messages once and only once. Okay, let’s be honest. How many times do you read the same email message over and over again? Guess what? The information hasn’t changed. That’s right. You are procrastinating.

One of my biggest challenges — I still tend to keep things in my inbox as long as they’re “undone” — leads to way too much rework. GTD and do/delegate/defer, along with the 2-minute rule of handling (“just do it if you can complete the next action in 2 minutes or less) would save me hours a week. My big challenge for ’08.

4. Stop attending low-impact meetings. If there’s one thing we can probably all agree on, it’s that we go to too many meetings. Either the meeting organizer isn’t prepared, the meeting objective isn’t defined, or you can’t really affect the outcome one way or the other.

I still have a lot of these on my calendar — and am actually getting rid of three of them as a result of this thought.

5. Schedule time to get your work done. This is crucial. As the saying goes, “nature abhors a vacuum.” If you don’t take control of your calendar, someone else will. You can’t spend all your time in meetings and still get your work done.

Instead, you need to make appointments with yourself. Yes, go ahead and actually put them on your calendar. Then, when someone asks for a meeting, you can legitimately say, “No, I’m sorry, that won’t work. I already have a commitment.” And you do—to yourself!

Biggie. I have some dedicated slots — mainly at the beginning of the week, mid-week and then at the end of the week to check in with myself and then hammer out next actions.

7. Engage in a weekly review and preview. Part of the reason our lives get out of control is because we don’t plan. Once a week, you have to come up for air. Or—to change the metaphor—you have to take the plane up to 30,000 feet, so you can see the big picture.

Keeping control and planning can seem like a lot more work, and if you’re already strapped for time and stuggling to keep up it can seem insurmountable to take on “one more thing” in your calendar. But if you don’t plan for completion and add some structure to how you handle your tasks, it’s only going to get worse.

Today

Look to this day
For Yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow is only a vision,
But today, well lived,
Makes every yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day.

- Sanscrit proverb

How to do more by “farming it out”

I’ve become something of a crusader for Tim Ferriss’s “The 4-Hour Workweek,” and have recommended the book (and blog/website) to at least a dozen friends, relatives and acquaintances. So when I saw that another of my favorite info sites, Merlin Mann’s 43 folders, had featured one of the book’s key nuggets — outsourcing your life — I knew I needed to dig further. And guest-blogger Ryan Norbauer’s post gave me a ton of great tips that I want to pass along.

Enlightened outsourcing, Part 1: The psychology | 43 Folders
I recently encountered a weirdly tantalizing idea in Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek, which would ultimately disrupt my addiction to the extraneous. The book advocates farming out the more mundane tasks of your existence to outside firms and consultants, which Ferriss calls “outsourcing your life.” Probably because it would give me an excuse not to do something else more pressing, I decided to give this a go a few months ago. While I did learn quite a lot about outsourcing in the process, my experiments led me to a far grander epiphany about the way I approach life and work generally and helped me form a new set of habits that have utterly rocked my workaday world.

Part 1 of this 2-part series gets into the “why consider outsourcing” question. Best reasons from his post for me include the chance to “do business like the big guys”:

Outsourcing has become something of a fad in the past few months, thanks to Mr. Ferris. I think this is in part because many people hadn’t realized that they could do just what American and British corporations have been doing for years: hire workers in the developing world at rates that would make any domestic contractor laugh.

And the necessities of taking the plunge that force you to get it together in such a way as to be able to hand some things off:

Making good use of outsourced help requires being able truly to open yourself to the possibility of asking for help, getting over your delusions of importance, surmounting any weird hang-ups you might have about entitlement or your worthiness to get assistance, and having the creativity necessary to identify the ways in which you can open your workflow up to external aid.

Then, Ryan makes the leap all the way into GTD to explain the big nugget in part 1:

David Allen, when defining productivity “tricks” puts it this way: “the smart part of us sets up things for us to do that the not-so-smart part of us responds to almost automatically.” And philosopher John Perry suggests something very similar in his structured procrastination, which involves taking on ever more grandiose projects so that you’ll work on the projects you’re actually supposed to do as a way of avoiding those bigger projects. I’ve merely taken this one step further (or flipped it on its head, depending on how you look at it.) By outsourcing the means of avoidance, I’ve committed myself to working on the grandiose.

