While you might not have to deal with zombies chasing you down the road, or finding a stash of tins so you can eat today, running a business can be a bit like the experiences in these novels.

Find other survivors

When we’re running a business, we’re often in an unfamiliar world, where we don’t understand the rules. And the rules change as we go along. Plus, of course, we’re running the business to survive, to create enough money to be able to pay for food and shelter.

Usually, these kinds of books have the plucky hero meeting up with some other survivors so that they can combine efforts. That’s a bit like recruiting staff or doing joint projects with another business. You need to have the right people with you, or your business isn’t going to make it through the next few months.

Know your enemies

And you’ll meet with enemies, who will be out to get you. They’ll want to take what’s yours. HMRC might not have a knife to your throat, but they will come after you if you don’t pay your tribute…I mean VAT bill.

And your competitors will try to take over your space in the market, offering the same thing as you to your customers, or pushing you down the google ranking because they’ve done better search engine optimisation than you.

Find your guide

The successful survivor of the apocalypse is usually someone who meets a helpful person to guide them on the way. Someone who knows the route, and can look out for the dangers. And the successful business owner is usually someone who has got it together to get the right kind of advice and support to protect them from hazards and ward off the competition.

If you’re ready to face your business zombies, book in a coffee and cake with me. I might not be able to help you fight zombies or breaking into abandoned warehouses but I can give you the support you need to run a successful business. 

Some more post-apocalyptic reading for you:  

How to work out your ideal customer avatar

How to protect your business from going bust because of Brexit

Will you hold my spider for me? 

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There’s no point worrying about your business.

These are two clichés which people have said to me about a trillion times over my lifetime.  I’ve probably said them to other people, or to myself. I’ve also quoted Mark Twain’s much more enlightened and humorous version:

The trouble is, that none of these has ever stopped me worrying about things for more than 45 seconds. All that happens is that I feel guilty for worrying, and it takes up my mental bandwidth.

I worry about all kinds of things:

• Climate change
• Does my hair look okay today?
• Did I remember to lock my bike up – I don’t remember doing it, better check
• What on earth is Donald Trump going to do next, and is there going to be a world war 3 because of that numpty
• And of course I worry about my business, just like you do

I can’t do too much about numbers 1 & 4 and of course, I did lock my bike up because I do that every day on autopilot. Which leaves me with checking my hair in the mirror, and possible remedial action with the hairbrush.

Worrying takes up your mental bandwidth

Seth Godin is right when he says that worrying takes up mental bandwidth which could be better used to actually do the work and get on with the things that will make a difference.

And plunging into something useful does stop you worrying about your business because your brain is full of something else. The worrying either gets pushed into a dusty corner of your mind or evaporates entirely.

In fact, plunging into activity is the only thing that will break the worry cycle. If you’re beset by worries at 4am (the worst time, because your sleepy brain has no filter as to what’s important, real, or within your control) then you need to get up and walk around the garden. And maybe eat a banana, which also seems to help.

If you are worrying while you’re at work, you might as well get on with writing a blog post, or checking off one of the items on your to-do list. It breaks the worry cycle by putting something else in your brain.

But what is the purpose of all this worrying about your business?

When I read Seth’s article, I nodded in agreement.

But then I wondered why we humans worry so much. There must be a point to it, some kind of genetic advantage. My ancestors who were worriers who got to survive and pass on their genes and their happy go lucky pals got eaten by lions.

[Note – I have no real idea if this is how the survival of the fittest works, or if worrying is even a genetic trait. Happy to hear from anyone who does know about this kind of stuff.]

Worrying does have a kind of advantage. It brings up all of those niggling little things, that if we are constantly in action with a serene sense of flow, we would simply miss. Maybe I need to worry about those little things, so I can check them.

Worrying is useful because it reminds me that I didn’t brush my hair, and I shouldn’t see clients looking like a birds nest crazy woman. It points out that I could take 5 seconds and walk back to my bike to check that I’ve locked it. There was that time that I just put the lock around the lamppost and not around the actual bike, after all.

The worry gene is what gave my ancestors the ability to check their rabbit traps, just in case, so they could eat that winter. I guess my equivalent of that is going over the open rate on my email series, so I tweak my subject lines, so I can eat this winter.

My new rule when worrying about my  business

My new rule about worrying is to notice what I’m worried about, and either dismiss it as being out of my control (I can’t do anything about Trump, sorry) or spring into action to make things better. And not to feel guilty about worrying, as long as I act on it.

