German Dominatrix

A friend of mine had hosted all her sites with one hoster. The hoster went bankrupt yesterday, and almost all site backups were on the hoster’s servers.

Lessons to be learned:

• Don’t have all your sites (and domains and e-mail addresses!) with one smaller hoster, no matter how cheap they are or how much you are befriended with them. Distribute your sites between hosting companies.
• Always make local (as in: not somewhere in the net) backups of your contents. And keep those backups up-to-date.
• Have one e-mail address independent from your domains, like on Gmail.

This may sound like an overkill, but if you make your money with or via the Internet, losing your domains and your normal e-mail accounts means losing your business. In a heartbeat. So better take care early and often.

Really. The public pool is always crowded. When there’s school, there are classes around. When there are vacations, there are family with kids around. When you’re too early or too late in the day, normal 8-5 workers are around. And don’t even mention the retired people that clutter the lines!

It’s just the same for sales, right? It’s never the right time for your ads, your letters, you phone calls. Someone lately posted the following joke into a group:

“A salesman has four enemies - spring, summer, autumn, winter.”

And while that’s funny, it’s also rather true - and not. If you deal in candles, Christmas will be great but summer will be lacking turnaround. If you’ve got a restaurant with outdoor seats, summer will be great but less people will spend their money there in winter time. But for normal office work, the seasons aren’t a problem.

A friend of mine owns a cold call business, and she says there’s no good (= no bad!) time for trying. Okay, before holidays or late on Fridays, you may be unlucky in IT offices - but she has no “no-no” time in her schedule.

So, if you think about improving your sales, it’s primarily about choosing the right methods and the right target groups, not about choosing the right time. Or vice versa - if your sales quota sucks, don’t try to use the time of your sales attempt as an excuse. It’s very likely not the real problem you’re facing.

There are lists over lists what you can do to speed up and/or improve your business life. I’m sharing with you what had the best effects lately for me:

• Skype more. Saves telephone costs, works face to face with your computer, looks professional (but make sure to choose the right user name for each work field).
  
• Use Bloglines or something similar for your RSS feeds. Though I actually have a lot more websites on the list than I surfed before, I spend less time on them, because it’s so much quicker to filter the contents and read only the articles that interest me.
  
• Use more filters in your mail program. While I’m not an “Inbox Zero” addict, it does help to unclutter the main inbox by filtering mails into relevant folders. It also makes it easier to find posts again later.
• Concentrate on a few business portals. It’s a pain in the ass to update your data when it’s shuffled around in the Internet. Therefore, pick a few favorite places where you keep your information up-to-date and point interested parties to those places.

I just read the Freelance Freedom comic strip of today, and it amused me a lot.

Didn’t we all have customers already who want to have speciality#1, 2, 3, and later we found out that they actually wanted normal feature#1+2 only? Most people cannot say what they really want before they see the result. It’s so much easier to criticize something that’s already happening or existing as a text or drawing than if it’s only in your imagination.

How to work around this divergence between wishes and real wants? I prefer rapid prototyping. Start quickly with the project and make clear that you’re creating a first level for your customer - and demand feedback on this draft! Customers who are unwilling to have a look at your intermediate results should be taken with caution; they are likely to be unhappy with the final result. Working on a project is a two-way-experience, and any customer who sets you on the track with a “see you at the end” didn’t get that important point.

So start the work week with communication and have fun!

That’s an easy question, right?

However, once we are asked if we want jam, honey, sausage or cheese, we’re confused. Too many choices! And a bagel has only two halves. Damn.

One of my currently most admired authors, Kevin Hogan, places quite a spotlight on the choice question in his book The Science of Influence - Hot to get anyone say YES in 5 minutes or less. The title’s a little lurid, but Hogan knows his business. And the question is very important for your business.

Too many choices create a cognitive dissonance. We want one thing, but we also want another. The more choices there are, the more likely we’re overwhelmed. We may get paralyzed and, in the end, might choose nothing.

Another effect is that the more choices there are, the less appealing they are. Having many choices makes us wonder if there can’t be yet another choice that totally meets our expectation. Seeing ten beautiful suitcases in a row makes only stick out all those little details on each that hold us back from buying. Having only three to choose from, we’ll probably find an acceptable one and leave happily.

That’s the angle of the buyer/customer. But what does that mean for you as service provider?

• Concentrate on and market only a few of your fields of expertise. This applies to ads, websites and flyers. Nobody wants to know every little detail at once. Don’t try to sell a vendor’s tray, as we say in Germany.
• If you offer a service that’s hard to explain, work with a few interesting showcases.
• Don’t advertise where everyone else does too. While it’s good to be active e.g. in the same web forums as your competitors, don’t hang around in places where they are in the hundreds. Create your own niche where there’s less competition and therefore less choice.
• Narrow down the options, once you find out what the customer really wants.
• If necessary, direct the customer to the choice you think is best for him. (Always nicely, of course - you want him to become a steady customer, right?)

By the way, I’d take the honey. What about you?

Sometimes the dragging keeps on. Maybe you feel a little ill, there’s only rain outside, your family calls you with some frustrating news and your new potential project looks like it’s going to die before even starting. And the little work you’ve got on the table does look neither inviting nor will it bring you a lot of money. But you’ve got to do it.

One way to overcome this kind of inertia caused by general low energy is to follow those tips for goal-oriented working, like “shut off your messenger and mail program, don’t answer the phone, then start working and STICK TO IT”.

Usually, that’s the way I go. It’s often a hard way that makes you curl your fist and feel like Hamlet, opposing slings and arrows. Not really a fun method.

