Serenity Tip: Patience

First, an expansion on yesterday's post on income goals:

Erik Sherman has a great post on when not to focus on monthly goals. His basic advice for finding serenity with your income is to look at the long haul:

Ultimately, the important thing is what you average over a quarter and, then, the year, and not every single month taken absolutely on its own. One reason is that it's difficult to turn around a significant amount that drops out of a month, as by the time you make the sale and start work, generally you will find your deadline into at least the next month. And if the amount is small, it's probably not worth diverting your attention from where your business is going overall.

What I love about Erik's suggestion here is that you need to have a balance between short-term cash flow and long-term goals.

This is where vision comes in. As you're growing your business, I've found it helpful to be mindful of both--but to focus on the latter. My mantra starting in about February of last year was "Focus on November."

What that meant was--sure, I could worry about my income this month. But if I wanted to really change my income picture in the long run, I needed to focus on increasing my income significantly in the next nine months. That meant changing my whole approach to work. I needed to privilege time working on marketing over some of my quick-paying but low-income assignments, and I needed to just hold tight and stomach the slow months.

And guess what happened? In November, my income doubled.

It was a gift. And I continue to be grateful for it. I show that gratitude by being a good steward of my cashflow by continuing that focus.

So if you're stressed about your income, and not meeting your income goals, try to practice patience. Income changes can come with glacial speed--and it may seem that way especially because your electric bill is due, like, today. But they will come, if you continue to do the work.

How do you practice patience? My best attempts include calling my fellow self-employed friends, being honest, meditating and exercising. You know, do the work and then practice the 1 percent rule.

30-Day Marketing Challenge: Saturday Bonus Bloglink Edition

This week brought us some great marketing and query posts from around the web. Here are a few of my favorites:

Kristine Hansen at the fabulous Renegade Writer Blog shared Seven Tips for Standout Queries.

My favorite, besides going for the quirky, is to slow down:

"Take a deep breath (yoga breaths if that’s your thing) and let it sit for a day, maybe even overnight. What you might discover during your time away is an added source, or a fresh idea for a sidebar. Not only will this make for a stronger pitch but you’ll feel more confident about its idea too."

Jenny Cromie, whose blog, The Golden Pencil, I raved about yesterday, did a great post this week on whether it ever makes sense to work for free. I'd argue no, but she does a great job of breaking down the options strategically.

Then, Erik Sherman, whose pearls of wisdom I've shared several times, wrote on his blog this week about what to do when your marketing efforts fall short of expectations. In Erik's typically thorough and thoughtful manner, he gives very concrete suggestions for appraising your efforts.

I also love that he says that a 10 percent success rate on your marketing is "very healthy." I knew I wasn't the only one who thought so!

And finally, though this isn't directly about the world of freelance marketing, it is a concept that I strive to take into my marketing efforts: Taking a vow of stability. What Gretchen Rubin, in her Happiness Project blog, is talking about is monks who take a vow of stability to stay at whatever monastery they are directed towards.

She applies this to marriage (which is apt), but I'd also argue that it applies to marketing. After all, setting a bottom line for how much and what kind of marketing you'll do and then sticking to it whether it's boring or not, whether you're busy or not, is another form of stability.

And I would also argue that so doing creates a lot more financial stability in your life as well. Try it out and tell me what you think.

More on Rejection: Strangle Your Darlings

As I'm working on a pitch today, I'm going to remember this:

The time to be sentimental about the story is when I write it. Once it's out there, that time is over. I can put aside sentiment like I put it aside when I'm editing. There's nothing so precious it can't be reworked and re-sent.

I'm a big believer that what makes you successful creatively can make you successful in your business. For instance, I'm curious. It makes me a good reporter, but I can also apply it to figuring out how the business side works. And I'm friendly: I can make that work for me with sources and for networking.

So what's the creative equivalent to rejection?

Does the phrase "strangle your darlings" mean anything to you?

It's the phrase my dear journalism professor used when he talked about being unsentimental about those beautifully written tangents that end up detracting from the point of the story. Or maybe the story was too long and needed to be trimmed. You can't cut out the essential info. So sometimes those lovely turns of phrase have gotta go. It's best for the whole.

