This is the first post I’ve made in over two months. A crazy amount has happened in that time. I’ve become a new dad. This is picture of my new daughter, Libby Joss Mabbitt. She’s the one in the picture with lots of hair.

This is a good time to revisit a post I wrote last August: Fork in the Road. I talked about how one of my biggest clients was in need of more and more work from me as the months went on. It was reaching a cusp where they needed to bring on an internal person to handle what was starting to approach 40 hours worth of work each week.

I brought up the idea in the post that the position could be filled by me or someone else, but the freelance opportunity with this client was disappearing. I started talking about this phenomenon in very general terms, but I never explained how things were working out with me. Cody left a comment on the post and said he assumed I didn’t take the job.

For the most part, Cody is right. I have accepted a position with this new company. Then why am I qualifying this? Well, I’m taking a part-time position with this company that is 32 hours each week. I am still going to be working on independent projects like Patron, but during most regular business hours I’ll be working as a traditional employee.

How does this change affect this blog?

I am not going to be closing down Best Practices, although I probably won’t be posting weekly. Between a new job and my new role as dad, I doubt that I will be able to devote as much time to the blog as I have in the past. If the last two months are any indication, then that’s certainly true!

I don’t really know if I’ll be posting every two weeks, every month, or just on occasions when I feel compelled to talk about something. Probably the latter. So if you don’t use RSS feeds, this is a great time to start. There’s certainly no need to keep checking the site every Wednesday morning because there often won’t be a post. If you can just add this site to your feed aggregator, though, then you can just kick back and wait for new posts to come to you.

photo credit: Extra Ketchup

My emphasis has shifted to more of a product-based business model since July of 2006, but there is still some very good points in this post. The idea of growing large customers is really based on the model of being a service-oriented web developer.

The advantage is that you get to develop relationships with your customers who are going to come to you with new projects they need done. You spend less time selling yourself to new customers and more time developing.

Growing Little Customers Into Big Customers

Today is Blog Action Day. Each year an important topic is selected, and bloggers around the world who wish to participate post about that topic. This year’s subject is poverty. I thought about trying to do a post that ties into poverty, but I think it makes more sense to do a post on this blog that talks about using your skills to help any organization that is trying to make positive changes.

It seems like most successful freelancers I know end up doing at least a little bit of pro bono work from time to time. Usually for some noble cause that resonates with them. It’s seldom because they have so much extra time. So why do they do it?

• It’s the right thing to do. I imagine I’m not the only person who sleeps better at night if I feel like the world is a slightly better place because I’m on it.
• It raises your visibility. You can land projects with much more recognizable clients than you can at your regular billing rates. As a result, your portfolio gets stronger.
• It builds contacts. The decision makers at any organization that is worthy of pro bono consideration do not exist in a vacuum. They tend to know a lot of people and will recommend you if you’ve done a good job for them.

So you believe in the value, but there are thousands (probably tens of thousands) of worthy organizations to donate your services to. How do you figure out which one to work with?

• Need. Who actually needs your service right now? If the soup kitchen down the street already has a stable of freelance writers, they might not need another one.
• Personal connection. Does the mission of the organization resonate with you? If you hate cats and dogs, then doing something for your local animal shelter won’t be quite as satisfying. (Don’t worry. There are other freelancers out there who love cats and dogs, and they will take care of the animal shelters of the world.)
• Advancing business goals. You can do something good and grow your business at the same time. I would suggest working with an organization that brings you closer to your potential customers.

I recently got involved with the Indianapolis International Film Festival. I will be donating a considerable amount of my time over the next several months revamping their website. Right now the site is the responsibility of people who don’t have a ton of experience with this type of work, and they really have other things they need to be spending their time on for the festival. I’d call that a big need.

The objectives of the festival resonate with me: bringing some of the culture of the rest of the world into Indianapolis. I’m also a big movie buff. I get excited about being involved with this organization so that’s a match.

The film festival also advances my business goals. With Patron, I want to be in front of the people who care about promoting culture and entertainment in Indianapolis. The people involved with the film festival run in the same circles as my target market.

