… In which we find being stuck in a rut gives us an opportunity to explore many escape routes, how even our name can become a valuable asset, learn to be agile, and don’t be tempted to lease a hatstand.

STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU

As an old hippy, one of my guiding philosophies comes from Robert Pirsig and Michael Kramer’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I have used this example in a previous book; however, it is very relevant to our current situation. Pirsig and Kramer have this idea of ‘stuckness’ on the benefits of being stuck. When you become stuck you learn things. The wage slave is in a rut, but not stuck. Someone said that a rut is a grave that is open at both ends. Each day is the same, the same things are done, the same money is paid, until you are too old to do it, and then a little while later you die. When you arrive in Heaven will you regret not scoring higher in your appraisals … ?

Imagine you are in a familiar room that you enter and leave at will. One day you are in it and the door handle comes off in your hand. You are now stuck and this stuckness will lead you towards a number of learning and growing opportunities. You would ask yourself why you wanted to leave the room anyway, it might be nicer to stay. You would consider the mechanics of door handles. What happens when you turn a door handle? Rotary motion is converted into linear motion inside the door so that the bolt slides across. Maybe we could fashion a device that could manipulate the mechanism in the door. If there was another person outside the door we could strike up a conversation with them and ask them to use the handle on their side to let us out. What about the window? Until the door broke we had never considered climbing out of the window, but once we try it maybe it is the best and most fun way of leaving any room.

If we apply stuckness to our job we have to see how narrow our focus actually is. We tend to describe the task or function that we perform as our work. So OK, that’s what we will call it for now, but later, work is going to mean a whole lot more.

Let’s imagine yet another room with a desk in the middle and a serving hatch in each of the opposing walls. Through hatch number one comes our work, we take it to the desk and do our work at it. Whether that is sewing things on it, polishing it, or writing letters and numbers on it, when finished to appraisal standard we hand the work out to hatch number two. Where did your work come from, where did it go? One fateful day, nothing appears from hatch number one – now what do you do? You have no work. Or, possibly, you have done tons of work and hatch number two is locked. It won’t be long before you are buried in unwanted work. What is actually going on behind these hatches; Design, Marketing, Sales, Finance, or Distribution?

In the case of the door handle, we have explored engineering solutions, we have forged new alliances and relationships, we have explored wild alternatives, mastered new skills, and become opportunists, none of which we have ever done in our job.

WHY DIDN’T IT WORK OUT?

Maybe the preceding words have seduced you into thinking about being self-employed. Hurrah! I’ve been self-employed most of my life and I love it but – and ain’t there always a but – I meet people who fail horribly at being self-employed.

I am often hired by government departments or large companies that are downsizing to conduct courses to help prepare people for self-employment. I get to know these people and am always disappointed to find the odd one returning to some boring job after a while and telling me that ‘it just didn’t work out’. If you are reading this book because you are dreaming of being self-employed or about to become self-employed or you are already self-employed, I am sure you would like to know why ‘it didn’t work out’. If we could nail that and deal with it, surely it would stand to reason that it will work out. So let’s interrogate our unfortunate chum to find out what happened.

“How do you mean, it didn’t work out?”

“Well, I just couldn’t find any/enough work.”

There can be a number of reasons for this one; it’s got a lot to do with what is behind serving hatch number one. Firstly, do you know for certain that there is a need or demand for the work that you do? Our turbine designer may have to look for something completely different to do. What do you suggest? That is going to take a lot of careful work and planning; you don’t want to get it wrong again.

Do you know where to find the demand, if there is any? Possibly Mr Turbine could design blades for the Koreans – once everything is sorted out, he can work remotely using his computer in his garden shed, but first he may have to put some clean pants in a carrier bag and hop on a plane to Seoul. That takes bottle, but we now live in the world where the single self-employed person is a global business and therefore has to be prepared to behave like one.

Once we know that our work is relevant and there is a demand, can we sell ourselves and our work? These are all part of our stuckness skills. To be fair to employers, other people are working hard behind those serving hatches to get the best possible price for our work. They are packaging it in the most attractive ways, delivering it on time, and then going to war on our behalf to get the money. There are none of those things that we can’t do or get someone to do for us, but those things must be done and done as well, if not better, than they were in our previous job. It is all about achieving our true value, which has to be a lot. I don’t wish to get all motivational here but if you don’t believe you are worth anything, you won’t be able to get a lot. Well, you will get what you feel you are worth. Which is nothing.

