Last week my accountant emailed me with the out come of our tax return. He suggested that if I move some cash into retirement savings I could reduce my burden by 2x what I am paying him for this year’s service. He has paid for himself with a simple suggestion. It is the second time in as many meetings he has added depth to my knowledge and numbers to my bank account.
He is a valuable resource to have. It is interesting though, that the value of the accountant seems to go up as our net-worth goes up. When there is little to account for there is little opportunity to recoup the cost of counting. Yet, I have utmost confidence that had a professional financial guide been at my side in the beginning we would be in an even better position today.
When resources are scarce one of the hardest things for us to pay for is knowledge. Yet it is precisely knowledge that we need when we have little else to work with. We need to work smarter in tandem with working hard, because often times we are working harder due to lack of efficiency, or rather, lack of knowledge..
The benefit of efficiency is a curious thing, it has drastic impact at the start and overtime it compounds.
One of the most evident signs of our need for knowledge is with our most precious resource: time. When we first start a business, we are constantly busy. We are terrible at time management because we can not assess what is important. Assessment is about awareness. We lack knowledge of the right questions to ask to gather the right information to guide our actions. Is the product more important or finding my audience? Should I work on a partnership or focus on a sale? Is that gig worth it? Furthermore, when we lack time because we are busy, the last thing we prioritize is sitting to think. Thinking seems like doing nothing and how can we afford to DO nothing.
Unfortunately doing nothing is likely one of the most valuable things you could do to not only win back time, but also win the life you want to lead.
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Finance is complex but it is by far the easiest field for assessing one aspect of value. There are “logical” rules within the world of dollars and cents. BUT, because the world of finance is inhabited and controlled by humans, rationality is not always followed nor the driving force. The complexity can, and often does, become chaos. And that uncertainty yields a rightful sense of fear.
Probably one of the biggest fears is to confront the financial worth of our work. Does price really define my worth?
The simple answer is no. But let’s dig into price to understand why that can never be the true measure of our worth and success.
In the realm of economics price is the point at which transaction happens. Transaction is an exchange of value, often times currency/money FOR an object or service. Transaction requires two parties, it can not be done in isolation. Price is therefore never determined by a single party. This means that “price” is not necessarily the number printed with a dollar sign next to an object on the wall, nor is it the the number in the head of a potential customer. The number on the wall is the financial value assessed by the producer of the object and vice versa, the number in the head of a customer is their financial value for the product. Neither party is right or wrong, they are both true.
The challenge might be to get to place where exchange can happen.
The easiest experience is when the number in the head of a customer exceeds the number on the wall. Of course an exchange can happen, and possibly include more then what is stated (a bonus on your work; Wouldn’t that be nice!) As you progress in your work and build the value of your brand this is likely to happen. Think of how often you purchase an object or a service because you value what you are getting sometimes even before the object is produced for your inspection or the service is provided. You know it is worth it either from your own experiences in the past or the trusted guidance of a friend. You know that the brand carries a level of integrity that you trust and will deliver the dollar value, or even more, than what you are taking out of your wallet.
Things get more challenging for the exchange to occur when the reverse is true, the number on the wall exceeds the number in the head of the customer. There is a misalignment of assessed financial value. How do you get the numbers to match up? This is the art of sales and negotiation.
Often times our first inclination is to question our assessed value. This is an icky feeling situation! However, this makes sense as it is what is in our control and likely the easier move on our part. But… there is the possibility of increasing the assessed value in the head of your customer. How do we demonstrate that our number is more accurate for the value of the experience?
When it comes to art, we likely can not lean on objective financial value. The cost of materials and our labor is not likely where the number we put on the wall comes from, nor will those two things add up to what you have put on the wall for the customer. We therefore can not debate the physical value of the object or creation of the object with our customer. The caveat to this might be if we have the market (an “objective” valuation platform that is agreed upon by many) to support our number, but many of us do not have that for our work.
So we have to ask ourselves where did the number on the wall come from?
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Confidence is hard to find because it is not something that exists on its own. It is something that has to be developed.
In our early life, confidence comes easy. We do not have any limits because we do not understand the physical boundaries of the universe nor the social constructs of society. And, if we are fortunate we have cheerleaders. We touch hot stoves. We leap off sofas. We work on an ollie repeatedly until we get it. Our parents congratulate our first simple words. Our grandparents push us to try new foods. Our friends egg us on to hit the jump one more time. We push ourselves out of naivete, out curiosity, out of ambition and out of the encouragement of others to mature and get better.
The opportunities are endless in early life. We will become the next Shaun White. We will master the Sommelier’s level four. We will write the next To Kill a Mockingbird. We literally can do anything.