So take a second to brag in the comments below. What worthy organization do you donate your time to? Here’s a chance to give them a little free exposure.

photo credit: cambodia4kidsorg

It seems like several of the time management and professional blogs I read have recently talked about limiting how many online social networking sites you get involved with. Although I haven’t personally experienced this phenomenon, I guess some people are finding that after checking in with MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, a couple of niche communities on Ning, and Twitter there isn’t much time left in the day to do anything else. So the advice I’ve seen is to reign in and just pick one or two communities that you really want to become deeply involved with. Let the rest slide.

For online social networking, this makes a lot of sense to me. But networking in the real world strikes me a little different. For over two years I’ve spent most of my networking energy with a single group. It has about 30 people in it. We meet for lunch every week. I’ve gotten to know them pretty well. They’ve passed me some new business and vice versa. Unlike a social network that can have tens of thousands of active users at a given time, I really only have connections with 30 people.

Those 30 people already know each other, so I’m only bringing to the table my previous customers, friends, and family. But look at what happens when I get involved in a second networking group. Now there’s a room full of people who don’t know the 29 people that I’ve spent the last two years getting to know so well. The people in this new group don’t know my friend Allen, who offers exceptional IT support. I’m bringing value to both of my groups by introducing Allen to the people in the new group who need IT services.

If I was in a single group that had 60 members, everyone would already know Allen. Not much for me to do in the way of introductions. If I’m in two groups with 30 members, then I am the connection point. Business networking is based on the idea that if I help you find new customers, then you’ll help me find new customers. That means the more people I know that you don’t, the more likely I will be able to introduce you to a new customer, and the more likely you will be to return the favor.

So does this mean it’s even better to be in 4 groups with 15 members each? Or 6 groups with 10 members each? Depending on the time constraints, I would say yes. There’s a certainly a point at which your schedule does not allow you to keep committing to participate in groups (just like with online networks).

The key difference here is that with an online social networking site, you’re never going to meet all the people in the network. There’s always more strangers in the network for you to meet. So focusing your time and energy on doing just one network really well makes a lot of sense.

In the real world, networking groups are much smaller. Everyone gets to know each other pretty well. Two other people in the room can connect themselves without an introduction from you. The only way you can bring value to the group is to have other networks of people that you bring into the room with you.

There are certainly people who have spent more time than me on both online and offline networking, but that’s my experience.

photo credit: Refracted Moments™

Short and simple tip this week: think long and hard before refusing to quote a project. It’s possible the work is something you truly don’t want to do, and in that case it’s okay to let it pass by. In most cases, though, you’ll be well served thinking about how much you would need to charge for the project to feel good about doing the work. It might be 10 times what you think the client is willing to pay. That’s fine.

The client may come back to you, saying that the price was higher than they expected. That’s your chance to point out the parts of the project that you think are going to cause problems. You can suggest a modified project that is more appealing to you and comes in at a lower price. Everybody wins.

Or maybe the client won’t balk at the price at all. You’ve landed a job that isn’t your favorite work, but it’s at a price that makes it worth the trouble.

photo credit: pingnews.com

I love movies. I love going to the movies and spending far, far too much money on popcorn. I met my wife while we were both working at a movie theater. So I didn’t really need a solid business plan to create Single Sentence Movie Review. I knew I wanted to create that site. I included it in my web development portfolio, but that’s not why I built it. Interestingly enough, though, it has led to bigger and better things. And I imagine that your passion projects can lead to bigger and better things for you.

Last night I joined the board of directors of the Indianapolis International Film Festival. First of all, I really like the other people in the room. There was a lot of good energy focused on the idea of growing and improving the festival. It’s always good to be in a room with those types of positive vibes.

My first responsibility on the board is going to be lending my expertise to the development of the festival’s website. This is probably going to be the highest profile website I have worked on since I started my business. It’s a great talking point when I’m meeting other people in the Indianapolis community. This position is going to go along way in establishing my credibility in the local market.