So there you go. Taking care of the small junk that you’d be tempted to do instead of your big projects actually frees you up (or removes all your excuses) so you can get down to the business of the big things you’re taking on.

Now, things get really interesting in Part 2.
Ryan sets up a detailed explanation of the kind of work that’s best to outsource and how to figure it out (watch your habits over a couple days, continually asking “can someone else do this?”), plus a GTD trick to help you on the way:

Ethan Schoonover recently wrote a fabulous piece here at 43folders about the value of formulating your GTD next-action lists as if they were written for someone else to do. If one of your projects isn’t moving forward, as the theory goes, you probably haven’t sufficiently clarified precisely what physical, visible actions need to be done in order to complete it. When approached with an eye toward outsourcing, it becomes clear how important and powerful this strategy can be. Not only have you figured out precisely how the thing needs to be done, you’ve already packaged it up to outsource to someone else with no (or little) additional work.

Some examples of work Ryan offers as good for the outsourcing model: Virtual assistants, design, fulfillment, A/V editing, scanning, transcription, “artificial” artificial intelligence (doing work that needs automation but that’s hard to automate, like picking photos), software development and domestic work. He gives fantastic examples for each, and gave me a ton of great ideas for ways to make the leap to outsourcing a reality.

He also offers a ton of places to look for outsourcing providers, anything from eLance to Amazon, India to Boston. Plus links to top choices and things to look (and look out) for when choosing and matching a provider with your needs.

Fantastic write-up — if you’ve been thinking you’re too busy and need some help, do yourself a favor and check out both parts.

Be Your Own Executive Assistant in 3 Easy Steps

How to Be Your Own Executive Assistant in 3 Easy Steps | zen habits

Aside from outsourcing your life via tricks in Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Workweek, the easiest and most affordable way to get some extra help for many entrepreneurs is to learn a few of the “master techniques” of EA’s. Zen Habits (via guest columnist Chrissy from EA Toolbox)has 3 steps to get you on the right path to becoming organized and reaping the benefits of having dedicated help. As EAs often fill the role of “professional organizers, time managers or simply “professional keepers,” here are 3 steps to help manage some of your time, tasks and life:

1. Schedule a specific period of time every day for performing these [EA] tasks.
   These are the kinds of tasks that are easy to put off, however, once they pile up become a daunting and overwhelming project. Schedule time (generally about an hour) each day (preferably in the morning) to complete the basic office maintenance that your business requires. This may involve filing paperwork, scheduling meetings, sorting through mail, or reviewing and prioritizing task lists. Simply sit down and take care of these things one by one, before you get busy “doing business”.
2. Utilize tools of the trade.
   As your own assistant, it’s critical to develop routines and standard procedures that are rigorously and consistently followed. This will help streamline your daily activities. As an Executive Assistant, I use a variety of detailed checklist to make most activities “standardized”. For example, when gathering materials for a meeting for my boss, I run through a checklist to make sure he always has the same things with him. Of course, there is some minor tweaking for each meeting, but the basics always remain the same. Taking the time now to standardize your processes will save you time in long run.
3. Establish a proactive tracking system
   Executive Assistants are great at making sure things don’t fall through the cracks. There’s nothing worse than having a client call you to ask the status of a request that you’ve let go by the wayside. As your own E.A, you will need to create a system for following up on client requests and other time sensitive tasks. These days, the best practice is to use some kind of electronic calendar system (such as Outlook). During your dedicated daily E.A. time slot (see number 1), do the following:
1. Review your pending task list.
2. Rank each by priority level.
3. Make note of the next action for each and create a firm deadline.
4. Review progress of established next actions and make note of what has been completed.
5. Gather your next action tasks for the day and rank them by priority.

Most of these are pretty close to the tasks and general principles of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (link to Merlin Mann’s excellent round-up on all things GTD) — but the additional metaphor of setting yourself up as your own EA may help you reframe your activities in those time slots, or help you shift gears from “big picture” to “next actions” and organizing/prioritizing.

E-mail Etiquette 101

From Where I Sit: E-mail Etiquette 101

18 suggestions on email etiquette. My favorites (abridged, with my comments below):

Keep messages brief and to the point. Make your most important point first, then provide detail if necessary. Make it clear at the beginning of the message why you are writing… if you send long messages, it is much less likely that the person will act on what you have sent or respond to it.

