Thinking big, but prioritizing family

This is going to be a little more like a freewrite blog than anything else. Something that happens every autumn is that I start to think about the next big project that I will be working on to ensure that I am bringing in enough cash to help keep us comfortable.

The Milky Way from Ramah, Colorado by Joel Tonyan, on Flickr

My day job is as a freelance professional in a field that allows me to charge my time at a high rate and I have a few return customers that allow me to stay busy. The challenge is that I really hate being too busy, so I refuse a lot of projects and typically don't do a lot of marketing or other business development when I have active projects. This results in a rollercoaster of a bank account.

Over the last couple years I have been able to drastically stabilize the personal side of the accounts such that its only the business account that goes up and down from mid-five figures to 3 figures depending on the month in the year, but I would really like to have an account outside the operating account with some reserves to add more buffer.

Time with family

However, to do that I would have to work more and I have two small kids that I really enjoy spending time with. Every once in a while I will look at pictures from just 1 or 2 years ago and be shocked at how much they have changed and grown. I don't want to miss any of this.

The reason that I bring this up is that historically, the way that I would make a lot of cash and get a lot of new clients is by spending weeks commissioning projects and at conferences building my network. I really don't want to do that anymore, and especially not for at least 5 years at which point I could make the conference part a family affair and choose locations that they would have things to do while I do the business thing.

So for now I brainstorm big ideas.

Knowledge Worker

When I distill what I do to the most basic thing, I'm a knowledge worker. I use my brain to create designs and solve the problems of my clients. I have been doing this long enough now that solving the problem is just following a system. I ask a series of questions to make sure that they actually know what the problem is, and whether they are hiring me to solve the actual problem or just the symptoms. Typically its the symptoms because the actual problem is structural to the business and not something that the person that I'm working with can address.

I then work out a way that will solve the problem that will make the person on the other company's team look the best while letting that person know that's what I'm doing. It's how I get my repeat business. I make other people thrive in their career and they take me along for the ride.

But that strategy doesn't scale, and I don't want to hire the talent to make it scale. Been there done that.

More money less time

So what I need is a way that I will be able to scale a method of increasing revenue without increasing my time commitment.

The obvious answer there is a product of some kind, and that's the conclusion that I keep coming back to. And its the thing that I know that I need to start working on.

Now the product has to be something small that I can grow with, and I think that I have the idea.

I'm going to sell my process.

What I mean is that I'm going to put together a series of courses where I can train clients and my competition on how to do the things that I do. This is something that I think will be relatively easy to do, and the time commitment will fit nicely into the gaps. I will increase my working time by 10%, something that is not unreasonable, continue my normal business development and project work and see if my MVP course is something that people will pay for.

As I build these courses and increase their proportion of my revenue I will rely less and less on the project work and spend more energy on marketing those courses which should finally decouple my time and money.

I think that is enough rambling for today. I will let you know how it goes.