I’m avoiding doing a bunch of organizing of my business by thinking about meta-organizing. You know, things like what kind of binders I need to put a business manual in. Or categories for filing.

And one of the big things I have to do is create a new financial tracking system. I had a lot of angst about this a month or so ago. And then just stopped doing anything other than filing business expenses in my filing cabinet. Which is all well and good while I have ONE business. But in June I will have 3: my business, renting this house, a farm. I need spreadsheets.

Nimble computing?

So today, I’m procrastinating about creating spreadsheets by wondering whether I should become MS Office free.

I’ve already downloaded Open Office. Mostly because it can export word processing documents to PDF without losing things like hyper-links. I needed that when I did my e-book.

Lisa Firke has had an interesting series of post about moving to a more nimble set-up. Her motivation is coveting a MacBook Air. But I think there are some important things about the project in general.

Like me, Lisa is a Mac user. She’s probably achieved geek level 10 or something, though, and knows a lot more about these things. (She designs websites for a living.) But she’s talking about using iWork instead of Office.

Considering iWork

So I poked around in my applications folder and there it is. As soon as I open it, it tells me there is a new version, but what the heck. So I’m looking at it. And it seems like it’ll save documents as PDF (with hyperlinks intact, and hyperlinks for TOC entries), which is important.

Looks like it’ll also export to Word format, which is handy for sharing documents in a world where MS Office is hegemonic. (I’m thinking you can figure out what hegemonic means from the context. Expand your vocabulary day!)

There doesn’t seem to be a spreadsheet app, but the tables in the word processing app (Pages) can use formulas. (Why do I instinctively use Latin plurals?) And it makes charts from tables.

I’m not an advanced Excel user by any means and my needs are pretty simple on the spreadsheet front. So maybe that works. And might even be easier to print out in useful ways. Excel is a PITA when it comes to printing stuff out.

Benefits of nimbleness

So, apart from a general tendency to resist hegemonic forces,  why go this route?  Lisa’s comments about the loss of hard drive space, processor speed etc in her laptop shift (she bought the Air) made me think about the fact that hardware upgrades are mostly about those things. I’d like to keep using the machine I have for as long as possible. Better for the environment as well as the budget.

I think I bought this machine in ‘06 (the version of iWork I have is ‘06). It is a desktop iMac, one of the ones with a flat screen with all the gubbins in the screen. Since I had my previous one from 1998, I think it’s got a good few years left in it.

So I’m thinking that if I get rid of stuff I don’t need, like duplicate word processing software, I’ve got more space for the stuff I use.

Living laptop free

My other thing is that I don’t have a laptop. And I don’t really want one. Another thing to carry around.

I have found that I rarely need one. I don’t travel much for work, and when I do I bring my presentation on a memory stick and ask the client to provide a machine hooked up to a projector. This avoids me working out how to get a Mac laptop to work on their system. It means everything is set up when I arrive. And there is usually a tech person onsite to deal with any issues.

My business trips aren’t that long. And I’m working with clients all day. Either I don’t check e-mail or I use the free computer at the hotel.

When we went to Europe we took laptops (Mat uses one as his main home machine; Tigger has his old one) but that kind of trip doesn’t happen that often.

With the move to the country, I’m wondering if I will want to do work away from home. And what kind. The library computers aren’t too busy in the middle of the day, so that might be an option. And we are planning on finally breaking down and getting cell-phones, so I’m wondering about a Blackberry or something.

One of my friends uses her Blackberry a lot for dealing with e-mail while waiting at piano lessons or whatever. I don’t feel that is a need right now, but when I’m driving further and doing more kid-stuff on those days, maybe. Or will I just schedule my time differently. Segregate bits of my life more?

Cloud computing

I’ve come across this term but don’t understand it very well. I am using a bunch of web apps for my business. And my new e-mail came with a file folder thingamy that lets me drop documents and retrieve them when I’m somewhere else.

This makes me think that I could make good use of library computers. Or a friend’s computer while kids are doing whatever.

Does this impact the decision about wordprocessing apps? Or does it just mean that I do some things at home and other things elsewhere?

Your thoughts

This feels pretty vague and unresolved for me. So any thoughts more than welcome. Mac apps you really like. Experiences with cloud computing. Open Office vs. iWork

Help me procrastinate about the spreadsheets!

So. I’ve been working on my new business direction. My big marketing opportunity is a conference at the end of May: the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

I am giving a presentation in the Career Corner series, “Managing Your Research Career”.

I’ve also booked a booth for the Book Fair.

Now I’m working on things to give to conference attendees. I’ve decided on a leaflet “From Conference Paper to Journal Article”. Useful content, relevant to most people, and fits on a leaflet sized thing.

