… In which we discover that you need to like people if you’re in a people business, but whatever enterprise you are in you will have to learn to behave in a way that may not come naturally to you.

A GREAT BUSINESS … IF IT WASN’T FOR THE PEOPLE

The next area that baffles me is the personality of the self-employed person and the enterprises that they choose. Personalities build enterprises. If, to go back to an old chestnut, you open this mythical coffee shop, you will meet loads and loads of people. If you don’t like people, what on earth are you doing opening a coffee shop?

We recently visited a local attraction which is a tiny model country with working trains, funfair, ships and buses. We took some very young relatives who were enchanted by it What wasn’t enchanting at all were the proprietors! To look at them, you would think that this fairyland was their own private home and that, instead of paying a hefty whack to see it, you had broken in with the sole intent of befouling their treasured sanctuary. Not a smile or an acknowledgement, and a total rejection of any attempt to involve them in conversation, that is, until an elderly lady tried to photograph her grandchild’s wide-eyed delight at the sight of the models. Then they pounced! “No photographs, can’t you read?” they cried, pointing at a selection of threatening notices – one of which read ‘No photographs’. Why no photographs? They offered no explanation. But that’s not actually the point; if you hate and despise people that much and are so tired and exasperated by them, then why on earth would you involve yourself in a people enterprise? Take any rundown, ordinary, miserable little enterprise and do nothing else, nothing at all, other than smile, be nice, be welcoming, and be busily proactive and I guarantee income will quadruple.

PLAY NICE

I asked this earlier but I will ask you again: when you start your enterprise what job will you give yourself? Clearly, that guy should never have bought that tea shop. I tried to tell him that the job description ‘Tea shop manager, whose duties are to include waiting on people, washroom cleanliness, and sorry, no weekends off’ would not suit him. Even we normal human beings who have picked an enterprise that we will enjoy will find it getting tiresome or inconvenient once in a while.

My strange friend who does this odd bit of gardening admits he is not that fond of gardening, but he has a theory (albeit a bit weird) which is: at the heart of his life, on the whole he detests work and will avoid doing much of it whenever he can. He doesn’t like working, it makes him depressed, but he has to do it to live. The theory then goes on to suggest that anything you have to do becomes work. So if you take his passion, which is riding his motorcycle, if he did that as a job – say dispatch riding, stunt show or motorcycle taxi, it would become work and rob him of his only pleasure. While I am not too sure about his thinking, I do see that even fun things which have to be done at a certain time, in a certain way, and at a certain place, can become demanding. But if you look at actors, for example, most of them got into that profession because of a passion for that art. They must get tired and depressed but if we had invested a large amount of money for tickets to see that long-running Broadway hit, we would be a bit miffed if, when the curtain went up, the star ambled to the front of the stage and said, “I am so bored with doing this. I’ve been stabbed in the final act 836 times and I’m tired of it.” That never happens; every night we see a fresh dynamic show with breathtaking characters. For us it is the first time and the skill of the actors would never let us see that it was their 836th time. We need to do the same; we have to put on a show.

BEHAVIOUR MODIFICATION

During my research for my books, I enjoy delving into the world of interpersonal psychology. These psychologists have a flash name for finding ways to make people act differently. They call it ‘behaviour modification’. One of the tenets of this practice is that ‘behaviour changes behaviour’, so, as long as we are aware, we can choose the behaviour that changes the subject’s behaviour.

The tea shop owner, the family attraction owner, and my chum the gardener, may all be accused of having bad attitudes. Every chirpy self-help book wishes to improve our ‘attitude’ and for us it is a mystery as to why anyone would start a people-based enterprise if they had a bad attitude But hold up there a moment, what is an ‘attitude’? The best definition I have ever heard is, ‘Attitude is a behaviour that we choose for ourselves’. Eureka! That is the heart of this whole book; Self Made Me – we are not told any more, not forced, ordered, bossed, persuaded or enticed. No more the wage slave, no code of conduct for employees, no book of rules. Behaviour you choose for yourself; a life that you choose for yourself. So you’ve got a tea shop? You get up in the morning, look in the mirror and you see the tired dismal ageing thing looking back. What behaviour are you going to choose today? What part are you going to play? Why, the part of a cheery, welcoming, country tea shop owner, of course, the role that builds the business and makes money.