Then something happens.
We learn to fear. We get hard introductions to gravity. We get laughed at for our crude drawings. We get told our writing is not good because of technical conventions. We start to experience the ease of being comfortable and rarely venture beyond the simple tastes we were able to develop in early childhood. We get stuck and our confidence falters.
How much better would our ability become if we got back up after the fall and did it again? How much more refined might our skills become if we pressed on through the practice? How much more nuanced might our taste be if we continued to explore the unknown? How much stronger would we be as a person if we ignored the external and internal critic?
How much further could we have gone if only we had continued to expand our confidence?
There is a near daily question of, “Are you an artist?”.
In my gut and my heart, I know that I am, but the distance to my head has not yet been fully traversed and the distance to my hand feels like an eon away. I rarely give a confident “YES, I am a writer and a film producer.”
I need to start saying so.
That will create some level of accountability for me.
I also need to start acting like it.
My regular musings have refined my ability to write but as a dear friend correctly pointed out, they are only for myself. I fail my own criteria of an artist by hiding behind my screen and never allowing the words to see the light of day and more particularly the assessing eye of an audience. New perspective for myself and for the masses will never be possible if I continue on the trajectory of personal work for personal sake.
It is time to start being an artist instead of just making art.
I recently binged on Sex Education. No I am not referring to the awkward lessons of adolescence.
The Netflix series indeed has it’s unpleasant moments as it focuses on a high school age troupe of characters navigating the lifelong adventure of discovering-oneself. The protagonist, Otis (Asa Butterfield), is the son of a divorced sex therapist (Gillian Anderson), who is persuaded by the cool girl (Emma Mackey) in school to start a relationship clinic at their private academy. The series is worthy of focus. It is good long form storytelling with well written dialog and appropriate ups and downs and twists and turns. I enjoyed the experience.
A scene that lingers for me is late in the premier season. Otis, the teenage therapist, is discovered as not having had intimate relations through an unexpected encounter with Lily (Tanya Reynolds), a sex-crazed nerd. She is kind enough to keep the dilemma to herself but realizes it is a bargaining chip for free therapy services when she discovers her theory of sex does not match her experience. Otis reluctantly takes on the case. Otis needed to do so for the obvious reason of protecting a budding industry and more importantly his all important high school dignity. HE also needed to take on the case because it is his own narrative.
Otis is wise (and actually beyond his years which is somewhat of a shortcoming of the writing) and practices a well known therapy tactic of using another field of physical practice to alter the mental experience of a patient. He takes Lily by bike to a large meadow with an epic hill. His treatment is for her to ride down the hill. He suggests that she needs to face a fear and embrace it, or rather she needs to let herself go. Lily is rightfully hesitant and in the moment suggests that Otis too needs to let himself go. Lily then takes off with Otis watching. Within short order he realizes she is correct. He too proceeds down the rough hillside to experience freedom.
The advice is astute. We are often the greatest obstacle to achieving our desires. The way we can find freedom from our mental blocks is likely to let go. To embrace the choice and let the hill take us to our destination. YES it will be incredibly scary. YES we will certainly lose control and YES we will fall. BUT that pain of that moment of hitting the ground and even the weeks of recovery will never be as great as the agony of living life having not tried.
Hop on your bike and find a place to experience flow in a realm that is somewhat uncomfortable so you can sit in your studio and produce what needs to be produced.
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Time is our most valuable resource. Unlike money, we will never be able to produce more of it.
We likely have to think differently about how to find ourselves with more time.
In the early stages of growing a business we particularly feel the limits of time. We are likely the sole employee of our enterprise which means all tasks fall upon us. We are the visionary, the salesmen, the manager and the labor. We also have to do all the admin that has no one to bill for the service other than ourselves when we do not do it. Time is furiously present when deadlines loom yet always absent when rest and play are needed for the entrepreneur.
So what can you do?
The answer is very simple to state, it is actually one word, we need to say NO. But what do you say no to, everything feels eminant. No visionary time no distinction. No sales no revenue. No management no efficiency. No labor no invoices. No admin, no foundation. It is not a matter of saying NO to any of the overarching hats on the whole, it is matter of saying NO to the circumstances encountered while taking on the role.
To win back time, one of the best places to consider saying no is in your SALES. Yes saying no to customers is one of the most important steps in building a flourishing company. Customers dictate not only the pipeline of revenue coming in, but also the time spent creating revenue. If the cost of serving a client exceeds the amount of revenue in, it is hurting your business.