I need visuals. Help!

A couple of people have read drafts and commented that the text is great. But one made a good point. It is text-heavy. Maybe a picture or a cartoon would break up the text.

I’ve found a cartoon I like, though I worry that the humour will not have widespread appeal (my lovely life-partner, who is an academic, didn’t get the joke though he did get the relevance). And that is making me nervous.  I’m also not sure I can really afford to pay the licensing fees on top of all the printing and booth registration this year.

I’ve been drawing a blank on a photograph. I found one that said “young English prof writing in bed and tearing her hair out in frustration” to me but when I sent it to a grad student friend he though it said “Philidelphia cream cheese”. I’m not sure why. Maybe he doesn’t know any good looking English profs.

In any case, most of the stock photos involve either beautiful people or suits, neither of which feel totally comfortable with my potential client base (not that some of them aren’t beautiful or even fashionable, though I think wearing a suit automatically disqualifies you as one of my Right People).

This morning, I had an idea.

How about a tasteful photograph of papers (like typed papers as you might present at a conference, maybe with editorial marks on them) and scholarly journals on a desk. Not my desk (too messy; and actually made of countertop) but a scholarly looking desk. I think black and white will work best.

Here’s where you come in

So I’m about to go searching all those sources, despite my fear that it will be in vain. But if anyone out there is a decent photographer (this is going to be a small picture) and has access to a decent desk, a scholarly paper (pref. without equations), and a journal or two (social sciences and humanities) and wants to take some shots, I would be eternally grateful. If you are in Ottawa, I could even round up the materials for a photoshoot.

Thanks.

Saw this video on Productive Flourishing (Somehow Charlie can get the video to actually show up on his site and I can only get a link but do click through. It is worth it.)

David Heinemeier Hansson – FOWA Dublin 2009 from Carsonified on Vimeo.

And it resonates a lot with what Lori is saying about Cheating Your Way to a Great Education.

If you are at work or have small children around (the kind who aren’t used to hearing swearing from time to time and thus might make a big deal of it; not like my child), you might want to use headphones. Or wait until the kids have gone to bed.

Here’s what I’ve been up to… creating a website for my business.

I hired Andrea, our site admin here at homeschooljournal.net but also half of Ron & Andrea, to do a lot of the work, host the domain and generally hold my hand through things like buying a domain and getting e-mail and stuff.

The hardest part was actually trying to figure out how to make my business scale up. Up to now, I’ve been crazy busy in May and September and doing no business at all most of the rest of the year. And that was mainly because of the kind of work I was doing. I knew I couldn’t just do more of the same.

I plan to keep some of that work, which I am hired by universities to do, and add in other things that individual social science and humanities researchers might hire me to do. And because it needs to scale, I also thought about things like e-books, and using telephone conferencing services instead of travelling to meet people in person, and that kind of thing.

Getting the standard advice that I repeat a lot into e-books and presentations seems like a good first step. It means I can help more people and people can get my help at a reasonable price. Then the one-on-one coaching can really focus on specifics, which means more bang for the buck on the more expensive services. Win-win.

I do feel a bit nervous announcing this here. Part of that is because I work with Canadian academics and I know that some of my products and services are specific to the Canadian context. But I’ve been a British academic, too. So I know that some are not so geographically specific. If you, or a friend of yours, is interested but you aren’t in Canada, I’m happy to answer questions before they buy. Basically, the grants page has some things specific to SSHRC (the Canadian government research granting agency for social sciences and humanities) but even some of the general advice on there is going to work for others. If in doubt, send an e-mail to info (at) jovanevery (dot) ca and ask.

So, I’ve been reflecting on the business and making decisions and generally trying to do stuff. And that means finding new blogs where I can learn things and hang out with other small business types.

One of my issues seems to be that I don’t know what I need to do or how to organize my time or anything. General confusion. Some days I deal with that but just sitting down and doing something. Anything. It is amazing how well that works, actually. (And the new routine Tigger and I worked out for her seems to be working pretty well, except for days like today when she really just wanted to read a book all day and I had to remind her how absolutely not onerous the routine was and that it was full of stuff she loves to do.)

But I’ve also found Cairene at Third Hand Works. Her business is helping folks like me figure out how to do all the administrative stuff that makes our businesses actually work. Or I think that’s it.

Cairene has a category of posts on her blog called Business Manual, in which she writes about her own process of revamping her Business Operations Manual.  There is useful information in there, I’m sure, but the whole idea was making me nervous. I am just not that good at documenting things. Much less keeping those documents organized. I do have a grey folder around here somewhere with a bunch of pages of random notes about the business in it, but it seems to have wandered off. I hope it comes back soon. It might help. But it isn’t anything organized enough to be a manual. It’s the notes that were lying around on my desk.