A Biker at Heart

In my heart and my lifestyle I am a fairly tatty looking biker, so imagine my wry smile when a critic described me as the ‘archetypal business guru’ looking at home and sharp in my Savile Row suit. I think I must be playing my part a bit too well but I made a horrible mistake once when travelling to a conference in some distant land. The suit, tailored shirts and silk ties were all nicely packed away in the luggage and I was travelling as ‘me’ in my battered and comfy leather jacket. The client met me at the airport and flipped! He really didn’t want to let me present at the conference and it wasn’t until he saw me in the monkey suit that he relented. Put on a show and then whip out of the stage door before your fans see you. If you have a small town enterprise you are on stage a lot longer than you may think. If you are Mr Tinkles the children’s entertainer, don’t start a huge punch up in the local bar in your spare time.

Strength of Character

A good way to get your head around this is to write a tiny play where the star is a character who is a huge success in the enterprise you are planning. ‘“To the Stars”’, a play by Geoff Burch. The principal character is Doris, a successful recruitment adviser.’ Go on to describe the person’s dress, activity levels, attitude and behaviour towards other people; how do they behave when they spot an opportunity; what other people think of them. Could you play that part? The thing is, if you can’t then you are giving yourself the wrong job.

The Right Person for the Job

In the preceding examples, some of the individuals mentioned should really never have gone into the ‘people’ business. Their natural inclination is to dislike interacting with people and I cannot understand why they would ever pick an enterprise that consisted of nothing but mixing with their fellow humans. The problem for us is that, even if we choose an enterprise that we might believe has limited interaction with others, we will always come up against behaviours that are required for success which may conflict with our natural inclinations. I would like this book to offer success to anyone who reads it, not just the extroverts but also to the shy and retiring. The fact is that the price we have to pay to become successfully self-employed is to occasionally work against our feelings and to be able to work outside our personal comfort zone.

If you look at professional entertainers, some of the most famous ones, who looked so smooth, casual and successful, were actually crippled by stagefright every single time and yet still managed to have a great career for many years. They believe that the stagefright is a price worth paying and, more importantly for us, despite it, they ‘work the room’. You will have to learn to work the room – even if you make coffee tables and are shy you can’t just hide away in your shed with your saw and plane and hope the public will beat a path to your door. So even if it is against your natural inclination and even if you have chosen a business you feel doesn’t depend on human interaction, you are going to have to put on a show, put on a face, and get out there and grab those opportunities.

WORKING FOR NOTHING

OK, where are we? We have chosen the correct enterprise, it will result in a job that we will enjoy doing day in and day out, we are competent and expert at the job, we understand and exceed our competitors big and small, and we know our potential customers and have tailored our offer precisely in a completely professional manner. So why haven’t we got any work? Dare I say that it might be against our natural inclination and personality to suffer the perceived embarrassments and humiliations of going and talking to strangers, revealing personal information about ourselves, being forced to ask for money and risking being rejected. I cannot soften this blow – that is one of the downsides of self-employment and will always be with us. The only advice I can give is to remember that frightened but successful entertainer and just grit your teeth and get on with it. It does get easier, I promise.

If you remember my tirade about coffee table makers, taxi drivers, merchants and burglars, we looked at what the self-employed fool themselves into calling work. That poor old coffee table maker sweats away in their shed under the impression that, just because they are making hundreds of coffee tables, they are working. What they are in fact doing is expending effort for no reward, whilst I cheerfully claim that the correct definition of work is effort that someone (the customer or employer) is prepared to pay you for.

Well, perhaps I wasn’t strictly honest with you there. Perhaps we ought to analyze the statement, ‘Finding and keeping customers is the only activity that generates revenue; everything else involves us in cost’. Implicit in this statement is the fact that a lot of our effort will not be paid for – well, not directly.

Early on in this book I may have been a little harsh on employers. I suggested that if our employer pays us £20 an hour and sells the output of our effort for £100, then we are being paid a fifth of what we are worth. That employer has to find the work for us to do and when it is done they have to distribute it and get paid. As self-employed people we will be able to keep a much larger share of that pot – in other words, the profit, but we will have to bear the costs or consequences of the other side of the equation. We will have to do work that we don’t appear to get paid for.