THE PERSONAL BRAND

There is a weird paradox that I want you to solve for yourself later in the book, in the exercise of ‘Fred’s Garage’, but for now imagine your name is Gladys Sponge and you are a watch maker employed by the world famous and prestigious Swiss ‘Heuromeglex’ watch company – average watch price about $5000. What in truth the customer is actually buying is a watch made by Gladys Sponge, in effect a Gladys Sponge watch – but that is not the name on the face. You decide to go freelance and make watches with Gladys Sponge on the face, a person that no one has ever heard of. As a wage you probably got $100 per watch so where does the other $4900 come from? At the end of the day, the customer is willing to pay $5000 for what in effect is a Gladys Sponge watch, as long as it says Heuromegelex on the face. So what we have to find out is how that extra value and demand is created.

The first reply that springs to mind is that Gladys’ employer was a well-established famous Swiss watchmaker. That statement makes some very strong and often not very well-considered points about self-employment. I suppose that I have picked up a lot of my guru-ing experience and knowledge from doing it for so long and from meeting the successes and the failures, but I am sure some of my skill is actually genetic.

My Dad was a weird old Viennese psychiatrist who never really occupied the real world long enough to make any money, so it fell to my Mum, who at home was a lovely Mum, but outside was a tough, hard-nosed Cockney dealer. Her speciality was to buy run-down businesses, build them up and sell them on. She was the turnaround queen – she could transform loss-making concerns into gold mines – but even with her prodigious capacity for work she used to say that time was needed to establish a business. She reasoned that it would need at least one year’s money put aside to survive, and in fact she often bought businesses that had a great idea but had just run out of cash a few months in.

A Matter of Time

Let’s return to our failed friend, “It just didn’t work out”. Perhaps he just didn’t give it enough time. How long did it take the watchmaker to become established? Two hundred years? Does that depress you? It shouldn’t – some of the worlds most famous and established brands have not been around for as long as you might think. It is how they manage those brands that is so clever. We may even be able to borrow or rent a brand ourselves. I am sure that the mega starlet superstar isn’t actually mixing up her best-selling fragrance in her bathtub with a stick and going round the shops flogging it herself. It will be some guy with a perfume factory who is renting a bit of her or his celebrity to save all the fag and bother of brand building. Gladys and her watches can become ‘established’ faster than you could imagine by judicious use of PR and networking. We will all need to get a bit famous.

Brand New, New Brand

For us, the newly self-employed, while today may well be the first day of the rest of our lives, it’s also the first day of the construction of our brand. One of the intentions of this book is to help you to choose what you would like to do, an enterprise that will keep you rich and happy to the end of your days. Well, if it blows up in the first six months it isn’t going to be a lot of fun, therefore what we choose must be influenced by how long we can keep it going before it can keep us going. If you decide to buy a cruise liner for $100 million, a year’s interest on the loan will probably cost a million per month or $250,000 a week, or $5000 a working hour! If, on the other hand, you have no job, no business, you will probably totter by indefinitely on the pittance you receive from Social Security or welfare. Therefore, a very modest enterprise can be sustained for a long time on modest means, and a more ambitious enterprise will require more finance. Is that an over-simplification? So why do new enterprises crash and burn in the first few months?

Time Costs Money

In my home town I watched with interest as a lavish refit was undertaken to construct a new coffee bar. Clearly no expense was spared to get the finest Italian barista machines and mood lighting. The job must have taken six months. There was a grand opening and a week later they were gone. How on earth could that happen? All I could find out was that the refit had taken longer and cost more than expected and the customer numbers were disappointing. DISAPPOINTING?! They gave it a week … maybe after a year they might have had to pull the plug, but they hadn’t budgeted for a year and probably thought takings would cover loans, which they didn’t.

That, then, is a key message. Only pick the enterprise or activity that you can afford. Getting established takes time, although I can show you how to hurry things along a bit with a bit of game play, jiggerypokery and sleight of hand. If you can’t afford the time, you will have to modify your choice of enterprise.

BE A GUERILLA

What really frustrates me is when people have a sound idea and then destroy it by burdening it with unnecessary expense and costs. Let’s for a moment get into the joyful, anarchistic and fun heart of being self-employed. You can be fast moving. You can travel light. You can seize opportunities when they come your way. When disciplined Western troops come up against rebel guerillas, they find them surprisingly difficult to beat. When you need to move a troop of soldiers and their equipment, the logistics and support all have to move. When it is time to fight, an objective has to be presented and explained to the whole troop, who in turn have to coordinate to avoid shooting each other. If you picture the camp, there are probably vehicles, a medical centre, communications, and even a kitchen. Your opponent, on the other hand, is a raggy individual who functions completely independently with a simple reliable weapon that can be fixed by a blacksmith. He has one simple objective; to kill people dressed the way you are. He eats off the land and travels fast and light, making his own decisions. Yes, he fights in a group but they are loose-knit acquaintances who also want to kill people dressed like you. That is how they compete with what appears to be a much stronger force. That is how we can thrive by being an agile business guerrilla.