So what does all this have to do with Single Sentence Movie Review? When I contacted the festival about doing some work on their website, I included a link to Single Sentence as a way to demonstrate both my development skills and my love of movies. That approach seems to have been pretty effective.

Now it’s entirely possible that I may have eventually ended up on the board for the film festival even if I had never created Single Sentence. But I can tell you that the board president was very excited about it. Viewing my site actually spawned some ideas of how the film festival’s site could be approached differently. I also had a lot more confidence when speaking to the board members (who voted me in) because I wasn’t giving them a theoretical pitch of what I could bring to the table. I had already created a website with a database backend to store all the movies.

photo credit: seeks2dream

Sometimes I feel like I’m riding on a pendulum that is swinging back and forth. At one end I have more websites in development than I can comfortably handle, and I’m working long hours just to meet my deadlines. In a relatively short period of time, though, things will shift to the other extreme where I find myself twiddling my thumbs and wondering how I’m going to earn enough to pay all the bills. From conversations I’ve had with other people who have gone into business for themselves, bouncing back and forth between these two scenarios is very common. It’s also very annoying.

Dissecting how this pattern gets established is easy. When I have nothing on my plate, I frantically scramble to get any and every project I possibly can. All of my time is spent on sales and marketing. Zero time on productive development.

This type of dedicated focus will eventually pay-off. Then I get a flood of projects requiring my immediate attention. All of my time is spent on productive development. Zero time on sales and marketing. You see where this is going. Once I complete all of these projects, there’s no new business coming in. So I start the cycle again, spending all my time trying desperately to attract some new clients.

What’s worse is I even recognize it while it’s happening. When I have a stack of projects that I’m working on, I know that there’s no marketing happening. But what can I do? I need to take care of the clients I already have on the line.

Finding Balance

The key is to always be spending some of my time on finding new business and some of my time working on the projects I currently have. It’s far easier for me to make the time to do the current development work I have. (After all, there are clients asking me when their sites are going to be ready.) It’s much more difficult to schedule time to do the sales and marketing when I’m busy.

I’m trying to find a window that I can treat as a dedicated block of time for building my sales pipeline. Maybe it will be from 3pm to 5pm every day. Maybe it’s all day Wednesday. I’m not sure, but I feel confident that it’s a necessary step for the evolution of my business.

When I’m busy it will be tempting to say I can skip the marketing this week because I really need to catch up on building all these websites. In fact that’s what happened last week. I had scheduled some time to do some sales calls, and I decided to work on projects instead. The result? I can already see that the work I have right now is probably going to be completed before I have any new projects coming in. Oops.

Why Is This So Hard?

I usually want to complete projects as quickly as I possibly can. The sooner I finish, the sooner I get paid. It can feel irresponsible to spend a few hours looking for new business, when I already have someone willing to pay me as soon as I’m done with their site. Part of me also doesn’t want to start a conversation with a client if I’m already booked up for the next few weeks. There’s a fear that if I tell them they are going to need to wait until next month for me to get started, they will just walk away.

The truth, though, is that most of the clients I work with aren’t ready for me to start working until at least a week or two after our initial contact. (Some of my past clients have taken months to pull the trigger.) And even if I did say that it was going to be a few weeks, I think most of my clients would have been okay with it. I’m sure there are exceptions, but here is another advantage of this approach.

When I’m in feast or famine mode, I’m a little desperate to land a customer. Since I have nothing to do and no revenue coming in, it’s critical that I close every sale. With a steady pipeline of new business coming in, it’s not as painful if a particular prospect turns out to be a bust because they need a new website today instead of next month.

Does it seem like I’m onto something here? Does anybody else have any insight or tips for getting over the hump of transitioning from a feast-or-famine business to a steady-pipeline business?

At the beginning of the year I wrote a post about thinking of your web design service as a product. In that case I was talking mostly about how this approach makes pricing your service easier. That’s all true, but I think I stumbled upon another benefit: it’s a lot easier to sell.