It's the same with marketing. If we're honest, we writers have to admit that we love our queries and nurture them from glimmers of ideas. In these moments, we aren't thinking of ourselves as business people with a quota of queries to send out but as artists birthing creative visions into the world. When those ideas get rejected, we feel rejected. We think of the work we put in and we suffer over the wasted effort. We feel like misunderstood geniuses. C'mon. You know it's true. And even though I am writing this sarcastically, I know how much it hurts.

There's a place for such passion. If we didn't have it, we wouldn't be any good at our jobs. But moving on from rejection is the same as moving on from those lovely turns of phrase that we're convinced, if we're just permitted this tangent--or those extra words--we can make the piece sing.

The skill to cultivate here is a studied detachment. We can do it after we've let the story alone for a few days and come back to it with a fresh eye. We can be merciless and unsentimental. We have to be that, too, to be good at our jobs.

We need to remember we can be unsentimental, too, to get over the fear of rejection--and to bounce back quickly when our efforts are rejected. Being a writer may be about ideas. But being a full-time freelance writer is a volume business. As Erik Sherman says so ably in his recent blog post on the subject:

Another part (of the reaction to rejection) is not so normal, because it involves taking rejection as personal failure when you don’t accomplish what literally cannot be done. One is when the freelancer takes everything personally. Do you agree with your significant other on everything? Probably not, and you’re far less close to your clients, so why expect that much acceptance? You may be involved in your business, but you are not the same as your business. Focus on your decisions and the efforts you make, not on others.

Sherman is right: The key to serenity around rejection is focusing on what we have control over. Heck, that's the key to every type of serenity.

As you get responses from editors today, can you treat your queries like you'd treat a favorite word or phrase?

30-Day Biz Planning Challenge: Forget the Plan, Not the Planning

At this point, we're getting to the end of our challenge. You've seen how I do business plans and how others do business plans. You've seen every module (practically) you can include in a plan. And one theme comes up over and over again: Don't just write it and forget it. Business planning is an ongoing thing, a living organism that gets bigger and better when you focus on it. Today, guest blogger Erik Sherman, who taught me to do my first business plan and who is offering a new class on business planning in January, explains why making business planning a practice rather than a product is essential.

In the business planning for writers class I sometimes teach, I've often been asked about writing a business plan. "Don't bother," I say.

That probably sounds strange, but it actually isn't. Over the years, I've found that most companies and people write business plans for one of three reasons:

• They think they're "supposed" to.


• They want to get someone to give them money.


• They're taking a class on business planning.

I've worked on my share of business plans, and they can be a good exercise. At some point you need to think about what it is that you want your business to do, how you plan to market it, who your market is, whether you can realistically make enough money to stay afloat, and what the potential for the venture is.

But the problem with the way most people undertake business planning is that it becomes nothing more than a formal activity for a period of time. The result, a paper document, gets shoved into a metaphorical (or sometimes real) desk drawer to sit. Then the plan authors go off, start trying to make a go of it, and forget all about that plan they devised.

That is a largely useless expenditure of time and energy because the planning has now stopped. According to experts--and my own experience in a number of areas supports this--planning should generally represent a good 80 percent of a project. You put all that time into planning because you want to maximize your chances of achieving what you set out to do in the time you allotted. You start with anticipating as much as you can, and then as things unfold, you continue to refer to the plan, modifying it as circumstances change and periodically seeing if you are still on track and, if not, whether you can get back on.

But if the plan has become a fossil in a drawer, you quickly lose any benefit from it that you got. What if one customer segment turns out to be the best fit for what you want to accomplish? It might be that unexpected expenses will increase the amount of money you need to make to be
self-sufficient. A sideline offering might overtake what you thought would be your main line of business.

It is easy to get lost in the daily process of running a business. Without keeping an eye on what you want to achieve and the plans you put into place, you can easily head off in a wrong direction. This is akin to driving without a map in an area that is unfamiliar to you. Getting caught up in the specifics of where you are doesn't tell you if you're getting closer to the ultimate destination.

When I teach planning, students do start with some exercises that help establish where they want to go. But most of the class focuses on how to make planning work in operating the business. That includes measuring success, pinpointing weaknesses, and otherwise working smarter, not harder.