The Legendary Hatstand

It is at this point that we come to a crossroads. I want you to read this book and be guided to success. I would love you to see how your value as a needed resource to others can be increased.

Your perceived value to others will be governed by the impression that you make on them, which must be of the highest quality. Nothing cheap, nothing tatty, no corners cut, but apparently contradicting that is the danger of overburdening the new enterprise with too much debt and commitment. The problem is the bad habits that we learn when we have a ‘proper’ job. If you were in the army and had decided to become an independent freedom fighter, whilst I would encourage the purchase of a good rifle and ammunition, I might counsel against the setting up of a field kitchen.

In my book, Go It Alone, I tell of my experience when I encountered a group of executives who were being outplaced (sacked). Their employer, to try and assuage his guilt, set up a series of ‘Outplacement’ courses and seminars. The one I was presenting hoped to guide these people towards successful self-employment. A few months after the course, I visited each of them to see how they were getting on. One guy had based himself in a business centre which was magnificent with gardens, car parking, and a fantastic reception area. I was directed to his palatial office where our hero sat resplendent. He had hired a cutting edge light wood designer desk; the latest computer hummed and whined while it sent its commands to the fabulous colour printing centre that was against the wall. “How did you afford this place?”

“Rented, just one week in advance!”

“The desk? The computer The printer?”

“Leased.”

Then out of the corner of my eye I saw the thing lurking in the corner, the thing that summed this madness up! It was … a hat stand.

“A hat stand! Where on earth did you get that?”

“I leased that, too,” he replied defensively. “I always had one in my other office.”

“Did you ever have a hat?”

“No.”

“Have you got any customers?”

“No, but now I’m all set up, that’s the next thing on the agenda.”

“Are you quite mad? You have been at this for months. No customers and all you have succeeded in doing is leasing a hat stand.”

It was at this point that the conversation was terminated rather acrimoniously.

THE MEANING OF WORK

Before we continue, let’s investigate that word ‘customer’. The people who fail at self-employment say that they failed to find work, but do they understand what work is? Work is not just effort or activity; loads of diligent people put in loads of activity and effort into their enterprise which still fails miserably. They say that they have been working hard but they still failed to find work. What on earth does that mean? Let’s see if we can make it clear. Work is the effort and activity that someone will pay you to do.

In the case of self-employment, from this point on we must see that the person who will pay you for this effort is a CUSTOMER. Therefore, above all else we need to find and keep customers, people who will pay us for our effort and activity. In our previous life, someone who gave us money for effort and activity was called an employer. They, in their own way, would find and organize customers – or not – that wasn’t our concern. The employer was entitled, for our ‘wage’, to manage and direct our activity and to punish us if we didn’t produce enough of the right activity and effort. Now you are free, the customer – the person who provides the money – has no right or obligation to manage or punish, but what they can do is to see that we are possibly rubbish and walk away. No notice needs to be given, no appraisal undertaken, no warnings, just voting with their feet. Your management and directions will come from your current employer, that’s you, and all activity must be undertaken with the customer in mind because that is the only place money will come from. Everything else will involve you in cost (particularly hat stands).

Agile, Not Wobbly

What makes the self-employed enterprise so brilliant is its agility. The crew of the Titanic saw the iceberg from miles away but it was already too late – such a mighty ship could not turn quickly enough, so they all just stood and waited for the crash. If an individual was in a kayak, they could paddle around the iceberg with a few seconds’ notice and centimetres to spare. It’s the same with large corporations; they are not stupid, they are just big. When I do my presentation of future trends in the global economy, they don’t disagree with me, they are just too bulky to change direction quickly. As I do my stuff, I see their eyes widen in horror and sometimes I could swear I can see the cold white peaks of an iceberg reflected in their eyes. But don’t feel that smug in your kayak; canoes are agile because they are unstable, so a few lease agreements, a nice big bank loan, and a high rent are rather like carrying a huge anvil in the kayak with you. Just one wobble and the whole thing turns upside down in a split second. To survive for those first few critical months, you must travel light.

I would be truly relieved if you told me that you could survive for at least a year without any extra income (of course we would expect you to make oodles of cash but it’s nice to be safe). So our mission is to present a sharp, attractive, professional image without spending all our cash. Our goal is to increase our value.