Help, I’m in The Wrong Business!

Sometimes You Need To Stop Flogging Your Dead Horse

Now and then we get asked a question that really makes us review what we’ve been upto, take stock and reflect. A friend of ours, who knows our business quite well, got in touch a few months ago. Here’s his question and some answers below.

QUESTION
Hi Debs
We are still at the crossroad. I can use the money generated by the business so far either to

1. move it into a full-fledged UK service company (similar to what you were doing before going over into publishing), or

2. try to launch new products / hosted services, or something like this (similar in spirit to your WebAim thingy, but of course with a different content)

Since you’ve been in both places before (and, apparently, did not like either!) a word of advice will be very useful – what would you do in my place?
B

OUR ANSWER
Hi B

here you go with my brain dump…

We didn’t like having staff – this was our main problem. We preferred doing the client stuff – not the managing staff bits. So if you’re happy with your staff then the option of improving that side of the business is a good one. Our issues with staff included the following:

• they had their own agendas (ie they would choose to do things certain ways in order to fit within their own plan, not the clients!),
• we spent more time “looking after” them than working with clients,
• if business was slow we had lots of people with little to do and it was expensive,
• our expectations of them were wrong (we thought they’d care for our clients as much as we did!)

We also didn’t like having clients who were reliant on us. There was a huge cost (money and time) inherent in having dependent clients, it meant that we were always “on call”.

We had also attracted some clients who were of the “desperate” variety – which was exhausting as they never appreciated anything we did.

We didn’t like having to maintain stuff – boring! Nor do invoices and chase them!

We decided to change our own business focus so that:

• we could give our time for free (no invoices),
• we would only do what we enjoyed (working with inspired people and writing and marketing),
• we would take money upfront for value (ie sell a book and we get paid first),
• we had a business where we didn’t need to be there all the time (systemising everything),

we had a business that had unlimited growth potential (not reliant on the number of hours in a day!)

So, my suggestion to you is to work out what you want and then make a business around that – we did it by using the following tools:

1. Brainstorm the ideal day (get up, read email, check how much money we made overnight, go for a swim, do some writing, chat with some inspired authors, do speaking gig, relax with a big gin & tonic & my husband at my caves! – Joe’s was very similar but without caves, without a husband and he prefers rum!)
2. Have a pity party – what are all the things stopping you getting what you want – really be sad and miserable while you do it! get them out of your system
3. Brainstorm some business ideas that might give you your ideal day
4. Decide on your new business and ask yourself “What will that get me?” or “Will that allow me to live my ideal day?” and continue until you’ve designed things just right

So the first thing for us was “publishing business”. Our goal was “do as little work as possible and only stuff we really enjoy”. Then we said “so what does a publishing business do? And/or so what must we do in the publishing business to get our goal” – and kept asking the questions till we got near the goal.

I think this will help – let us know if it does – having run the wrong business for 6 years, it’s so much more fun to be running the right business now

Debs

If you have a business question send it in and if we can help we will. And if we can’t, we might know a person who can!

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