Go It Alone E-Book

Geoff Burch

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 358

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

In this completely updated and revised edition, Go it Alone! provides essential information for anyone who wants to get out of the rat race and work as a free agent, or start their own business. From the ins and outs of writing a business plan, to how to win customer loyalty Geoff Burch in his usual provocative and anecdotal style gives the common sense advice we've been waiting for. Along with Geoff's missives and anecdotes, he provides excercises and a resource directory. All of which make great reading and inspiration for anyone to Go it Alone! Readership: budding entrepreneurs or those wanting to find out how to become a free agent.

Leseprobe

Go It Alone

Go It Alone

The Streetwise Secrets of Self-Employment

GEOFF BURCH

This edition first published by Capstone Publishing Ltd (A Wiley Company)

Copyright © 1997 Geoff Burch

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ISBN 9781841124704 (print); 9781119950059 (ebk); 9781119950066 (ebk); 9781119950073 (ebk)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 10/16pt Palatino by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester

Printed in the UK by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

CONTENTS

     Introduction

  1 Look Before You Leap I – The Philosophy Bit

  2 On Your Own: Now What?

  3 Money Troubles

  4 Swimming with the Sharks

  5 The Money Spinners

  6 Now Ask Someone to Buy Something

  7 How Can You Sell Them Anything if You Can't Get to See Them?

  8 Ok, So Now You're In, Then What?

  9 Questions, Questions, Questions

10 Customers – Who Needs Them?

11 Marketing

     Epilogue: The Zen of Going-It-Alone

     Further Reading

Introduction

Despite the fact that I am supposed to be some kind of corporate guru, I have always enjoyed spending a little time helping out with small-business start-up schemes. What prompted me to write this book was the experience of addressing the ‘I want to do my own thing’ contingent of an outplacement scheme. The thinking behind such projects seems to be that, when all else fails and a ‘proper’ job can't be found, you have to go off and start a business of your own.

There was a time when, if you got caught fiddling your dole or social security money, you could avoid further action by signing off. There was then an opportunity to go on the Enterprise Allowance scheme, which at the outset was a few quid a week, no questions asked, while you got the enterprise on its feet. This meant that I was confronted by a room full of those of the buccaneering spirit, to put it mildly. We would talk of selling oneself, the minimum red-tape requirement to prevent embarrassing prosecutions, and how to avoid converting all income into alcoholic beverages. You may feel that this was a recipe for disaster, but in fact they all did rather well in their own way, and it was my future delegates that have caused the most concern.

In recent years, it is the middle classes that have taken the hammering as regards jobs. As the bloody slaughter of middle management goes on, I now walk into an entirely different atmosphere. Instead of the nose rings, the creak of black leather, the abusive T-shirts, and pungent aroma of ganja and engine oil, I am now met by Prince of Wales check, shoes that shine like new conkers, a row of very sharp pencils, folded arms, and an atmosphere of hurt bewilderment. I ask each delegate in turn what brought them here, and what their plans are for the future.

I hope that this book is going to be a great adventure for you. Part of it will be based on the replies received from these poor unfortunates. We will examine what can be done to secure a rewarding future for them and us, but let's save the really juicy bits for later and just have a quick glance at what they say:

‘You, Frank.’

‘Well, I was made redundant from my position of Resources Director for International Trip Wire Dot Com.’

‘And your plans?’

‘I plan to become a consultant.’

‘George?’

‘I plan to become a consultant.’

‘Janet?’

‘I plan to become a consultant.’

‘Derek?’

‘I plan to open a tea shop.’

‘Don't tell me,’ I say, pinching the bridge of my nose in the style of all stage psychics I have ever seen, ‘You are going to call it the Mad Hatter's Tea Shop.’

A gasp of astonishment, ‘How on earth did you know?’

‘Oh, just a lucky guess, I suppose.’

Lambs to the slaughter, doomed every one of them. But do you have to be doomed? Is there any hope? It's tirade time!