Finding Work Is Work

Here is a nice bold statement of fact that you need to remember: ‘Finding work, is work’. There are two things that the self-employed need to remember: finding work is work, and it is going to have to be paid for. It is no good saying, “I can afford to work for £20 an hour” if in a 40-hour week you spend 20 hours looking for work. This means that you will have to double your charges to cover the ‘looking for work’ time which, of course, makes work even harder to find.

You have covered the checklist; you are truly brilliant and ready to go. Now what? If you are crap, that is bad, but if you are not crap and have no work, that is worse. Even more dangerous are people who become self-employed because they have work lined up; maybe someone has a large project, or asked them to go freelance.

Cheesy

One of my least favourite books is Who Moved My Cheese, but it does have a simple core message that you would think would be obvious, but apparently not – so through gritted teeth I recommend that you read it. It suggests that if people (or mice, weirdly enough) find a place of plenty where the living is easy, they don’t question the source or longevity of the situation. When the well, as it were, runs dry, they are shocked and bewildered.

If you have come to self-employment through redundancy, you may well have already experienced the feeling. Go to bed, get up, go to work, same old dreary job, same people, same jokes, same commute, same money, and then, “We’re moving production to the Far East! Sorry. Bye bye.” Don’t tell me you really didn’t see that coming? There will have been signs … meetings, closed rooms, strange measurements taken, unfamiliar faces about the place. Just don’t make the same mistake now you are self-employed. Always be looking for the next piece of work or other opportunities.

When I am really busy I don’t follow my own advice, so every feast is followed quite swiftly by a famine. I panic and throw myself into work-generating strategies, like PR, networking, blogging, writing articles and contacting my databases. Of course, this is all unpredictable slow-burn stuff so when the work starts to trickle back, it isn’t long before I am hit by a tidal wave of work that overwhelms me. Well, as I said, the Buddhists say something like, “He teaches that which he needs to know most himself.”

It’s a Steal

You may wonder at my choice of the burglar as my role model for self-employment. The overriding thing about this example is that the burglar has that rare and treasured ability to work wherever and whenever they want, and at a time and place of their own choosing. The other remarkable point about the burglar is that they are such consummate opportunists. Burglary is their core job description; yours may be cake maker, bar owner, lawyer, inventor or adviser, but in the case of the burglar there is an internal philosophical driver and that is dishonesty – a desire to steal anything that’s not nailed down, to make money as quickly and as easily as possible, illegal or otherwise. The burglar may steal your wallet, sell pirate DVDs, grow illegal drugs, take a car to get home, or thieve an antique vase. The burglar’s internal driver will not let him miss any opportunity for gain from dishonesty.

You have your job description but what is your driver, what will help you to spot your opportunities? Self-employment is not a job; it’s a lifestyle – a way of life. When I see self-employment projects that fail when every aspect seemed to be in place to lead to success, the reason is so often missed opportunities. The frustrating thing is that it isn’t as though the opportunities are hiding in some way. We see that wallet unguarded on the bar and (quite rightly) a set of moral codes and imperatives prevents us from taking it. We saw it, but we didn’t steal it. The burglar would describe that as a missed opportunity. We have behaved well and honestly, our morals and our upbringing have prevented us from behaving dishonestly. The problem is that other elements of our upbringing, background and conditioning also prevent us from behaving effectively where it is legitimate and appropriate for our situation.

Seize the Day

You overhear a conversation in a bar: “What I need is someone who can make my management team more effective”. You stride across, hand over your card and brochure which you always carry with you, “I’m the person you are looking for! I have doubled the output of the following companies to which they will be delighted to attest. There is a newspaper article where I am described as the world’s best management development expert. Now, when can I get started?” Brash, pushy, I bet the very idea is making you cringe with embarrassment, but that was your wallet on the bar, there for the taking. But those inner voices held you back, “Don’t show off”, “Don’t be pushy”, “Don’t speak to strangers”, “Don’t risk getting rejected”, “Being told no is an esteem-crushing blow”, “Don’t blow your own trumpet”, and so on.