What you can do when you worry about your business

When you find yourself worrying about your business, especially when that worrying takes up too much of your mental bandwidth so you can’t get into action, it’s probably time to come and have a coffee and a chat with me so we can sort out what’s going on and get you into action.

You might need some business coaching, you might need to invest in one of my programmes, or everything might be completely fine and you just need some reassurance.

Here’s how the coffee (and maybe a cake) thing works…

Photo credit to Dave Stokes and Ben Brophy from Flickr on a Creative Commons license

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I have been raving about the ideas in the book, especially deliberate practice. So thanks to my partner and friends who have been talking about it with me on some long walks up big hills. And in the pub afterwards.

This is a review of the book, but I will write more about it later as I work out my thinking about how to apply deliberate practice to business coaching.

What is Peak all about?

Anders Ericcson and Robert Pool are the people behind the 10,000-hour rule. Malcolm Gladwell popularised this idea, but as they very tactfully point out in the book, Gladwell got the idea slightly wrong.

Apparently, you don’t need to practice for 10,000 hours to become really good at something. The good news here for most of us is that we don’t have to do the full 10,000 hours (or 2 hours a day, 7 days a week for the next 13 years) to be amazing. Which is a bit of a relief, I have got to say.

The bad news is that practising alone isn’t enough, whether you do it for 100 hours, or 10,000. It is, actually a bit more complicated than that.

It’s not the 10,000 hours of practice, it’s the deliberate practice that makes you a peak performer – whether you’re a top business coach or a concert violinist.

But, as someone who loves to get better at the things I like to do, whether that is cooking Indian food or business coaching, Peak, inspired me and gave me some great ideas about how to improve what I do.

The big idea in Peak – no such thing as talent

Anders and Robert have spent their lives studying and working with people who have developed a very high level of skill in different areas.

There are the obvious ones such as world-class violin players and athletes but they have also looked at people who get their kicks from being the best at remembering very long series of three-digit numbers (don’t try this one after a few drinks), fighter plane pilots and surgeons.

They have only studied one business coach so far, and it wasn’t me, but there is still time.

And what they have found is that there is no such thing as natural talent.

What do you mean – no such thing as talent?

I found this idea really challenging. And so did all the people I have talked about Peak with since. We all know about talent, don’t we? We see people who have a talent for music, maths, or for cooking delicious food, and we wish we had their talent.

I know (or I thought I knew) all the things I wasn’t talented at, such as sport, drawing or playing the guitar. And because I wasn’t talented, I just didn’t bother with those things – they are for other people. I can now see that I’m no good at these things either because I didn’t want to do them (netball at school, ugh) so I didn’t practice them at all. Or because I was too lazy to do the practice needed to become even slightly better at them.

As I read the book I remember the 20 minutes I spent while someone tried to teach me to play the guitar before I gave up, claiming that I couldn’t do it. It hurt my fingers and confused me. I never even gave it a chance. I was too lazy/shy/unmotivated to give it more than 20 minutes before telling myself that I couldn’t do it.

I could have been in Mogwai or Queens of the Stone Age! But I gave up, believing that the guitar wasn’t for untalented people like me.

Everyone that I have talked to about this has brought out examples of people they know (often their children) who have found playing the guitar or drawing easy straight away because they are talented. But Peak debunks this talk of natural talent with some pretty interesting studies.

In fact, it turns out that the people who find something easy at first are less likely to become brilliant later. But the ones who work at it more from the beginning are more likely to be better over time. See, I could have been Jimi Hendrix, cos I was rubbish the first time I tried to play the guitar.

The most useful idea in Peak – Deliberate Practice

If there is no such thing as talent, and you don’t need to do your 10,000 hours, what do you need to do if you want to be really good at something?

Anders and Robert have done all this work and have identified this thing called Deliberate Practice.This is behind just about everyone they have studied who have excelled at what they do.

Here are the key ingredients:

• It has to be something you enjoy or you won’t stick with it.
• You need to have a coach or teacher – you cannot do this on your own.
• We all have to do things which are outside of your comfort zone and push your comfort zone a little wider each time.
• You have to be willing to try things which are outside of your normal abilities.
• You must have to have specific goals or targets (notice how this comes up a lot in business thinking).
• Focus on improving specific aspects of your performance.
• Your deliberate practice has to be…deliberate. You have to concentrate on it and think about how you can get better.
• You need feedback on what you are doing, from the teacher, from yourself and from fellow students.
• Excellence comes from using mental representations to monitor how you are doing and correct mistakes.
• It helps if you can build on skills you already have.

