When you go into business for yourself, even though it sure looks and feels like you’ve become free and unfettered, the fact is, you still have a boss. I don’t mean your clients, because in fact, your clients are not your bosses.
I mean yourself. You’re your own boss and as such, you toil under a contract that is defined by all the expectations, assumptions and self-limitations that you have in your head, whether you’re aware of them or not.
So, like the bosses of your employment past, what does your current boss believe about the way business works and where your opportunities lie? You may want to keep an eye on your boss. If he’s anything like mine, he’s working with outdated ideas from his previous employer (you know, the one he always talks about and likes to borrow ideas from). He’s also highly succeptible to business mythology (e.g., Fast Company, Inc., Wired) and is at times too preoccupied with what the business next door is up to.
I’m going to step away from the boss metaphor now. But let me give you a couple of examples of how the baggage you carry with you from previous experiences can, if you cling to it dearly, get you into a heap of trouble.
After we launched Polymer, we figured we needed office space. But not just any office space. We had just come from a marketing agency and believed that we would grow to ultimately resemble the type of place we came from, which meant having swanky (read: expensive) space that would impress clients and employees alike with just how hip and creative we were. So take one large grade B office space, add furniture, servers, a phone system and a T1 line and you’ve got a recipe for overhead.
It wasn’t until a couple years later, when we found ourselves in a downturn, that we realized how our assumptions had really hurt us. We had few employees, one partner had moved to L.A., the other two often worked from home, and over three years only two clients ever paid a visit. Yet we were paying for the luxury of a big, useless office space. Unfortunately, we had never been clear in our heads that our new business was literally that, new. It had been foolish and nearly fatal to behave and spend as if we were simply a microcosm of our previous employer.
The next example relates to how we actually dug our way out of the previously mentioned downturn. Like many other small creative shops, we were scratching around for business the way we had learned it from our previous employer: You make friendly with corporate marketers so you can get the RFP and then submit a proposal with pricing commitments.
There were two problems with this approach:
- One, marketing budgets were extremely thin, so there were many creative vendors chasing after the same handful marketing buyers. (By contrast, IT departments were looking considerably more flush as many companies were building online infrastructure in order to cut costs.)
- Two, with fixed-price bidding, if you won the work, you had to hope like hell you could manage the project within the promised pricing. It’s a common model in the creative business, but it doesn’t do a good job of accounting for the myriad factors — extra meetings, extra rounds of writing and design, technical integration issues, project stops and starts — that push up your time commitment without giving you the ability to declare a scope change or increase your billing.
So, we made a couple of big changes, which not only helped us climb out of the business doldrums but taught us that assumptions are always worth questioning:
- One, we took a cue from the tech side, where IT development shops typically estimate cost ranges based on project scope but then ultimately bill on a time and materials basis. If we could adopt this approach, it would mean the end of lost and unbillable hours. But we had to trust that our clients were reasonable and who would be willing to engage us on projects with open-ended costs. Our previous experience said it could never work. But as it has turned out, previous experience was wrong.
- Second, rather than exclusively courting marketing buyers whose projects might have a technical component, we started looking for IT buyers whose projects had a usability or marketing component. Again, our experience told us this wasn’t a good idea. If you have a creative service, you sell your wares the same way it’s always been done. You pitch. You show your book. You tout awards. As we discovered, selling into IT called for a different approach. Emphasizing your ability to work within a shared process, to be flexible and to cooperate.
The lesson here is one that I can’t emphasize enough. And I’m not preaching to you, as much as reminding myself. Success may not resemble what you thought, what you read or what anyone told you it would look like.
I also want to add that I don’t blame any of my previous employers and mentors for the ideas and conventions I chose to adopt while I worked fro them. Many of their methods made perfect sense for them and I know that they, too, had to go through a period of questioning and challenging the assumptions they had adopted from their previous employers. It’s an ongoing cycle and in the end, you’re ultimately responsible for how you play the hand you’re given.
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