Professor Charles Handy writes some great books, and in a recent ‘good guru guide’, he was named as the philosophical champion of the damaged middle classes, but he says society must change. Well I agree, but it won't. It's like someone striding around the deck of the Titanic shouting, ‘Ban all icebergs’. These books are gentle, reassuring, and comforting, but empathy is not what is needed on that listing deck. Me, I would dress in feminine attire and shout ‘Women and children first’. In other words, if the circumstances won't change, then we must, and I intend to show you how to survive and survive well by hook or by crook.

Why Be Self-Employed?

When doing my outplacement guruing, I often encourage people to consider self-employment. This idea is often met with an enthusiasm that is tempered and even quashed by the fear of the unknown and of the obvious insecurity. I continue to encourage because, while I am familiar with the worry of not knowing where the next job is coming from and the feeling of doom when I consider my overdraft, I also know that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. To my pleasure, I saw one of my former delegates some 18 months on. She had pockets that bulged and overflowed with large-denomination banknotes, she drove a fabulous convertible Rolls Royce, and with her were two Chippendale-style companions who pandered to her every need.

‘So, it's going alright then?’ I asked her.

‘Oh yes,’ she grinned. She was a godsend – I could use her as the example for anyone to be self-employed. ‘It's clear why you are self-employed,’ I said, ‘It's all that lovely money.’

‘Nah,’ she replied, tossing a few handfuls of tenners casually into the air. ‘I'm not interested in money.’

‘That wonderful car then?’

‘No, not bothered.’

‘Then it's obvious, it's the adoring manservants.’

‘Nope, I can take them or leave them.’

‘Then why on earth are you self-employed?’ I asked.

‘Job security,’ she replied with a big cheesy grin.

     Now that had really got me stumped. I believed I knew every conceivable benefit of self-employment, but job security has not exactly been top of the list. She went on to explain that all her working life she had been a faithful manager for a fizzy drinks company, getting up at six in the morning to be the first in, and being the last to go home. She told me that she would watch the lazy guy with whom she shared an office doing his lottery numbers, organizing the staff bowling team and generally wasting time.

     ‘For every pound I earned through my sweat, half would subsidize this moron. It wasn't fair. I was so loyal and conscientious, I would wake in the night thinking of fizzy drinks. Then one fateful day, someone at head office said, “Let's shut Milton Keynes,” and I had no job. Was that security?’ she asked. ‘Listen, now I'm self-employed, I'm hardly likely to wake up one morning and make myself redundant, am I? Do you know why they shut my plant? Because they had a one-third drop in business and I happened to be in the third that got the chop. Last year I made £300,000. If my business drops by a third I'll have to struggle by on £200,000 – poor me! If you're self-employed, you're never unemployed. Skint, maybe, but never unemployed, and that's what I call secure.’

This really shook me up. Why do we believe that doing our own thing is less secure than a ‘proper’ job. Do you really think that your lords and masters are better at finding profitable work than you are, that they could handle money more efficiently, produce better quality to more markets or impress more people? Perhaps it is the business skills and experience that make the difference.

The answer is simple. Just learn those few extra skills and trust yourself more than your bosses, past and present, and I assure you that self-employment is secure employment.

What are you Working For?

Go-It-Aloners work for different things. It is Tuesday afternoon and you are at the cinema. Do you feel guilty for not working? You do? Then you are no Go-It-Aloner yet.

I spoke to a friend, who is working himself very successfully to an early grave, about what he was working to achieve. He pointed proudly to his new £80,000 Jag.

‘Forget your £80 per hour call-out charge,’ I said to him, ‘After tax, you probably clear about £20 per hour. That car costs 4000 hours of your life. That is 100 working weeks or, if you like, two years. If I pinched £80,000, I wouldn't expect more than a two-year sentence, and you have cheerfully sentenced yourself. Wouldn't it be nice to have two years of free time?’

High-flyers die of stress. Say they earn £200 per hour – with a more modest lifestyle they could put in four hours on a Monday morning and have the rest of the week off.

