Archive for working remotely
Flexible Work Arrangements
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve been preaching about the benefits of working from home – happier employees, more productivity, less commuting stress, cheaper leasing costs, better for the environment – just to name a few.
Looks like I’m getting some agreement on flexible work arrangments.
Use Elance to Work Remotely
Posted by: | CommentsAs someone who has really fallen in love with working remotely it recently dawned on me to start using sites like Elance.com. In the past I didn’t think to use it because my expertise is in large integration projects using webMethods. As I’ve mentioned before I asked one of my out-of-town clients if I could work remotely after travelling for years to their office. These are usually long projects spanning for 6 months to a year or more. With Elance you can bid on much smaller projects which requires more marketing time (finding projects, submitting proposals, reporting, etc) and these allow you to work remotely. They don’t just have programming jobs, there is video/audio creation, copywriting, sales and marketing and many other categories.
Over the years I’ve built lots of websites and I recently realized that I have a lot of skills to offer clients in the Internet space – from setting up websites and blogs, to adding email autoresponders, shopping carts and membership sites. Not only that my ability to communicately clearly with non-techies is also valuable. Whenever I talk to people who need a website they often spend tens of thousands of dollars and the projects go off the rails due to all the custom coding. The sites I create are easy to update for a non-techie saving them money in the future usually spent to update the site. I’ve also figured out ways to get more traffic by adding Google analytics and seeing which sites and keywords bring the most traffic.
I like to use hosted solutions (also called software as a service) because there are no installs and upgrades required. You just pay a monthly fee to get ready-to-go code which has been fully tested. I use email autoresponders, a content management system and shopping cart systems that are all third party. You just have to copy some html code for the sign up forms and you’re good to go. Then you can focus on adding the content and marketing the site.
Getting back to Elance.com I’ve bid on a few website jobs over the last few days. In general the budgets are fairly low (given by the buyer) and the most common problem is a lack of clear requirements – do they need a header logo? Will they enter the content themselves? Do they know how to add content? How many iterations will there be if they want changes?
Some of this scares me but we’ll see how it goes. My feeling is that over time I will find a few high quality clients that will be the majority of my focus. Just like with webMethods the 80/20 rule applies. 80% of the work and revenue comes from 20% of the clients. Here’s my Elance profile.
New, Bigger Goals for 2009 and Beyond
Posted by: | CommentsMany people who are working as employees expect that they will get cost of living raises (based on inflation) and possibly some larger raises if they move into higher positions. So that is exactly what they get.
I learned a lesson early on in my career. As I mentioned in my IT consulting e-book, I got laid off after 14 months on my first job. The company got bought out. Two months before, I got a raise of about 30 cents per hour which was almost insulting. They gave me four weeks notice, and during that time I managed to find another job. The funny thing was I got a 30% raise. My first lesson was ‘You make more money jumping between companies than staying in one company’. That may have been short-sighted but it kept working. I jumped again a couple years later and got an even bigger raise (plus I went contract). I was getting $35/hour which at the time felt huge!
I eventually ended up in IT in a couple start-ups, but got exposed to webMethods software which is used in the integration space. I started to get my head around consulting rates in the $100/hr range. This is because I was talking to sales people from the company and discovered what they (and others like IBM) charge for professional services – from $150/hour to over $200/hour. At the time those numbers were unimaginable as I wasn’t even making six figures as an employee. My general view was that I would make cost of living increases or possibly up to 20-30% more if I jumped to another position.
I’ve been making the same amount of money for years, and recently realized that it was because I hadn’t set a larger target since the early days as an IT consultant. So I was getting was I was envisioning. I needed to think big, to set bigger goals. We all need to create challenges and strive to meet them. This is what gives us excitement in life, not the money but what money can enable. I believe that we are mostly seeking freedom in life. Freedom to make our own choices, and live the life we choose. This usually requires money!
So I recently set some new, bigger business goals. This has re-energized and refocused me. I’ve started to take action already, I’ve tried a few things so far that haven’t had much success online, but I will persist! I’d like to share the path that I’ve taken and the new goals I am setting and hope you will do the same:
- find a niche market to target (Done!)
- start a corporation and start consulting at $90+/hour range (Done!)
- start working remotely so I can avoid commuting, meetings, get more accomplished during the day and have more freedom (Done!)
- find more contracts that allow remote work and diversify my client base globally
- reduce time-based pay (getting paid by the hour) by finding and creating products to sell online
- obtain recurring revenue by creating membership sites
- move out of the big city and work remotely from a home in the country
- generate $1 million dollars per year of revenue
- give more to animal charities (up to 10%)
I’ll be talking more about working remotely (ie. working from home) and generating online revenues via internet ventures in future posts. So set your new, bigger goals for 2009 and beyond now! Remember, what you focus on expands.
Living the Dream
Posted by: | CommentsWell, my first month of being on-call is over and it went very well. As I mentioned previously, I had a minimum 20 hour per month clause in the contract and the rate was about 50% higher than normal due to being on-call. They didn’t call me that much and so it was a good idea to have the 20 hours in there! Things were pretty stable after I left and any major development is on hold so there wasn’t that much happening. I was on vacation for 2 weeks so it was nice not to have to answer too many calls. But I was prepared to do what I had to – once or twice I was swimming or lying in the sun when they called, but answering questions on the phone isn’t that taxing!
I’ve decided to only work remotely and there’s a possibility I can get some remote work in a couple months or so when the same client will start ramping up. So for the next couple months I am going to work on another business idea I recently started (online interactive guitar lessons). Not only that but I’m planning to move to the east coast where I have another house which we recenlty bought. I plan to get it set up with furniture and services and do my work from there.
The key point for you to take out of this is to know what you want and figure out a way to get there. It takes some thought to gain clarity on what it is you really want. Do you really want a large business with lots of employees and travelling around the country, or would you like to work from your country home or a tropical resort on a one-man internet business? Would you like to work with one client for months or would you like to have multiple clients for short-term jobs? Do you want/need to work full-time or would you prefer to work part-time on multiple interests? I realized that there are certain things I don’t like about the IT work, but I kept doing the same things expecting a different result (the definition of insanity). So I’m committed to living the dream. I hope you are too.