You can be reasonably accurate in determining the revenue that a client might bring in, how many widgets will they buy or how many hours might you bill them determines your top line. The more challenging consideration is what will it cost you to do so.
Here are a few things to assess when consider the cost of serving a client:
Are they competent? Do they do what they say they will do well? If they are unable to add value because of thoughtless work efforts internally or externally they will not be in business long and will not be an account you will receive funds from. You will spend time and see no return.
Competence shows up early in building a relationship. There is a good chance that if someone can not manage their own schedule to show up prepared and on time they probably can not handle scheduling a rigorous project calendar let alone a company trajectory.
Are they able to communicate? There are very few things that are in our control. Circumstance will almost always create situations where things do not go as planned. Not to mention high achieving people will push limits of their ability and mistakes happen. An ability to articulate what will happen, what has happened, and what can be done saves everyone time and just as importantly saves on everyone’s stress account. Remember communication is not only about the words that are said, it is also about the timing and the manner in which they are said.
Communication skills show up early in building a relationship. You certainly have to set up a time to meet. You can recognize when a client abuses a medium. 6 three word emails to schedule a lunch likely means there will be waste when launching a new marketing campaign.
Are they a nice person? You would think that in a rational business the ability of someone to extend empathy to humanity is not important. It is. Humans are not only rational, they are also emotional. This means energy and effort are consumed when emotional experiences are encountered. An email that is egotistically crafted likely causes a mental pause for the recipient that is far longer than the thought required to step down off the pedestal. Mean people cost a business a lot of time and also tax the emotional accounts of others who have to work with them. Besides do you really want your day to be spent with people you do not like.
It takes time for underlying colors of a client to come out. However small interactions say a lot about the character of someone. Thank you is very cheap to say but incredibly costly to forget. Recognizing the dignity in all humans does or does not happen as someone walks down the street. If lunch focuses entirely on the work and life of your table opposite, what might a meeting talking about the collaborative project look like?
Being selective of your customers early on in building your business will serve your accounts well. Saying no to people that will cost your business more than what they bring in will grow your receivables faster than your payables. This is true for your money, your time, and your emotional well being. And all of them will need to grow if you are going to build a flourishing business that you love.
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I am getting organized. I decided to start tracking my time in 2017. If time is my most valuable resource it is surely important to understand where it is going. It will also be incredibly helpful for determining the value of what I am doing.
In a year of tracking time there have been a few things that gave me pause.
First: There are plenty of hours in a day.
I am only allowing myself to track productive hours and I am being honest about the actual time spent. It is very difficult to exceed 7 hours of meaningful work in a day yet. (This is billable or truly productive hours) I may be too strict with my definition or I may be unrealistic in time spent but I think there is more I could be doing on a daily basis. I need to keep working on completing my three most important tasks everyday. (This will be a future post about priorities.)
Second: Productivity is not always billable, should it be?
In 2017 I had limited hours that are truly billable. I have had even sparser hours that I will recover what I think my billable rate should be. So what is the deal with those hours? I still consider them productive as they are leading to a meaningful payoff in the future.
This is particularly true when it comes to sales. My work in 2016 at a tech startup doing business development further heighten my understand of how relationship is what drives sales. If people do not trust you, what you say is possible is irrelevant. The personal relationship is often what determines trust. There are certainly ways to improve the pace of building trust and I need to focus on that in 2018. I need to be attentive to tracking my “time to close” along with my “closing ratio”, knowing both will help my sales cycle.
The other area I understand as productive but not necessarily paying is infrastructure building or rather working on the operations side of business. I am presently not paid to manage my finances, nor am I paid to develop a time tracking system. However, my work on those operational aspects will pay in the future. I assume efficiency will result which enables me to invest more time in billable hours. I also assume that analysis of these hours relative to my billable hours will determine when it is appropriate to hire staff and what amount of payment they should receive for their work.
Third: Tracking time allows for transparency with clients
Having a record of my time will assist in defining value for clients. As someone who has not tracked time in the past I can attest to how oblivious I am to how long things take. This is particularly true early on in my own career. I thought a city wide mural project with my skill set and access to resources would take a year, it took five! Unfortunately, I only paid myself for part time work for a year. Yikes! Needless to say folks who do not track their time do not know the real value of their time, nor the value of others.
Fourth: Tracking time allows for better definition of expectations.
Heighten awareness of any data about past events allows for better hypothesies about future events. Knowing how long things take me will enable me to more accurately define my own value in the market place. If I am slower to do something is there more value delivered elsewhere? If I am more efficient does my price reflect that?