Why you should read Peak

Although Peak isn’t strictly speaking, a business book, it is still very relevant for anyone who wants to develop their skills in running a business. It has certainly made me think more about how I learn new things.

For example, I have been doing a copywriting course recently. It is one of those video courses, so it would be easier to just watch the videos and not do the exercises. But I have tried to use deliberate practice here, and do the exercises, even though some of them are really difficult and make my brain hurt because I’m having to change my writing habits.

Peak may help you to develop your skills in how you work with clients, encourage you to get more feedback, and actively set those goals and targets.

It is also a fascinating reading. It is easy to read, and full of great write-ups of other people’s work and the studies the authors have done. Ironically, it is just as enjoyable as reading Malcolm Gladwell so if you like his work, you might like this.

And it gives you tons to talk about with your friends or in the pub after a long walk. What could be better?

How to buy Peak and learn about deliberate practice

You can buy the book here, and let me know what you think.

How I’m using the idea of deliberate practice for my new programme

I’ve been so impressed with Peak and the ideas of deliberate practice, that I’ve started using the ideas with many of my business coaching clients. I’m not sure they know that I’m doing this, but they don’t need to.

I’m also using a lot of the ideas to build my Remarkable Business programme for people who would prefer to get really good at running a business in a different way. I’ve been able to build in a lot of deliberate practice principles into the new programme. And this means that Remarkable Business can help people to develop their business skills much more quickly than if they had to spend 10,000 hours slogging away in the traditional way.

Full details of Remarkable Business can be found here…

More ideas from my obsession with business books

One of the things I like to do with my blog is to write about the books I’m reading and what I’ve learnt, so you don’t have to read the whole book. I can just pick out the good stuff for you and give you the ideas I think will help you with your business.

Here are some good articles based on books I’ve been reading:

• Using checklists to keep things running smoothly – I use these ideas by Atul Gawande all the time
• How to use the magic word “because” – I stole this from Robert Cialdini’s classic Influence
• Seth Godin and the Purple Cow – if you’re not already familiar with this, there’s a short video to explain this key idea
• Creative swiping – my take on Tom Peter’s best idea ever

Photo credits to Poptech and Ferran from Flickr on a Creative Commons license

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Your business needs to make money for you – a 5-year-old could tell you that this is the point. But your business should also be fun. You’re entitled to enjoy how you spent a huge chunk of your waking hours.

I often meet people who aren’t enjoying their running their company. They’ve lost their mojo, and got caught up in the humdrum of VAT returns, admin and doing the same work day in and day out and working too hard.

And I meet a lot of people at my coffee and cake sessions, who aren’t maximising the money they could be making from their company. These are often the same people who aren’t having a lot of fun.

How making money and having fun are linked

We don’t often think of making money as being a fun activity. Many people I talk to believe that to make money, you have to sacrifice fun.

It’s almost as if fun is something which we should keep for the weekend. Or maybe a couple of weeks of holiday. But most of us spend a lot of time at work, and I think we could be having a lot more fun while we’re there.

I’m not talking about that holiday kind of fun. It’s difficult to find many business ideas which require you to sit on the beach drinking cocktails before going for your next scuba diving lesson.

Although, I have to say that’s not my kind of fun, and sitting on the beach would get a bit dull if I had to do it for the next 20 years.

How you can enjoy the process and have fun

I am talking about enjoying the process of working with people you like. The satisfaction of creating something new and feeling that you’ve accomplished something this month.

That great feeling of mastering something new, something that was a bit difficult where you had to apply yourself and bash your head against learning a new skill. Maybe the warm glow of helping other people to do difficult things. It’s delicious to feel that you’re getting better at what you do.

These are all part of running a business. Or should be. In particular, they’re all part of running a successful business, which is why fun and making money are linked.

Successful businesses are good businesses

We small business owners can’t afford to be rubbish. The giants often can get away with this – as you can see this from all the people who complain about Dell, BT, Vodafone and all of the major banks, to name a few.

They have massive marketing power, monopolies, and huge bank accounts, and I seriously wonder if they care at all about being a bit rubbish as long as the share price continues to rise.

It’s different for us. To run a small business successfully, you have to be good. And not only do you have to be good at whatever you sell, but you also have to be good at marketing, sales and doing the accounts as well.