I'm not saying never write a business plan. But make sure you know why you're doing it. If you're not setting a framework to help you make better decisions and to keep the business headed the way you wanted in the first place, then you're keeping the drudgery and losing most of the benefit.

Our Next Challenge: Writing a Business Plan

It's December, and that means, for me, that it's time to update my business plan.

Don't have one? You're not alone. So often, the conversations I have with other writers include questions like, "How much should I charge for this?" or "Where should I pitch that?" These are questions that a business plan can answer, and I look to my plan to tell me how much to charge, where to direct my marketing and how I want to spend my time.

But it wasn't always this way. When I started freelancing, I was a bit panicky. Sure, I'm always a little panicky, and starting your own business will make anyone even more so. I was lucky that I stumbled across Erik Sherman's Planning Your Writing Business Class. I forked over the $149 and answered questions--and even though I hadn't been freelancing for more than a few months, I came out the other side with a plan.

Since then, I've refined it and now I look at my business plan as an opportunity to expand and plan the exciting new directions my business will take next year. Do I really want to expand out into podcasting and video journalism this year, or is that just a passing fancy? Do I want to apply for fellowships? Which ones? What topics do I want to focus on next year? Do I want to go to any conferences?

By the time this 30-day challenge is over, I'll have the answers to all those questions--or at least an educated guess.

I invite you to come along with me, ask questions, propose your own answers and get a rough business plan together by Jan. 1.

So what's stopping you from creating your own business plan? If you have one, what works for you?

Planning for Serenity

Serenity, in my experience, is not namby-pamby or hippy-dippy, or any other rhyming put-down. You don't have to be pure of heart or devout to achieve it, especially in business.

Instead, try this: Work on your business plan.

It's that time of year again: The end of the fourth quarter, when business owners everywhere are buying tax deductible items lest they give more money to Uncle Sam. And it's the time to plan your goals for next year. There are plenty of articles out there now browbeating you into creating a business plan. The Small Business Administration even has a whole page of tools to make your business planning easier.

If you're dragging in this department (and really, who isn't?), here are more incentives:

* As this article makes abundantly clear, lack of planning adds emotional and intellectual clutter to every day, sapping your serenity. How much money do I need to make this month? Will I need to buy a new computer this year? What do I do if my main client goes out of business/drops me? Don't worry. Decide. Put it in your business plan and then don't worry about it.

* Your business plan can add to your joy. I know, I know. "Joy" and "business plan" aren't terms that often share the same sentence. But hear me out. I took Erik Sherman's amazing business planning class a few years ago. In it, I essentially learned what mattered most to me in my work (the types of things I love to do, the clients I hated to work with, the things that brought me the most, yes, serenity) and came up with goals that would allow me to support those values, and steps to achieve those goals. By the time I got to work on creating an income plan for myself, I found I was ready to direct my earning into avenues that supported my values.

For 2008, I'm planning on creating a one-page cheat sheet of my business plan and posting it on the bulletin board behind my computer monitor. That list, as of now, will include:

* Monthly income goals;
* Monthly time goals;
* Target markets;
* Clients to replace this year;
* Major new/changing expenditures for the year; and
* Marketing goals.

Next year, I'll report back on whether doing that helps me achieve what I expect it will: to guide me toward decisions that support my personal and professional fulfillment and abundance.

More on Managing Serenity During Recession

If you haven't seen it already, Erik Sherman has a very smart post about how to adjust your work worldview during a recession.

What I think is most helpful about his suggestions, which include marketing more, being less picky about projects and looking for clients that are financially stable, is that the focus is on what you can control--not what is happening out there in the world that you can't control.

We can't control our clients' work flow (when they can assign a project, for example.)

We can't control our clients' cashflow--but we can do our best to seek out clients that seem stable.

We can't control--or even really know--what pressure our clients are getting from higher-ups.

That's not our job. Our job is to make their jobs easier by being professional, upfront and enthusiastic about what we can control: the work in front of us.

It's that old 1 percent rule again.

What can you focus on today that's in your control and possible today?

30-Day Marketing Challenge: Establishing a marketing bottom line

When I did my first business plan, I thought I'd have to do maybe 10 or 20 queries a week to get the kind of work and income I needed.

Today my plan is quite different, and it's landed me a lot of high-quality and high-paying work. The key has been to have bottom lines and stick to them.