Every once in a while I read one of those great posts about homeschooling portfolios in which someone will say to start with a big folder and put tabs in for this and that and…. I can read the whole post and nod a lot but I can’t actually do it. Nor keep it going. And I don’t think it’s just because we are not very product oriented homeschoolers. So the Business Operations Manual seems to be to the small business person what the Portfolio is to the homeschooler. And I was having the same reaction. Great idea. Won’t work for me.

Then today, I was talking to Tigger about what I did this morning — cleaning up a recording of a telephone conversation so I could send it to a client. It involved some ARRGH trying to figure out the technology (Garage Band; it’s already on my computer, why not?). But I was quite pleased with myself. It did help that Mat knows something about the general recording thing (though he uses Reason for his music creations) and thus knew what various menu items meant, and what to type into the search box in the help window and whatnot.

Tigger made some positive comment that included the idea that it would be easier the next time, to which I replied “Well, except that I’m not getting very many of these gigs right now so I’ll probably have forgotten what I did by the time I do another one.”

Smart ass 11 year old then says “Maybe you should write it down, so you won’t forget.” Like that is the simplest idea in the word. And like I’m not capable of losing the paper that I wrote it on (even if I put it in a folder, apparently).

Ding! So that’s what you put in a Business Operations Manual. For someone with a PhD, I can be kind of slow sometimes.

The binder and tabs thing was still bugging me. I don’t have the supplies on hand, for starters. But I thought that documenting how I did the thing would be a good idea and opened up a Word document. Harder to lose on your desk as well.

At which point I remembered their notebook view. It has sections, with tabs. And it writes stuff in outline format and has handy thingamies that let you promote them and demote them and move them around and whatnot.

So I now have a Business Operations Manual. It has a tab for “Recordings”, one for “Bookkeeping”, and one for “Filing”. Some of the information is pretty sparse but it’s a start. And a place to put stuff that doesn’t require a shelf or clutter up my desk. (Cluttering up my desk is one of my special skills.)

I have often thought that there are a lot of synergies between being self-employed and homeschooling. One of them came up very early in this homeschooling journey when someone casually remarked that being bored at school might have to be endured just like sometimes we have to suck up a boring job in order to get the paycheque. At that time I was about 8 months into have made the decision not to do that and to work for myself instead. Homeschooling seemed like it was consistent with my own unwillingness to put up with stuff.

I’m enjoying the self-employed thing. It is going well. Over 3 years into it, I’m stepping back and doing some thinking about it and I’m going to make a few changes and make it work better. In the process, I’m meeting some interesting new people.

Artemis had a good post up the other day On Entrepreneurialism that really resonated for me. I recommend it. She credits her failure to see that “jobs” might not be for her to the strenght of parental conditioning. But I think that the need for a job, preferably a secure one with a pension, is a very powerful cultural discourse.

And given how illusory that security is — how many people went to work at the GM plant because it was a good, secure job? — and how dicey even those occupational pension schemes are also proving to be, much less savings invested in registered retirements plans (or that number with the k after it that the ‘mericans have) … Well, it seems to me that other options need to be looked at more favourably.

I’ve noticed that Tigger has an entrepreneurial bent. I’m trying to nurture that. It scares the living daylights out of her dad, but in a good way. I suspect more thoughts will be forthcoming.

I am beginning to doubt the value of Powerpoint…

Recalling an incident a couple of years ago when I gave my presentation by candlelight, without the benefit of PPt, due to a blown transformer cutting power to the university and my being booked in a windowless room… Afterwards one of the participants came up to comment on the fact that he thought he took more in than he does when there are slides. He was of the generation that had always had PowerPoint (whereas, I’m really an OHP girl) and until that presentation had never noticed how much the visual distract from the content.

And the comment a former colleague of mine made, after transferring into the Business School, that the businesses who they dealt with actually banned PowerPoint in presentations. Triumph of form over content, apparently.

Now pondering.

I’m not the most tech savvy girl on the planet. I know what I need to know and that’s it. But I’m smart and can figure stuff out, usually. I’ve been thinking about various business-y things and wondering if anyone knows how I could convert a PowerPoint presentation into a video/DVD, possibly adding in sound. I did a google search and there seem to be a couple of different software thingamies available but they are all for Windows systems. I use a Mac.

I’m just in the thinking about what the possibilities are stages of this but would welcome help figuring out what tools are available.

Thanks.