Resource tracking is vital to successful business. And although an unseen resource, time is the most valuable resource to a service business. Just as I account for money, it is time to start understanding my time.
A side note on “hustling”
I cringe when someone refers to spending their time “hustling”. For a while I had an aversion to people who describe themselves as overly busy. They are one in the same thing. Hustling and busy are the result of a lack of plan and awareness of what is truly productive. I find when I am “busy” I am working on many things because I do not know what I want. I have not decided what my goals are and without a destination I am trying to get everywhere, which is physically, emotionally, and relationally not possible. It is not human to be able to do it all, it is just arrogance to even try!
I have always been an active person. I grew up playing team sports both organized in public gyms and impromptu scrimmages in neighborhood yards. I ran cross country in high school and eventually retired from sport when I went to college. While studying to be a grown up, I came out of retirement when I was wooed into mountain biking. After a baptism at my first stream crossing, Saturday bike rides in the woods and on the roads became ritual. For 15 years my fitness had been maintained exclusively outside.
Stepping back into a gym changed my body but also enhanced perspective on success beyond the facilities doors.
In 2015, I entered a gym for my first indoor workout since freshman year of college. I bought a Groupon for Yoga. My friend Brandon, requested my support for his effort to get chest-baring-ready for a professional dance performance. Yoga captured my being. I enjoyed the physicality of the sessions, and found enlightenment in the practice. I dreamed about my mat and watched my body change. It was going great until our sessions were up.
Brandon still had 3 months to curtain and wanted to continue the path to professional form. He suggested we buy another Groupon, this time for Crossfit. Yoga had been great, so why not?
I entered my first crossfit gym for a 6:30 PM work out of the day (wod) on a cold February night. Intimidating is an understatement. The space was sparse with tortuous looking apparaty around the walls. The previous class was wrapping up and their strained looks showed desperation for seconds to pass and more than hinted at what was to come for me. The specimens of humanity present in the gym were lessons in platonic human-body form. I am not fat, but I certainly did not have ripples in those places. Music was blaring to pump up the athletes and likely to drown out the grunts of agony. The gym owns the title of “box” as inevitably a box is the only place you could imagine physical duress to take place.
Inside this box, there is much to learn from a mindset of daily performance.
The typical session for crossfit starts with a coach describing the routine you will endure during the next hour. The coach walks you through the technique and the strategy you will need for the performance. A coach shows the most appropriate positioning for a movement and suggests the most efficient tactic for completing the task at hand. Too much reliance on oneself in crossfit might lead to injury and likely will elongate the agony you must endure to finish.
During the chalkboard dialog, and in the midst of warming up the body and mind, the coach will note who is in attendance. It is important to document when we have done work and what we have done. In some crossfit gyms it is merely a name on the board, but technology is also used to preserve the information for greater analysis. Without documentaiton, the we cheat ourselves of both knowing our victories and understanding our weaknesses.
Once attendance has been taken, the plan has been made for the work out, and the technique tweaked through several rounds of building the motion or the volume of weight… the performance begins. The surroundings fade. There is little energy given to the cognitive efforts beyond the physical task at hand. It is hard to discern even what the blaring music is in the background, let alone what my colleague five feet away from me is doing. Is she ahead of me? And is that guy really doing more weight than I am? Those questions are not able to cross your mind. The challenge of the work, and the desire to excel at it, requires utmost focus on what matters, finishing. To complete the task you must do every rep yet only be thinking about the next movement required to conquer the beastly workout.
When the clock stops or the last round is retired, there is a chorus of euphoria. You hear the music of the room again. Your body is singing to the beat of your racing heart and tingling with the natural high of hard exertion. Your mind is back to a harmonious state thinking about the sense of accomplishment. You are rewarded for stepping up and performing!
The wonder of crossfit is not over when the timer chimes. You still need to report on your work. Either publically or in private, you record your score. The documentation allows for consideration of your position, certainly by you, likely by your coach and if you really want to grow, by your peers. You have a mark to compare either to the past or to the future with yourself, and even with others. You have an opportunity to improve and consider what might lead to different results. Performance is not complete without evaluation.
Crossfit highlights the value of approaching everyday as a performance.
First and foremost, peak performance requires guides. There are people who have gone before you that can provide insight on optimum execution. They can refine your skills and expand your thinking. Their understanding of rudiments of life, business and recreation are what you can build your practice upon to achieve and exceed beyond your goals.
Peak performance requires preparation. The warm up is key to success. Anticipating the feel of an experience and tweeking the small things when the clock is not held against us allows the mind and body to do exactly what it needs to when it matters.