This might seem unfair at first. But it’s more fun to be good at something. It’s gratifying to learn new skills, to work out how to do something more efficiently or to do an excellent job for a client. And getting better at these things, helps you to be more successful financially as well.

Taking the time to enjoy your business

When you work on your own, or you’re the boss of a small company you don’t have anyone to tell you that you’ve done an excellent job.

Maybe your husband/wife/partner congratulates you when you land a juicy piece of work. But I bet she/he doesn’t pat you on the back when you’ve finally got the hang of something. Maybe when you learnt how to make the VAT flat rate adjustment in Xero automatically (my little moment of triumph earlier this week) or when you have a client thanking you for a job well done.

Because we’re busy, and there’s always something new on the to-do list. I think we don’t take a moment to enjoy those good things. We don’t finish the week thinking, “yeah, I made a difference to some people this week. And now I know how to use CoSchedule social helpers properly”.

Maybe running a business would be more fun if we could notice those areas we do well in a little bit more and hug ourselves for doing well.

The warm glow of money in the bank

It’s difficult to have fun if you’re feeling insecure about cash flow. It’s a lot easier to relax and enjoy the ride if a decent amount of cash is glowing gently in your bank account.

The amount of money you need for this varies for each of us, but de-stressing your cash flow situation, followed by setting some financial targets and then meeting them is usually one of the first areas I work with, in my sessions with my business coaching clients.

Most of the people I work with aren’t setting out to be mega-millionaires, although it’s okay if you are. But no matter how big or small your financial aspirations are, you need to be making some money. You need to be getting close to your goals or at least feeling that you’re building the path towards financial security before you can truly enjoy the creative parts of your business.

Helping people to make money and have fun

Pretty much all of my business coaching work is about helping people with small businesses to make more money and to have more fun. At the same time. Why not?

My work is 75% about helping people to make more money. The rest of it is about helping people to have fun, and to enjoy what they’re doing.

If you’d like some help with getting your business to make more money and have more fun, maybe we should have a chat about working together, and see what we can come up with.

Some more articles to reflect on your business

I’m not bothered about being rich

How to work out your target income

Getting better at what you do

Photo credits – Brighton beach carousel by Martin Robson, Julian Howard and Rawpixel on Unsplash, Vervate

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How to choose a business advisor

There are lots of things to think about when choosing a business advisor.  You want someone who has direct experience of business, who knows how the world of business works.  I would advise you to find someone who is up to date and modern in their thinking and is open to new ideas.  You don’t want a business advisor who will tell you what worked well in 1987, or even 2007, because things have moved on from then.  This is especially true when you want advice about new business models or online marketing.

You need someone who will come up with new ideas and challenge you to move forward faster than you think you can.  And you need someone who will have your back, even when they’re saying the things that are difficult to hear.

That’s why you need a business advisor as a trusted friend

If you think about the people in your life who have been the most help to you over the years, they may not be the people you’ve spent the most time with.  They’re the ones who have stuck around, the ones that you can have a serious conversation with and the people you are most likely to phone up when you’re in trouble.  They might be the people who are best at listening when you’re upset about something, or they might be the kind of people who know how to do things.

My friend Phil is like this.  He’s always full of good ideas of what to do in a given situation, and when I told him over lunch that I was thinking about getting a bike, he asked me if I had thought about getting an electric bike.  Two hours later, he’d found me a bargain electric bike, and I bought it straight away.  He’s not a business advisor, but he is a trusted friend.

You want a business advisor who is like Phil – someone who can listen really carefully to your problem, discuss a potential solution and then give you the resources to put that solution into action.  In this case, Phil literally got me going much faster, as I can get up a great speed along the cycle path on Brighton seafront.

Video – why being a business advisor is like being a trusted friend

The kind of business advisor you might want to avoid

There can often be a grey area between business coaching and life coaching.  I suspect that this is because a lot of the people who have trained as life coaches have found that their potential customers don’t want to pay too much (or at all) for life coaching, but will pay for it if it’s called business coaching and they can put it the through the company’s accounts.

You might want to avoid this kind of business advisor.  They probably would be a trusted friend, but they are not likely to have the experience of business to be able to give you the resources and advice you specifically need to move your business forward.  They lack the “Phil effect” I was talking about above. And there is a risk that you can spend a lot of time identifying goals and dismantling your unconscious barriers to success, without getting into action on what your business needs to get going.

