Best Practices

Any post I wrote this week would just be about how bad it sucks to have pneumonia. Hopefully the antibiotics will have me back in composing shape next week.

Sure, you’ve got a lot to complain about. Let’s start with the ups and downs of work coming in. One week you spend so much time on client projects, you barely have time to eat. The next week you twiddle your thumbs and set a new high score on minesweeper… on all three difficulty levels.

That’s not the only tribulation for you, though. When you get in over your head on a project, there’s no one to bail you out. You can’t call in someone from another department. Your take home pay from month-to-month is inconsistent. When you have a day off, there’s no one to answer the phone and respond to emails. You don’t have anyone in the office with you to bounce ideas off of. No focusing on the best parts of the business for you. You’re personally accountable for everything.

Suck it up, freelancer. You could always be working in a cubicle.

A few days ago I ran across a mental exercise that I haven’t done in a few years. I have a feeling it was mentioned in one of the RSS feeds that I subscribe to. I wish I could remember where I saw it because they deserve a nod, but my mind is drawing a blank. If you figure out where I came across this, let me know in the comments so I can give credit where due. The idea: make a list of 100 items.

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A couple of weeks ago, I noticed I was running low on business cards. When I first started my business, I threw together a simple card design and went with the cheapest printer I could find on the Internet. (VistaPrint is what I found, if you’re curious.) My business has grown quite a bit since I started out of the gates. I felt like now was the time to consider a higher quality printing job.

I ended up working with a local company. (Rowland Printing, again for the curious.) The experience was totally different. With VistaPrint I had to do most of the legwork. I followed their instructions on formatting my design to meet their specifications. I spent far too long doing minor tweaks that probably would have taken a professional a few minutes. With Rowland on the other hand, I sent them a file that had my design. They sent me back a file that had been formatted appropriately and asked if that’s what I meant.

The whole experience was delightful for me as the customer. Now VistaPrint offers a very good service at what seems to me to be a good price, but I’ll be working with my local company in the future. I’m willing to pay more money because it required so little effort on my part to get the result that I wanted. If you wish you were making more money, a good question to ask yourself might be, “How easy am I to work with?”