Peak performance requires focus. Circumstances change and are hard to predict, we have to be able to complete the task at hand regardless, and to do so requires that we focus on every step along the way.. We will certainly miss the minor but meaningful shortcuts if our frame of reference is wrong, and we will likely miss the mark if we do not keep it in sight.
Peak performance has destinations that you can celebrate. Smart goals, or knowing the intent of the performance, gives you something to pause and stand in wonder at your abilities. They are natural points for rest, reward and conjuring up the next idea.
Peak performance is achieved through analysis. It is hard to know if you have reached the peak if there is no marker. It is also hard to know where you are at in relation to the destination if there is no accounting. Documenting our work allows for constant reflection which leads to adjustments that lead to meaningful change. Knowing where you are at and asking questions about the position and how you got there, is the means by which we will conquer new territory.
During the pitch practice of a recent coaching session I asked my client “What do you need?” Although it is rare for anyone to come out and ask the question in this form, this is the point of a pitch, to address the resources we need in order to get to where we want to be.
Pitch practice is a part of every coaching session. I refrain from using “What do you need?” as a prompt until about the fifth session. At this point the client is comfortable, or at least starting to get comfortable, talking about them self. Rarely when I put this out as the initiator of our conversation is there a prompt and concise response. It is challenging for most to articulate what is needed to get where they desire to be. I think there are two reasons for the awkward pause.
First, we struggle to know where we want to go. If we do not know what our destination is, how will we know what we need to get there. For instance, I enjoy traveling. It is easy to imagine that my goal in life is “to travel frequently”. I think this is admirable, but it is hard to know what I should ask of others if I have no specificity in my destination. What I will need to stroll the boulevards of Paris is starkly different from what is required to bushwhack through the rainforest of Costa Rica. The means to get there, the knowledge once I am there, and the tools/resources I should have on hand vary incredibly between the two.
A desire to “succeed” in business is admirable but fails to define a real destination. There are many details lacking in this type of goal. Even the more specific goal of finding funding for business is lacking. Are you looking for equity, debt, or gifts? Intimately knowing the destination we are trying to get to will drastically improve our understanding of what to ask of others to help us get there. It will accelerate our flight to the beach.
Second, we struggle to ask for help. Ego often goes hand in hand with creative and entrepreneurial practice. Ego certainly is needed when an artist dances naked in the street or an entrepreneur assumes $700,000 in debt. Your psyche needs to be strong to endure that type of risk. However, rare is the person who can change the world on their own, or for that matter even their own life. We lack all the skills that are required to achieve our fullest potential. We weren’t born with the knowledge and even if our genes are perfect, we still need mentors to show us how to use them. It is a fallacy to think that we will never need help. The sooner we learn to ask for it, the faster we will achieve our goals.
How do we get to a point where we can put out into the world effectively what we need?
Reflection and humility.
We need to afford ourselves the mental space to comprehend our destination. It needs to be specific and timely. It is harder to hit the west coast at some future date then San Francisco by the end of October. We need to give ourselves permission to recognize we need help AND that it is okay to seek it out. Frequently, the biggest obstacle in life is our self, and many times it takes someone else to move us.
Are you ready to stroll the streets of Paris, hike the trails of Monte Verde, land the next big paying gig…. if you know where you want to go JUST ASK.
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In a recent coaching session the client was describing the awareness of what to do and the time to do it but lacking the motivation. This is where just do it or take the next step or leap comes into play. We get stuck in our head and no additional amount of thinking will get us out. This is the chasm that everyone comes to but few can cross.
What makes one successful is letting the rubber meet the road. We have to write, we have to paint, we have to sing, we have to define our audience, we have to reach out, we have to do the work. But how?
Rote discipline is all I can think of.
We need to do things when the right thinking is on our side so that when motivation is fleeting, which it will be at times, we are ready to act. We need momentum to bust through the thick malaise of self doubt, worry and all the nasty emotions that stifle creativity and action. We need to be in motion when we can.
We have to get in the habit of getting off of our couch. We have to fall in love with the daily experience of doing, so much, so that when the motivation is not there, we still do. You can not force love, this might be true, but if there is not an inclination of love for the work that will get you to where want to be, there is probably good reason to pause and ask, is that really where I want to go.
Do you keep a schedule? What might happen if you put “training” for your career on your schedule? Might you put time on the calendar for studio work? Might you put time on the calendar to dig deep into new ideas? Might you put time on your calendar to work on the business?
Ironically, the more you schedule your time, the more likely you are to find freedom!
PS If you are in a pit without the umph to climb, do the small things you can. Take a breath, reflect, envision.. anything that might help you find just the next hold.