If you feel that you need some help on getting clear with what you want to do with your life, working on your confidence levels or any of those naughty self-limiting beliefs, I would recommend doing a life coaching programme first, and then finding a great business advisor to help get you going with the specific things you need to do for your business.

A checklist for how to choose a business advisor to be your trusted friend

I’ve put together a little checklist of these points (and some extras) for how to choose a great business advisor.  If you pop your email into the form below, you’ll get the checklist, plus every week I’ll send you some great tips on how to move your business forward even faster than me on my electric bike.

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The people who do well with me as their business coach are the people who want to have a “grown-up business”.

They are the people who have some serious ambition and are at the right stage in their business journey to scale things up. And they recognise that they don’t know it all and that they are embarking on a journey where they need some help.

What do you mean, a “grown-up business”?

I don’t necessarily mean people who want to make a million, or 10 million, or even to have a business employing dozens of staff. Some of my most successful clients have decided that they don’t want to have a big team or be working what most of us would call full-time hours.

A grown-up business for me is one where even a little tiny business does things in a conscious and managed way. A grown-up business is one where the owner sets milestones and targets, and measures them, and is conscious of the need to have the kind of systems and processes that you might have a much bigger company. I’ll give you an example:

Fred (not his real name obviously) is setting up a new company out of the ashes of a reasonably successful freelance business. He got bored with freelancing business and knew that he didn’t want to do it any more and that it was never going to make him the money that he wanted for the lifestyle that you wanted to lead.

It’s been a glorious experience working with Fred, He has leapt into mapping out processes, and he has costed out the time and labour costs in every part of his production process. He took away the pricing grid we did on the whiteboard in my office and came back with calculations of gross profit margin for each of his three routes to market.

This might sound like deathly dull business speak, and put you right off getting any business mentoring with me. But if you spoke to Fred, he might tell you about the day that we giggled over selling hippopotamuses, giraffes and rhinos (not his actual product items, obviously) to “randoms”, “uncle Jeff’s mate” and “Ms Smith in Hong Kong”.

The difference between a “grown-up business” and “just do it.”

Most people who are running small businesses adopt the “just do it” approach. We put up a website telling people about what we do, we maybe send out a press release about a new product launch, and we follow a few people on social media. We’re busy all the time, just getting on with it. And we’re often exhausted by doing all of this.

Because we are busy doing a million things, we don’t realise that we don’t need to do about 900,000 of those million things. We fill our time working hard but we don’t have a plan, and we don’t have a strategy. We don’t test what works, we don’t look at where the money comes from, and although we might have Google analytics on our website, we don’t realise that 80% of our traffic goes to just one blog post.

Why someone who wants a “grown-up business” might want a business coach

We all know the importance of planning and have a strategy for growth. Just like we all know that is important to eat vegetables to be healthy. But knowing these things doesn’t necessarily mean that were able to put it into action. And often putting together the plan can be an excuse to procrastinate, and do the opposite of getting into action.

By working with a business coach, people who want a grown-up business can quickly put a plan together with the coach and get help on identifying the priority actions. Add to this, advice about how to do those actions, such as writing a brief for a web designer, or using power terms in your signup copy, and you’re halfway to having a grown-up business.

That’s why I think successful people who want to get their “grown-up business” into action fast work with a business coach.

That all sounds good, how do we do this?

If this has made you think that you want to transform your business and get it to grow up and go out in the world and earn some money, here’s how I work with those successful business people, and how to set up a chat about us working together.

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It’s a myth that the best way to be rich is to be self employed. In fact, the best way to be rich is to be born rich. We don’t get to choose that one, but we do get to choose whether we set up a business and run it by our own rules. But you do get to choose whether to make a decent amount of money from our business.

How much is enough money when you’re self employed?

I see clients all the time who say that they’re not that motivated by big money, they just want to earn enough. And then I ask them about how much is enough, and I’m always fascinated by the replies because they vary so much. For clients who don’t know, I have a rule of thumb that I want to make them earn at least 50k a year. And then I make them go away and work out what their target income really is.

50k isn’t rich. It might seem that way if you’ve been used to earning minimum wage, which is less than 14k a year for working full time. And of course if you live somewhere you can eat for £1 a day, and average earnings are £20 a week, it’s going to look like an enormous amount of money. But if you’re based in the UK, 50k seems to be around the figure you need to earn to be able to have some sort of financial security, and not worry about money.

