Staying Afloat, Doing it on Your Own & Becoming Your Own Boss.
Everyone starts with the same dreams when they start up their own company: The stress-free life of being your own boss. The ‘big bucks’ in the money you see not going through a third party (your employer) before it gets to you. The allure of making yourself a success story. All the passion for development you had as a fresh face at a new job is burning brighter than ever and you can’t want to jump in at the deep end and grab your first client.
At Green Shell, we felt it too. More and more time devoted into the next project that the hours in a day seemed to slip away. Time at home became extra time working to get the next client while time at work was spent keeping existing clients happy. 8 hour days became 10, 10 became 12 and so on.
And we loved every second of it.
The Problem
When your busy doing something that you enjoy, you don’t mind doing it. You do it for fun, for yourself and best of all for your company. Everything goes brilliantly until one of three things happen.
1. Life catches up with you
When you’re consistently putting in twelve hour days, the people around you miss you. And when that happens your social life starts to deteriorate. Friends become absent, Significant others feel distant and you realize the affect of all your work. The fact that there are communities devoted to helping developers through hard times (such as devpressed.com) is a testament to this. What starts as fun loving work and living the dream quickly turns into living in solitude and loneliness. Forgetting to live while you work is something that happens to the best of us, especially in high-stress times at work.
2. The Dream Gets Lost
You made your startup to spend more time coding than ever before, helping clients out and realizing their goals but over time your hours have been spent more on the politics inside working. Your coding standard have slipped because you haven’t been able to learn new technologies or maintain best practice. You lose sight of the quality you once sought to product for your clients and you now have a ‘get it done as quickly as possible’ approach. Your work product gets worse and worse and your clients start to notice.
3. You go bust
You’ve spent so much time and effort on your business, but no one notices. The clients don’t come and your reserves have run dry. Time to get a 9–5 again and get back to it.
The Solution
Self awareness is the only way to succeed at all things generally. But it’s becoming self aware that is the tricky part. When you treat every day with passion and ambition, you often find yourself like a deer in the headlights waiting to be hit by an oncoming truck. Being aware of your surroundings is the best way to succeed, so here are a few tips.
1. Listen to your friends and family
When people say they want to spend time with you — spend time with them. Remember that you originally became your own boss so that you could have a bit more freedom. Work to live, don’t live to work.
2. Split your time well
With so many areas that need working on when you’re a new startup, its easy to over commit to clients and get stuck in a rut. Planning your time allocation before you even look for clients is the best way to avoid this.
Allocate 6 hours or so per day (assuming you want to do an 8 hour day) to work. 1 hour to finding clients and the final hour to developing the business while you’re starting out. Naturally, these ratio’s are subject to be changed but the key from this is maintaining your work/life ratio, just as much as the point above. You may think that a client is less likely to take your offer if you can only work 6 hours a day. However promoting an up-front persona and emphasizing the quality of code that someone will receive is (in my experience) more warmly received than any talk on quantities. If clients want quantity over quality, they’re probably not the clients you want.
If, like me you enjoy coding in your spare time too. That’s when you can explore the realm of learning new technologies and enforcing patterns in existing code. Having passion projects on the side doesn’t need to stop just because you became your own boss and you’ll still be enthusiastic enough to do those projects when you’re working a smaller schedule instead of bogging yourself down.
3. Find yourself a business partner / get outside
Work gets boring when you’re doing it alone. Freelancing from home is often lonely and only having clients to talk to about your projects doesn’t allow you to be proud of your work. Most libraries and some inner-city offices have communal areas for freelancers and travelling workers, some are free and all will cost less than £50 or so per month. The social benefits you get from experiences like this outweigh the cost tenfold for me. Hell, be one of those guys and sit in Starbucks coding if needs be.
Spreading the load of business growth between 2 or more people can often end up being great too. If you’re a developer then chances are networking and marketing aren’t your strong suits, pairing with a designer (or a developer who enjoys that kind of stuff) not only allows those social interactions but it also helps enable the business growth, hopefully stopping you going broke :)
However you plan on becoming aware of your time and work allocation; its becoming aware of it and being able to tell if you’re running into problems that will help you become a better business owner, a better freelancer, a better friend, a better person.