The Very Strange Account

A friend, who is a highly paid auditor, does this, only he does it by the year, not the hour. He works like fury for three months doing his auditing for £24,000 a month. He spends a gentle three months on crazy but cheap business ideas that, strangely enough, make a lot of money, probably because he doesn't care. Isn't that always the way? He then spends six months living like a beach bum in Barbados. He lives in a modest home, and drives an awful rat heap of a car. The side-effect of this leisure time is what seems like dozens of happy children for whom he has all the time in the world. He says that we are born with a very strange bank account full of the most valuable thing in the world. We can draw and draw on this account and use its contents for any purpose we wish, but when it is empty, it is empty and cannot be replenished. We never know what balance is remaining because there are no statements. This account we are born with is filled with time – something we should not swap too readily for cash. After all, death is in effect temporal bankruptcy, and no money in the world will bring time back.

My buddy with the Jag asked me what he would do with all that free time. What did you do with your long summer holidays as a kid? I built dens and cooked camp-fire teas. What are you doing at this moment? Whatever it is, wouldn't you rather be cooking a sausage on a stick, riding your horse across the hills – you are a long time dead.

The serious aspect of this for the Go-It-Aloner is that, to start with, the work may be patchy, and if there is a small mortgage, a cheap car (or no car at all), no overheads or big leases, you can survive very well on a small income. Then you don't need to worry, and you can enjoy the leisure time. Of course, you can have bumper harvests, but don't buy the Jag. Think camel, and fill your hump, then if the work dries up or becomes too boring to do for a while, you can survive very nicely for as long as you like.

The Voice from the Other Side

Sometimes stress is calculated by giving score numbers to certain life events: moving house 3, redundancy 7, loss of a spouse 8, theft of a motorcycle 9, dying 10. As any of these events threaten, we become stressed, and you may have noticed that death scores quite highly. People try to alleviate this stressful fear of dying by trying to find out if there is life after death. Great comfort can be gained by allowing a medium to receive messages from the other side. We love to hear tales of near-death experiences with tunnels of light and meeting old friends and relatives.

When I meet those who have experienced ‘career bereavement’, whether they have jumped or were pushed, they are undergoing a life change that some compare to death, and their questions are the same. Is there life after the event?

I have lived as a business guerrilla for nearly all my working life, and not only is there an afterlife, but it is a great life of milk and honey. So, let me be the voice from the other side – your spirit guide.

Strap on Your Beans and Follow Me

When we were all terrified by the prospect of a nuclear holocaust, someone said that when the end of the world comes, we need nothing but a rucksack full of beans, a bicycle and a pump-action shotgun. For the moment, the nuclear holocaust threat has receded a bit, and the Armageddon we are faced with is a commercial one. Maybe the fallout has struck you, or perhaps you have had enough time in the trenches. If that is the case, what is the commercial equivalent of the bike, the beans and the shotgun? Harry Harrison, the great science-fiction writer, created a character based, he said, on the rats that, throughout history, have survived well and even thrived in the wainscot of society. But now, he said, we have a stainless steel society, so we need to be ‘Stainless Steel Rats’. Up against the superpowers from the USA to the USSR, the raggedy shadow with a powerful weapon on his back has taken them on and won. From the Vietcong to the Mucha Haden, the ultimate victor has been the guerrilla. This can work in business. Travel light, live off the land and strike from the shadows. You have a great future assured. Victory will be yours, if only you can learn to GO IT ALONE!

1 Look Before You Leap – The Philosophy Bit

I want to take you by the hand and lead you up the rocky but golden pathway to success, but it might be a good idea to clear the air a bit, and decide just what success is.

I hope that, whichever runway you choose to take off from, you will reach the cruising altitude of your choice and arrive at the destination that you want to, because that is the major benefit of self-employment. It sets you truly free. But to start with, freedom can be a difficult thing to deal with and is really quite frightening.

There is a very cruel training trick used on elephants which consists of taking a young elephant and chaining it securely to a stake. The creature is then beaten and shouted at in an attempt to drive it from the stake. No matter how hard the terrified animal tries, it cannot break the massive chain that holds it. In fact, it would hurt itself trying. After days of doing this, the animal learns to stop trying to escape its tormentors because the pain they can inflict is less than that of its shackles. From that day onwards, people are amazed to see the elephant trainer push a single wooden peg into the ground and loosely wind a light piece of chain around it, and the animal's foot. Everyone can see that, if it wanted to, the elephant could just walk off with virtually no impediment. What secures it is not the chain, but its own fearful memories.