When I get in front of someone to pitch my services as a web developer, I seem to suddenly become shy. It feels a little strange to stand there and talk about how great I am. Immodest, even. (Maybe you don’t struggle with that, and if that’s the case than my hat is off to you.) So I end up going through the sales call almost apologetically, as if to say “I’m sorry that I can’t stop talking about myself. I know I sound like a jerk.”

The entire dynamic of that conversation changes for me, though, once I start talking about a product that I’ve built. I get more animated. I get enthusiastic. I can talk about all the exciting features of this product because it is just that one small step removed from bragging about myself. And that’s something that a customer can respond to. They want to hear that what they are buying from me is the neatest thing in the world.

So what can you find that allows you to get really excited when talking about your work? For me it is changing my offering from a service to a product. Maybe you get really excited when you talk about examples of how you’ve helped people on previous projects. Maybe you’re jazzed when you talk about a slick way to use AJAX. Find something because the sales process becomes a lot easier once you identify that trigger that gets your energy up.

Should you be more like Dr. House? Yes, if you possibly can. Now I’m not trying to say that you should be spiteful, difficult, or adopt any of the other character flaws of this character. But if you did, would people still work with you? Are you so talented and capable of producing at such a high quality that people will work with you despite any reason they may have not to? Because there’s always some reason not to work with you.

Hopefully the reason isn’t that you’re a big jerk. But maybe you have a different set of technical skills then what they envisioned for the project. Maybe you won’t be available for three more weeks. Maybe you are perfectly capable but don’t have any experience with the type of work that client needs. Maybe you’re a part-time freelancer with a 9 to 5 job that can’t take calls or schedule meetings during regular business hours. Maybe you cost more than all of your competition.

Whatever the “downside” is to working with you, are you so brilliant that customers are willing to work with you anyway?

You have a lot of information locked up in your skull. Think about it. How often do you come across a web site and think to yourself the person in charge of this could make it 500% better if they just made a few simple changes? That’s unique information that you have and they don’t. It’s valuable. You should give it to them for free.

“What?!” you may be thinking. “I’m trying to make money here. If it’s valuable, I want to charge something for it.” Oh, I see. You got into the freelance web development business because you are a four star salesperson that could sell investment tips to Donald Trump. You feel entirely at home convincing a total stranger to hand you half of his or her annual marketing budget. Interesting.

I, for one, am not particularly gifted at sales. I can’t sweep into the room in a flourish of handshakes and toothy grins, regaling my potential customer with epic tales of my design and programming feats. I sort of walk in, ask questions about their business, and answer questions they have about mine. Any sales coach worth their salt would classify me as a hopeless underachiever when it comes time to make a pitch.

So I need all the help I can get. In the unlikely even that I could convince someone to pay me for a few tips on improving their site, what would that be worth? A hundred bucks? Two hundred, maybe? (By the way if you can convince someone to pay higher than that for just sitting down and talking to them about their site for an hour, you are a fantastic salesman who has no business reading this post. Please contact me about a guest author piece.)

Let’s examine what happens if I just give that information away. I tell them a few things to improve their site. In some cases my words will fall on deaf ears, but in some cases they will listen. If they implement the changes, they will see positive results. That makes me look really smart. The next time they need to make changes to their web site, they are going to come to me.

Think about that for a second. I’m not cold calling. I’m not asking them for business with my hat in my hand. They are coming to me because they view me as a knowledgeable expert. Do you think my ego gets a kick out of that? It’s not always a quick strategy, but it does make your sales process easier and, dare I say, enjoyable.

Now I’m not saying you should start emailing total strangers with a laundry list of things that are wrong with their web site. You won’t make any friends, and you’ll probably make a few enemies. This is really only something you can do when you already have a dialogue with someone. But it’s a very good way to turn casual acquaintances into future customers who will also tell their friends about how smart and pleasant to work with you are.

Don’t hoard your wisdom. It will do a lot more for you when you give it to others freely. (Hint: this also applies outside the world of business.)