Here's the simple fact about bottom lines: Without them, you'll spread your querying around so haphazardly and so broadly that you'll feel panicked and confused about why your work isn't fulfilling your professional and financial needs. But once you establish your marketing boundaries, you're free to focus on what you want to query and where to send it.

I focus my bottom lines on three terms:

• How many queries to send a week.
• How much the client pays.
• How the client pays (ie, on acceptance or on publication).

If you have a business plan, you know the answer to those questions. If you don't, it might be worthwhile to sit down and answer those questions quickly--because they will guide your bottom line marketing behavior.

Today, I'll tackle the first and tomorrow I'll elaborate on the second.

Question #1. How many I send weekly: Three queries, minimum.

There are several ways to arrive at this number. Erik Sherman has a whole matrix for helping you figure out how many queries you need to send in a week to get enough work. When I started out, I didn't have a clue how many queries I'd have to send before I made a sale, so just to be safe, I assumed I'd need to send 15 a week. That was my goal.

I quickly failed. And failed. And failed.

Now I have a better idea of the number I need to send before I make a sale. But for me, there's a difference between what I know I should do and what I'm capable of doing. To me, three queries a week seemed doable, it didn't overwhelm me and it seemed like it might be enough to make a difference.

If querying is particularly painful for you, the number may be one a month. If you're particularly prolific, you may think nothing of sending 10 or 20 queries a week. The point is to choose a number and stick with it for at least a month.

Check in with yourself: Does that number work for you or are you spending more time resisting working on your queries than sending them? Are you berating yourself for not meeting your goal instead of sending the next query?

Adjust your number according to your answers.

What's your weekly query minimum?

30-Day Economic Stability Challenge: How I increased my income in nine months

It wasn't that long ago that I was working nights and weekends and still not earning enough to live on. But it doesn't have to be that way. Over a period of nine months, I went to work to change the kind of work I was doing to increase my pay, decrease my work hours and make freelancing sustainable for me.

Since we've been talking about the scary parts of finance so far--the savings, the mindset, and all the things you should have in place before you start freelancing, etc., I want to spend today talking about the good stuff: What happens when all your work pays off.

But it was work. To wit:

Meet with a consistent group.
I met monthly for a year with the same two self-employed people who constantly were urging me to move away from the movie reviews that paid me $50 a pop and the articles that paid 15 cents a word on publication. They did it gently, and kept at it until I was frustrated enough and bleary-eyed enough to listen. Then we talked about how to do it.

You don't have to have a group in place, but the key is to look for a mentor or two and set up regular meetings with the understanding that you're there to get help.

"Don't think about next month, think about November."
This was the best single piece of advice I got during that time, and it was my guiding mantra. Every time I worried about decreased income from not doing as many movie reviews, or spending time querying instead of time watching movies to review, I focused on bringing my income up in six or nine months instead of how I was going to get through next month's bills.


Focus your marketing.
I didn't have a specific income goal. The goal was simply "more than I'm earning now," which was what I needed. But I knew how I wanted to get there: I identified that I wanted to write for publications that paid $1/word on acceptance or more. Sure, it was easier to keep querying the low-paying markets that I knew were desperate for writers (guess why they were so desperate...). But I couldn't cling to them if I wanted to really make this my career. So I queried higher paying markets. I looked eagle-eyed for job ads and applied for every one I could find.

And when I got the assignment, I had to be willing to say no or negotiate if the pay was too low.

Take a class.
It was around this time that I took Erik Sherman's Planning Your Writing Business class. It taught me how to create an hourly rate. It taught me how many queries I should send a month, and how much I needed to make a day, a week and a month to support myself, including taxes. I also learned what my hourly rate needed to be.

Ask for help.
During those nine months, I often felt like I was coming out of my skin. I wasn't earning enough. I was selling old clothes and shoes and books online to make end's meet, and sometimes they still didn't. When an eroneous charge was made to my checking account, I'd call my friend in tears, because I didn't have those extra $10 to spare. But my friend always said the same thing: You will get through this. Focus on November. I know you feel like you're going to be homeless, but you won't. You will make it through.

And I did. It was amazing and a serious faith-building exercise.