But today, I tried an alternative*. I kept on irc’ing because it improved my mood to talk to my friends, I read mails, I watched King Kong (1933), all the while slowly working on my project. Of course, it was no comparison in result to a full-fledged, concentrated action. However, the snaily proceedings showed more effect than if I had smashed my keyboard, gone to bed, left the house or done anything else. So…thumbs up from this dungeon!

*Not recommended when the work is overdue!

Sometimes you’ve got work that just drags on like lead. And it doesn’t matter if it’s Mr. X standing in the corner cage boring you to death, or the overly colorful Power Point your customer sent you for corrections. Or it’s one of those day on which you have some projects on your desk but not enough to really propel you to start working. Instead, you’re idling, reading Bloglines, enjoying a comic strip or two and drinking more coffee than any living being should.

Well, that’s fine. Even better - it’s completely normal and human to do that once in a while. Especially on Mondays.

However - never let your customer know. Mr. X paid lots of money for your service, so look very concentrated and concerned about his well-being, even if you chew nails behind his back or repair your whip. The customer whose work you should have started yesterday already doesn’t have to know nothing really happened yet - send him a little mail, possibly with “received your mail, starting now”. Or even better, ask him a question that shows your growing expertise in his field but also occupies him for some hours.

The point is that your customer needs to feel that you cherish him (and I hope you do), that you invest your time and energy into what he paid you for, that you keep in contact and that in the end, all will be well. It’s not about telling him about your bad conscience for being lazy on Mondays, or - even worse - coming up with some wacky excuses. It’s about your customer’s satisfaction, not you.

One of my friends is a professional dog trainer (one of those modern, violent-free, understand-your-dog kind of trainers). She has a new trainee, and for one session with a customer and his dog, she told her, “Don’t touch that dog; it bites sometimes and it already bit me.”

Trainee sees dog, goes down and strokes the dog. My friend says, “Hey, I told you not to do that because he might bite!” Trainee replies, “Oh, I forgot. You’ve got to tell me that more explicitly.”

Which left my friend in a certain WTF mode. After I joked a little about using a whip for learning improvement (on the trainee, of course, never on dogs), I also thought about how such things can be avoided.

For once, it’s always good when the answer to an order is phrased as a full sentence.
Instead of: “Don’t touch the dog” - “Sure” or “yes” (instantly forgotten)
it could be: “Don’t touch the dog” - “Okay, I won’t touch that dog.” (better chance for remembering)

(Same goes if you are unsure what somebody expects from you. Rephrasing the work ahead like, “Let’s see. I should start with A, than do B, and if there’s time, C can be tackled.” makes sure that both sides are talking about the same subject.)

But I also think that in this case, there’s a strong reflex that works against not touching this dog. The trainee obviously loves dogs, and I guess she strokes every dog she meets. There are some numbers around how often you need to do something before an old habit is broken, and they are in the hundreds. So one order against a strong tendency of doing something might not be very effective.

For her own self-protection, the trainee needs to learn to heed warnings and that not all dogs are nice and cuddly. Possibly the best learning effect would have been reached if the dog had bitten the trainee (which it didn’t). As it is, I predict that similar situations will happen again with this trainee…no matter how explicit the order is given.

I’m a mole - really, I am. I won every contest of “who has the worse eyesight” in my life. So my glasses are almost hard-wired to my face (my eyes are too dry for contact lenses), and when I started swimming again last year, I always kept them on.

Now I’ve got wonderful and still inexpensive goggles with almost-fitting diopters. With them, I can dive and see everything under water super sharp.

And then I just took them off today and did some lines of breaststroking without any glasses or goggles. And not only didn’t I get lost or ran into anyone else - I also found that in front of my body, every stroke evoked a beautiful wave pattern on the water. The more regular the strokes, the stronger the pattern. I had never seen how my own energetic movements changed the water in front of me, because I had always been so occupied with staring at the end of the pool in the distance.

So if you keep your eyes too much trained on the goal, you may lose the sight of what’s right in front of you. I’m not saying the path is the goal, as I think that’s often a perfect method of forgetting where are you heading to. But the process is part of reaching the goal, and you may miss many things if you only stare at the peak at the horizon.

Welcome to the dungeon. Here, the same rules apply as to every small service business - and I’m going to share with you my ideas on how to play along those rules, and stretch them, if necessary.

Me, that’s a self-employed business woman, tech writer and studied chemist from Germany (yes, indeed). And why should you be able to gain something from reading my blog? Because I’m in the IT business for 9 years, and there’s a wealth of things we can share with each other. In addition, I’ve got a pile of friends with businesses of all categories - and yes, one of them is a professional dominatrix. She runs a successful studio, has a 5 day week max. with no more than a few hours work each day, and still loves her job.

For people who want this kind of lifestyle with maximum joy and a reasonable amount of work and income, I’m writing this blog.

Why am I not writing in German? Maybe there would be readers, but not as many. And I embrace many of the business ideas I read in English blogs every day. In Germany, there’s still the attitude of “self employed means you’re working all by yourself all of the time” (selbststaendig = selbst und staendig) and that learning new things and adapting to new processes has to got be painful.

Well, as a dominatrix, I’d say that sometimes, pain is a good teacher. Kids who burned their hands on a hot oven will admit that. But when you’re willing to change things, you’re ready and open and you should be able to find pleasure in what you’re doing. Because your work should be sexy. Your projects should be sexy. You should get hot when finding interesting solutions for your interesting customers. You should love finding out what moves them and how they can reach maximum satisfaction with you.

For tips and tricks from down the dungeon up to the many ways how your personality is the key for your business achievements, I’ll discuss personal experiences, books, websites, blogs and everything else that comes along the way and will make the road to success easier for all of us small entrepreneurs.

Glad you found me. Let’s enter. And I assure you, you always have the right to safeword my suggestions…