I realized today that I’ve been feeling a kind of low level anxiety for several weeks now. Physically. I have no real idea what I am anxious about, specifically, but I just kind of feel like I’m having a very very mild panic attack a lot of the time. Not great. But maybe it has something to do with deciding to pay attention to my business for a while. I’m exercising. I’m eating reasonably well (though the candy consumption has gone up from it’s normal “hardly anything” to “some after most meals” due to the post-Halloween stash).

My strategy has been to do little things. Things that in and of themselves are not scary. Or only a little bit scary. Like e-mail one person. Or set up a coffee date with one person. Or hire Andrea to sort me out a business website.  (I did that last little thing a while ago, before they stopped taking new customers for a while.)

Today’s little things included buying a domain name. What a wierd process. The scariest part was that the place Andrea suggested I buy it from has a lot of “and don’t you want some of this?” stuff in their process. At every single step. Even after you have put in your credit card number and confirmed and paid and everything, they are still trying to get you to buy more stuff. I resisted. So now I own a domain (well, 2). There is nothing there yet. You’ll have to wait. Andrea is busy and I’m not in a hurry and even when Andrea does her part, I still have to be ready to launch this thing. I don’t need any more anxiety.

The second little thing I did today was e-mail a satisfied client to ask questions. I’ve been doing this periodically. The first one is scary. But after that it gets easier. And people seem happy to help. I got some feedback immediately and she’s thinking about it more.

I also started answering some of the questions that Sonia put up in her “so-simple-it’s-scary business plan”.  It really is simple. And there are hardly any numbers (and I only did the questions before the numbers today). Those top questions help sort my thoughts out and make me realize what I need to think about from time to time. What I’m doing now is trying to add a new type of customer. So it is helpful to think of my services in terms of how they benefit that customer. I also signed up for her free marketing e-class. It is 10 e-mail messages. I think I can handle that. I’ve received (and read) the first one and it is very sensible.

I’ve also signed up for this course on internet business from Naomi at IttyBiz. Well, I don’t know if it is a course or just a series of posts. And I’m not really running an internet business so much as trying to have an internet presence for my business so people can find me easily (one client came here trying to find me once; luckily she thinks knitting and homeschooling are positive attributes and hired me anyway). I enjoy Naomi’s posts and usually find something useful in them, even if some of it isn’t really me.

All of these little things, and reading Havi’s blog regularly, help with the low-level anxiety. Of course we are also doing things as a family that are not helping, even though they are good things. But I’m not getting into that today.

Thanks to Andrea, I have recently found some really helpful business/life advice and I thought I’d share some of it with you.

My business

I started my own business a couple of years ago and after the first flurry of finding a few clients, I haven’t really worked that hard on growing or maintaining it. The work comes in big waves at predictable times of year and as long as I do a bit of work contacting existing clients at those times, I get enough work to keep those peaks maxed-out.

I’m making a reasonable amount of money and have lots of time to homeschool and do other things. I went to a conference a couple of years ago where I met one new client. I got another new client by word of mouth. That client was also an organizer for another conference and hired me to give a presentation at that conference, out of which came a couple of new clients.

I love the work I do. Getting word-of-mouth recommendations is a good sign. As is all the repeat business. I also get lots of direct thank yous from people I work with, both the people who pay the bills and the people I help directly.

I help university professors with their research plans and grant applications. Right now my clients are mostly university research offices or deans. They hire me to give presentations about grants to faculty and to review draft grant applications and provide comments.
Like I say, they are happy with the work. And so are the faculty that I advise. And that work is some of what I want to be doing. I think it will remain a big part of my business. But it isn’t all of it.

The problem

One problem with that work is that the demand is concentrated in two 6-week periods. During those times I’m busy but the rest of the year is pretty slow.

I can’t really do more work in those periods, so I can’t take on any more of that type of client because they will all want the same times of year. I started the business before I was homeschooling and one of the reasons that I slacked off on growing it was because I started to homeschool and needed to figure out how much time that would take and how I could balance the two.

Now that we’ve been homeschooling for a couple of years, and Tigger is getting older, I think I can see how growth could be compatible. But growth means thinking differently about the business.

What I’d really like to be doing is something like life-coaching for academics. So still the focus on academic research planning, including grants, but working directly for the individual researchers/professors to help them be successful in their own terms and reduce their stress.

Helping with grant applications might be part of that, but also helping people make longer term plans about their research and figure out when and where to apply for grants, helping with publication strategies, helping find time to do research and maybe provide some accountability so it doesn’t fall off of their to do list (as it so often does in favour of things like teaching preparation and administrative duties that have real deadlines and other people expecting things).