Take good care of yourself.
Those serenity practices I told you about the other day? Yeah. I did those in spades. I took the advice of a dear friend who said, "You should meditate once a day, unless you're really stressed. Then, meditate twice a day." I poured my nervous self into downward dog and into my journal and into the ears of some very kind friends. And I didn't use a credit card to relieve the pressure. I just worked hard and kept forcused on November.

The outcome
I won't lie: That kind of hard work isn't for the faint of heart. I had to keep doing the low-paying work long enough to keep supporting myself--barely--but also do the additional work of seeking out and doing higher-paying assignments. I was stressed, I was scared and I wasn't convinced it would work. It might have been the hardest I'd ever worked in my life.

But when November rolled around, my income for that month was double what it had been the February before. And it kept coming up. When I'd go to my business meeting with my mentors, I often had a look of incredulity on my face. I couldn't believe it. It worked. I could take a little pressure off. I could maybe go on a vacation and I could trust that my rent would clear and I could be the one to treat my sweetie to a meal for once.

I won't say that it's been an even course. It certainly hasn't. But that focus taught me both that I never want to go back to working the way I used to, and that I had the capacity to work hard and earn a decent income. There's a saying I've heard that goes, "You can act your way into right thinking but you can't think your way into right acting." This experience proved it. I was doing low-paying work because I didn't have the confidence to do more. But by doing the hard work, I earned that confidence.

What's the hard work you need to do today?

Photo by CamponeZ.

30-Day Biz Planning Challenge: The Wrap Up

Here's to 2008 and the end of this 30-day business planning challenge. In case you missed anything, here's a round up:

Planning for Serenity: A reprieved post on what business planning has to do with serenity.

Checking on Progress: Here's what my business plan tells me about my goals vs. my achievements this year.

Goals vs. Actions: Does a business plan work? Here's a lively debate about what success means in business planning.

How Katrina Does It: A skeleton plan and regular review is all freelancer Katrina Ramser needs to keep her on track.

Learning Your Way: Or, planning your way. Plan in a way that works with your learning style.

The Plan Is Useless; Planning Is Essential: A Q&A with business planning guru Tim Berry.

Choose a Module, Any Module: Following Berry's advice, I lay out the first of several modules that allow you to start planning now without setting aside a day or a week for it. Day 1? Philosophy.

2008 Modules: Day 2? A summary of what you accomplished this year.

How Kim Does It: Simple questions to guide your business planning in 2009.

2009 Modules, Part 1: Your financial requirements for the coming year.

2009 Module, Part 2: Marketing and other plans that will help you meet those financial goals.

2009 Modules, Part 3: New directions, new markets and new beats for 2009.

Reaching Goals With Groups: Q&A with "goals gal" Karen Childress, who has used accountability groups to help her reach her goals for years.

New Modules for 2009: Fellowships, awards and other fun add-ons to my 2009 plan.

Forget the Plan, Not the Planning: Biz plan expert Erik Sherman lays out the case for year-round planning. Notice a theme here?

Finding the Time to Plan: Squeezing business planning into my already busy life and the structure that gets me there.

I'd love to hear what worked for you and what didn't in this challenge.

Planning for Serenity

Serenity, in my experience, doesn't appear out of thin air. It's not the result of hours of meditation on a mountaintop (although meditation, on a mountaintop or otherwise, can't hurt) or prayers. Serenity is not namby-pamby or hippy-dippy, or any other rhyming put-down. You don't have to be pure of heart or devout to achieve it.

Instead, try this: Work on your business plan.

It's that time of year again: The end of the fourth quarter, when business owners everywhere are figuring out what deductible items to spend their money on lest they give it to Uncle Sam instead. And it's the time to plan your goals for next year. There are plenty of articles out there now browbeating you into creating a business plan.

If you're dragging in this department (and really, who isn't?), here's more incentive: As this article makes abundantly clear, lack of planning means you spend too much time making decisions instead of focusing on ways to fulfill your vision for your business. And that time-suck robs you of serenity.