Rambling messages drive me crazy. If you want to see any action out of your note, you need to keep it brief, outline and highlight the expected or requested action, any timelines, etc. Bullets and numbers are your friend, paragraphs and rhetoric are not.

Be mindful of your tone. Unlike face-to-face meetings or even phone calls, those who read your e-mail messages don’t have the benefit of your pitch, tone, inflection, or other non-verbal cues. As a result, you need to be careful about your tone. Sarcasm is especially dangerous. If something gets “lost in translation,” you risk offending the other party. The more matter-of-fact you can be, the better.

Amen! Re-reading and assuming the person will take it the worst possible way helps a lot too. I tend to use emoticons (smileys, etc.) to help add some “visual” cues… this is one place where some may disagree and feel that “smileys” make you look like an amateur, but anything that helps convey your tone, if done sparingly, is a benefit.

Don’t use e-mail to criticize others. E-mail is a terrific way to commend someone or praise them. It is not an appropriate medium for criticism… These kinds of conversations are usually better handled face-to-face or, if necessary, over the phone. Especially, don’t use e-mail to criticize a third party. E-mail messages live forever. They are easily forwarded. You can create a firestorm of conflict if you are not careful. Trust me, I’ve done it myself more than once.

Underscore this: email messages live forever, and what’s more, there’s a solid chance if you’re criticizing someone to a third party, that message will make its way to the person you least want to read it. It’s unprofessional, and it breaks mom’s first rule: “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

Don’t overuse “reply to all.” … This, of course, just adds more clutter to everyone’s already unwieldily inbox. Your default response should be to reply only to the sender. Before you reply to everyone, make sure that everyone needs to know.

This happens all the time. My favorite: Those who Reply to All to remind offenders not to Reply to All. Duh!

Don’t “copy up” as a means of coercion. It’s one thing to copy someone’s boss as a courtesy. I do this whenever I am making an assignment to someone who is not a direct report… You may be tempted to do this when you don’t get a response to an earlier request. But I would suggest that you will be better served to pick up the phone and call the person.

This will backfire on you 99 times out of 100, and makes you look like a fool or a tattletale to the person’s boss. Never choose the passive-aggressive route if you want to work with that person again.

Don’t overuse the “high priority” flag. Most e-mail programs allow you to set the priority of the message. “High priority” should be reserved for messages that are truly urgent…

No brainier, but some people don’t get this one. Same as “Reply to All”

Use a signature with your contact information. This is a courtesy for those receiving your messages. It also cuts down on e-mail messages, since people don’t have to send a second or third e-mail asking for your phone number or mailing address.

So easy to do, but so many don’t get this, especially on personal email accounts. Make it easy to communicate with you!

Provide “if-then” options. This is another tip I picked up from Tim Ferris, author of The 4-Hour Work Week. He says to provide options to avoid the back and forth of single option messages. For example, “If you have completed the assignment, then please confirm that via e-mail. If not, then please estimate when you expect to finish.” Or, “I can meet at 10:00 a.m., 11:00 a.m. or 2:00 p.m. Will one of those times work? If not, would you please reply with three times that would work for you?”

Brilliant, and very indicative of the many things that make The 4-Hour Work Week my top recommendation for anyone I’ve talked to recently. Thinking ahead a few steps takes less of your recipient’s time, and yours too.

Use your spell-checker.

Why you wouldn’t do this is way beyond me. See also, the final item:

Re-read your e-mail before you send it. I try to do this with every single message. My fingers have difficulty keeping up with my brain. It is not unusual for me to drop a word or two as I am racing to transcribe a thought. Therefore, it’s a good idea to re-read your messages and make sure that you are communicating clearly and observing good e-mail etiquette.

Actually, the spell-checker usually helps me do this, as there’s almost always something I’ve transposed in hammering out a response. My normal email routine is this: Outline, write, review to cut out unnecessary items, format for emphasis and action, review, spellcheck, send. Has saved my hide more times that I care to admit, but it works.

Be sure to read the whole post, plus comments, on this one. Every emailer will learn something helpful.

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