I know people outside of higher education think that all academics care about is their research but most of the academics I know really struggle to find time to do their research because they are committed to teaching and it really can fill up all the space available.

Things that are helping

Andrea pointed me in the direction of The Fluent Self. Havi Brooks has a bunch of interesting products and maintains a blog. She calls herself a “habits educator” and procrastination is one of the habits she can help with. I have her free sample material and thought it was interesting.

Recently I took the plunge and purchased her Procrastination Dissolve-o-Matic. And I’m really liking her approach. I’ve been procrastinating about growing the coaching side of the business.

I always wanted to do that kind of work, but when I started, the easiest way to get going was to use my contacts in research offices, to get the related work for them. Because the other thing was hard, I put it to one side and have basically been ignoring it. And I was getting enough work so it just stayed in the background and I didn’t pay it much attention.

This kind of procrastination is what Havi refers to as “life procrastination”. It isn’t the little day to day stuff where you can say “If I didn’t spend so much time futzing around on the internet, I’d get that done.” It’s more of a big thing looming in the background that you are just ignoring while you get on with all kinds of other things, many of which are good things, like homeschooling, doing the business I am doing, … and a bit of futzing around on the internet.

What kind of help is it?

I should note that Havi’s approach is what we in this household call (affectionately) “hippy shit”. We mean that in the best possible way. But it isn’t for everyone. (She has a page about what kind of people she wants to work with.)

In fact, most people probably think it isn’t for me.

When I was pregnant I signed up for an ante-natal yoga class (in North America you’d say “pre-natal”). It ran in 4-week blocks. And a few weeks in my partner admitted to me that he had expected me to come home from that class swearing and complaining and never go back.

It’s not like I got pregnant at the beginning of our relationship or anything, either. We’d been together on and off for about 6 years at that point. He knew me pretty well.

I started going to that class when I was about 14 weeks pregnant and went every week right through my pregnancy. It was great. A bit of yoga. A bit of “what went right, what went wrong this week”. Some cool breathing techniques. Some basic anatomy instruction about birth. A bit of aromatherapy. All in all “hippy shit”.

And it was great. My memory of labour is that it was tiring. Although there was some pain, it was all manageable. I had no drugs. I was in labour for many hours and did not swear once. Not once. In the normal course of a day, I swear frequently. I did not swear in labour. Most people who know me IRL think that is completely implausible. That’s how good that particular brand of hippy shit was.

As I was reading through the Procrastination Dissolve-o-Matic the other day, I come across similar things. A bit of yoga. A bit of breathing.

And this piece of advice: “Resistance is futile.”

The ante-natal class teacher said it this way: “What you resist persists.”

This sounds crazy the first time you come across it. But it works. Really. I figure if it can work for labour pain, it can work for crazy emotional baggage. So I’m all up with not resisting (fighting, beating, or other violent resistance metaphors) my procrastination.

Immediate results

And even just doing a little bit of Havi’s technique got me to write 2 e-mails today. One a response to someone I helped (paid for by her employer) who had asked me if there were any opportunities for me to help her with longer term research planning and one from someone I met (paid for by her employer) last spring who was very happy with how I made sense of her research plans (as presented less than clearly in a draft grant application) and wanted more of that “life coaching” for her research life.

I had no idea how to respond to these people who wanted the service that I most want to provide. I was stuck. Mostly on questions of how much to charge. But the intermediate stage in figuring that out is figuring out how much time people need in what kinds of intervals to do what kinds of things. And so I just e-mailed them and asked. I told them that I was stuck but this is what I really want to do and that I’d give them a deal on the coaching in return for some help with the figuring it out. Scary. But totally okay once I stopped worrying about it. And Havi’s techniques helped me do that. Hurray!

That was step 1. Which is more steps than I’ve taken in a couple of years on this particular project so Woo! Hoo! I’m celebrating that little step. And feeling like the next step might be easier.

The to do list (for growing the business) in no particular order:

• sort out a website (I’ve made some small steps on this)
• decide whether it is feasible to do in-person sessions with people or a workshop or something during a big academic conference in May
• figure out this pricing thing (there is a different brand of hippy shit to help with that here; I need to read his blog more because I bet there is more in there that would help me)
• talk to some more individual (potential) clients about how this thing might work

For those of you who are academics or know academics who might be interested. Here is my list of “who I want to work with”: social sciences and humanities; no economists (possible exception for feminist economists or other non-mainstream economists); working in Canada (or wanting to work in Canada). And one of my special skills is what one client called the “bablefish for humanists”. If that makes sense to you (or your academic friend), I can help. When I get my business website sorted, I’ll have more information about my background and qualifications, what services I offer, and all that stuff.