The post-scarcity freelancer
Twelve precepts for any lone wolf
 The 100 Days, 100 Grand project started by getting rid of some dead weight. Changing beliefs that held me back.
What kind of beliefs? These. Business isn't hard; it's easy. Customers aren't scarce; they're everywhere. There's no such thing as "knowledge work"; all trades are manual trades.
Some professionals (are you one, <<First Name>> <<Last Name>>?) might argue that last. But nothing makes the guy with the corner office more of a "pro" than a plumber.
(In fact, Plunger Bob may have more of a claim. How many office workers hold a professional qualification?)
My toolbox contains a laptop and phone rather than a monkey wrench, but I'm a blue-collar guy, doing a fair day's work for a fair day's pay.
That's why there's no "self-help" advice in 100 Days, 100 Grand. It's a honest work plan, with a practical outcome. In fact, I'm pretty anti-self-help. (My bookcase, when I had one, included most of the "spoof" versions (Who Cut The Cheese, 107 Habits of Highly Ineffective People, The Power of Positive Drinking.) And there's evidence no industry has inflicted more suffering than the motivational industry.
The illustrations for 100 Days aren't finished, but I guarantee no photos of "guy on mountaintop staring into distance" or "woman doing beach yoga at sunrise". Not that many, anyway. (For an entertaining take on all that happy-clappy "personal fulfillment" stuff, try this guy's articles.)
But I hope readers will dive in with one "inspirational thought": that business today is a world of abundance.
What's changed in the last twenty years is this:
An individual freelancer can now access that abundance.
 Laptops, mobile, email, the web: these tools connect you a hundred trillion dollar blob called "the global economy". The other week, I was working for a client in Taiwan; this week, in France. Neither I've ever met face-to-face. They just happened to need what I offer.
But abundance creates a problem: navigating the murk.
So I scribbled down this list of 12 precepts. Many sound simple, even naively so. But a surprising number of freelance professionals forget what business is really all about. They get wrapped up in "personal brands" and "mission statements", obsess over letterheads and line art. Business is simpler than that.
Management guru Peter Drucker - hardly a naive guy - said it best:
"The purpose of business
is to create and keep a customer."
That's all 100 Days, 100 Grand really does. So here they are: the axioms 100 Days, 100 Grand stands on.
- Business is about making money. Money isn’t everything—but this book is about increasing your income, so money is its subject. If you’re not making money, you’re not in business.
- You earn money by delivering value. Money isn’t a goal, but a result. Value, when delivered to a business, helps that business become more successful. Value is what businesses pay for.
- You deliver value with your head and hands. The knowledge in your head turns into business value through your hands, whether you’re bashing on a keyboard or shaping steel in a skyscraper. All trades are manual trades, including rocket science and brain surgery.
- Your head and hands can be multiplied with tools. If you want holes in the ground, a digger is better than a shovel is better than a teaspoon. The right tools let you leverage your expertise and increase your capacity.
- The same multiplier applies to finding customers. Marketing is a numbers game; it’s easier to find one customer among 1,000 than 5. Focussed use of search engines, websites, and social networks can find large numbers of potential customers for reasonable effort.
- Customers exist in a world of abundance. Today’s tools open up your business offer to a vast network of customers. No market is small; no niche is narrow. In a global economy worth hundreds of trillions of dollars, there is a sizeable market for what you do, whatever it is.
- Dealing with abundance needs tight focus. The millions upon millions of people to work for out there range from square pegs to round ‘holes, from bottom-barrel to top-dollar. A broad market needs a narrow approach: your job, <<First Name>>, is not to find customers, but to find the right customers.
- Tight focus leads to repeat customers. The right customers are those for whom you deliver value over time. It’s six times harder to acquire a customer than retain one you’ve got already. Customers who come back let you add greater value as as you learn their needs, deepening your relationship.
- Repeat customers let you plan for the future. Consistent income from several customers lets you invest resources, grow your revenues, and develop practices and processes that save time. Repeat customers are the only customers that matter.
- Planning leads to good habits. Building a list of 1,000 customers is a big job if done all at once, but far easier if spread over 100 days. The right habits, applied over time, deliver big outcomes. And that comes from planning ahead.
- Good habits come from good data. Improvement isn’t a line but a loop. Only by looking at the outcomes of what you’ve done can you make the right decisions about what to do next. Over time, all those informed improvements have a great effect.
- Good data can be small data. When combined with your intuition, it doesn’t take much to tell you what worked and what went wrong. Look at the outliers and edge cases for clues, and use the insights to improve your practices. This is how your business makes money.
And that's about it. Best for what's left of May, <<First Name>>. Now back to the editing: Part 7 needs some hard work...
Chris
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