Here's another reason: Making a business plan can amplify your serenity not just by clearing your mind of decisions laid out in your business plan, but by directing you towards a more fulfilling life. It does that by guiding you towards making business decisions that are in keeping with your most cherished values. I took an amazing business planning class taught by Erik Sherman a few years ago that essentially started with asking me to list my most important values and then goals that would allow me to support those values. By the time I got to work on creating an imcome plan for myself, I found that I was ready to direct my earning into avenues that support my values. Therefore, a lot of the area where I focused my energy in the past year has been:

a) Writing about simple ways people improve their lives and those around them;
b) yoga; and
c) Increasing my income.

They aren't mutually exclusive, and making a business plan helped me become more conscious of that and start acting on that.

For 2008, I'm planning on creating a short cheat sheet of my business plan and posting it on the bulletin board behind my computer monitor. That list, as of now, will include:

* Monthly income goals;
* Monthly time goals;
* Target markets; and
* Marketing goals.

Next year, I'll report back on whether doing that helped me achieve what I think it will: to guide me toward decisions that support my personal and professional fulfillment and abundance.

Then, with

30-Day Biz Planning Challenge: Planning for Serenity

Day 2's challenge: Put serenity first in your business plan.

Last year, I wrote about business planning also. This year, I'm starting this challenge by reposting an abridged version of the following explanation of what a business plan has to do with serenity.

Serenity, in my experience, is not namby-pamby or hippy-dippy, or any other rhyming put-down. You don't have to be pure of heart or devout to achieve it, especially in business.

Instead, try this: Work on your business plan.

It's that time of year again: The end of the fourth quarter, when business owners everywhere are buying tax deductible items lest they give more money to Uncle Sam. And it's the time to plan your goals for next year. There are plenty of articles out there now browbeating you into creating a business plan. The Small Business Administration even has a whole page of tools to make your business planning easier.

If you're dragging in this department (and really, who isn't?), here are more incentives:

* As this article makes abundantly clear, lack of planning adds emotional and intellectual clutter to every day, sapping your serenity. How much money do I need to make this month? Will I need to buy a new computer this year? What do I do if my main client goes out of business/drops me? Don't worry. Decide. Put it in your business plan and then don't worry about it.

* Your business plan can add to your joy. I know, I know. "Joy" and "business plan" aren't terms that often share the same sentence. But hear me out. I took Erik Sherman's amazing business planning class a few years ago. In it, I essentially learned what mattered most to me in my work (the types of things I love to do, the clients I hated to work with, the things that brought me the most, yes, serenity) and came up with goals that would allow me to support those values, and steps to achieve those goals. By the time I got to work on creating an income plan for myself, I found I was ready to direct my earning into avenues that supported my values.

For 2008, I'm planning on creating a one-page cheat sheet of my business plan and posting it on the bulletin board behind my computer monitor. That list, as of now, will include:

* Monthly income goals;
* Monthly time goals;
* Target markets;
* Clients to replace this year;
* Major new/changing expenditures for the year; and
* Marketing goals.

Tomorrow, I'll report back on whether doing that helped me achieve what I expected it would: to guide me toward decisions that support my personal and professional fulfillment and abundance.

What business decisions have you put off making? What business items are robbing your serenity? Make a list and keep it to use as a foundation of your business plan.

Cultivating Persistence

I've been a writer and reporter for 15 years, if you include all my schooling. When I started, I was terribly shy. I sat in front of that big, old, clunky, beige phone for an hour sometimes working up my nerve to call a source. I wasn't friendly, or when I was it was forced and, I'm willing to bet, creepy.

But I loved the writing. Writing was my favorite part. Not that it always came easily, but it was what I got into journalism for. I wanted to write every day.

Today, I'm finally following my dream: I want to write more narrative journalism. There's a reason my Web site is called "Writing with a human face." I want to tell those stories. I want to help readers connect with other people. I want to help foster conversations.

I say all this not to promote my business, but because I'm not entirely there yet. But I'm working on it. If you're reading this, you're working on it, too: You're trying to make writing into a career. You're trying to scale the vertical learning curve that is entrepreneurship and managing business finances and cultivating clients and--oh yeah--writing really well.

The way this happens is messy. Take this great, great clip from Ira Glass of This American Life (and really, who doesn't want to be Glass when they grow up?):



This is the same advice that the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Tom Hallman gave at a narrative writing workshop I attended recently through The Society of Professional Journalists. The key nugget I took with me, aside from a few techniques was: be persistent and be brave. Admit you're insecure. We're all insecure. Do it anyway.

It's also the same advice that Erik Sherman gives for querying: if you keep doing it, you're guaranteed to succeed. But you have to keep trying.

This advice falls into the category of "serenity tips that make you feel crazy." This one won't feel good. But it's true. So my wish for you this week is that you make another start at the things that feel like you're failing. Keep going. Send that rejected query out one more time. Try again to do some good writing.

Just try. Again. For today.

30-Day Biz Planning Challenge: Learning Your Way

What kind of business planner are you?

Not long ago, I wrote a package of stories on crisis management for Momentum Magazine, the Magazine of the National MS Society. And while business planning isn't the same as managing a chronic, degenerative disease, planning for changes and crisis is what business planning is all about.

One of the stories was about how to go about finding the information you need to plan successfully. For those of you who find business planning overwhelming, take note. Here are some of the questions you should ask yourself, according to Dr. Rosalind Kalb, a clinical psychologist and vice president of the Professional Resource Center at the National MS Society:

How much information do you really need?
Some people can only plan when they have all the information they can possibly find--when they have made themselves into an expert. Others would be overwhelmed by so much information and need to learn in small, digestible chunks. Which are you?

How best do you learn?
Some people relate best to books, others are best educated by a five-minute podcast or by online forums like this blog. Still others need a teacher to take them by the hand and show them the way.

What information should you trust?
Not all business planning advice will work for you and not all suggestions apply. Find sources you trust--whether because you want what that professional has or their advice jibes with your sense of the world--and find out how they're doing it.

What I learned when I started considering a business plan was that I needed a class. I couldn't digest piecemeal information or really "get it" from reading a book. I kept asking, "How does this apply to me?" and "Am I doing this right?"

So I found a class, and it made all the difference. The support, the constant feedback and reassurance, and the cameraderie with the other students made it seem less scary. The structure of a class comforted me.

If you're like me, allow me to recommend the business planning class taught by successful freelancer Erik Sherman. His approach is both holistic (considering your whole life and how your business can support your personal goals) and specific (how many queries do you need to send, etc.).

He's offering the class again next month, and I can't recommend it enough. If you have some end-of-year spending to do and you want and require one-on-one guidance, consider it. Space is limited to check it out soon.

(And lest you worry that this is some kind of advertisement, let me reassure you: I'm not getting paid for this.)

Serenity Tip: Knowing Your Value

Not long ago, I wrote about transfering your creative skills to your business life. But here's another good reason to cultivate your skills:

Better negotiation

The first thing Erik Sherman will tell you about negotiation is to remember the value you bring to any project. If you're a perfectionist or simply prone to negative thinking, that's not just the first step but the most important one. Here's what I mean:

When a client contacts you to do work, do you negotiate pay?
Do you know what your hourly rate should be?
Do you believe you deserve it?

I know many freelance writers who don't value their own skills enough--or at least struggle to value their own skills enough--to ask for the money they need to make their career sustainable. They may have a business plan. They may even know how much they need to earn per billable hour to make their minimum income. But without the belief that their skills matter and that they are offering something of value to their clients, they constantly feel like their clients are doing them a favor by hiring them. Without that sense of value, they can't put the rest of their plan into action.

So don't skip this step. If you're particularly prone to focusing on the parts of your work that aren't good enough, make a list of your skills, and the good things editors say about you and put it behind your computer monitor or on the wall in front of where you look most often (obviously, this should be out of view of your clients).

To help, here are some questions to ask yourself:

* What compliments do you get most often from clients?
* What skills have you fought hard to develop?
* What do you like most about your work and what energizes you?
* Are you good with deadlines?
* Do you return calls quickly?
* Are you professional--do you fess up to errors, do you double check facts, do you respond quickly to edits (if you're a writer)?
* Are you always looking for ways to improve your work? (This is a twist on "negative thinking:" if you are focused on what you didn't do perfectly the last time, you're also focusing on changing it. You don't make the same mistake twice or three times.)

These may seem like small things to you but they are of great value to your clients--and they often make the difference between hiring you and another writer. You become the go-to contractor for clients by having these skills.

So the next time you go to negotiate your price, remember the value you provide and ask for what you deserve.