It’s probably enough to buy a house or at least save for a deposit. Or be able to afford children, who apparently cost 220k each to feed, clothe, take on holiday and educate (you can amortise this cost over 18 years, by the way, it’s not a one off payment.) You probably need to be earning 50k to afford to pay into a pension, pay your mortgage and have a couple of decent holidays each year.

Everyone has different amounts they want to earn

Everyone’s different. Everyone has different calculations and different needs, in fact, my target for my own business isn’t 50k. And there’s no right or wrong way to work out what you need to earn. But even if you’re not bothered about being rich, have a good think about what you need to earn, maybe starting from thinking about that magic 50k number.

And then factor that into the targets for your business. Maybe you won’t be able to reach your target this year, but start putting in place the things you need to change about your business to get to your target. And if you’d like some help in getting to that target, whatever it is for you, come and have a chat about how we can work together to get you there.

Here are some ways I can help you and your business:

• One to one coaching and support to take your business to the next stage
• Programmes and courses to help you focus on your business and get support from me and other people
• Books and manuals to learn more about running a successful business
• Exclusive content by email with tips, thoughts and stories about what I’ve learnt about business

Photo credit – Kim Alaniz from Flickr on a creative commons licence

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There’s no legal difference at all between seeing yourself as self-employed, a freelancer or running your own business. I’ll talk more about that in a moment.

I’ve been self-employed and giving business advice since 2000, but I’ve never called myself a freelancer.  Not that there’s anything wrong with being a freelancer, some of my best friends are freelancers.

That’s never been the way that I’ve thought about myself.  I’m more likely to talk about running my own company. I do worry that there’s something self-limiting about the term freelancer.

Why choose between being self-employed or a freelancer?

To me, a freelancer means someone who does pieces of work for other people.  I think of myself as someone who employs freelancers, as I’ve got a lovely army of people who help me with all the bits and pieces involved in running the Joy of Business.

Freelancing seems to imply a single person who works on their own, doing different projects for a variety of companies. They’re an outsourced resource for other businesses.

It’s not about the money

There are lots of freelancers out there who earn more money than me.  My friend Sarah is a data analyst who is currently contracting for a very well funded AI start up. She’s working 5 days a week at 1.5k per day – a pretty healthy freelance gig.

And there are lots of people running their own companies. Often quite big companies, who don’t make any profit at all and might even be making a loss. Some of the freelancers are probably more financially secure than these folks; my data analyst friend Sarah certainly is, as she’s saving most of her money.  If she loses a gig, she can just pick up another one.

It’s about what you’re building

The problem with calling yourself a freelancer, for me, is that it will always be just you.  The freelancers I use to help with my marketing and admin, for example, are people who are selling me a chunk of their own time.

Some freelancers will make the transition to running bigger companies, perhaps through a network of other freelancers or by the more traditional route of taking on staff. Or they will pivot to a product-based business and stop trading their time for money.

This will be the point at which they’ll probably stop calling themselves freelancers because they’ve got out of that mindset. They’re running a business now.

People who call themselves self-employed or talk about running a business from the start tend to make that transition to a bigger business sooner.  They’re open to the idea of building something.  And even if, like me, they choose to stay as one person (albeit with an army of freelancers to help), they’ve got a mindset of growth right from the beginning.

I think that the path to a more grown-up business is the real difference between whether you see yourself as self-employed or a freelancer.

Let yourself be open to that possibility

If you’re quite early on with your business journey, then I’d encourage you to think about the opportunities for growth right now.

Even if your business is tiny, think of it as a business.

Because it will save us a lot of time and soul searching later on when you come to me for help in expanding because you’ll have already got past that freelancer mindset.

Isn’t there a legal or tax difference between being self-employed or a freelancer?

People often think that there’s a legal difference between being self-employed or a freelancer, but there isn’t, it’s just what you call yourself, and, I’m arguing, your mindset for being able to grow your business.

The legal and tax differences (in the UK) are whether you’re a sole trader or a limited company. This difference only determines how you’re treated in law and for tax purposes.

You can be a sole trader or a limited company, whether you see yourself as self-employed or a freelancer, and your choice should be based on how much profit you make and which one will let you pay less tax. As a rough guide, if your net profit before tax is more than 40k in the UK, you are better off trading through a limited company. Any accountant will be happy to do more detailed sums for you.

Once you’ve got that pesky tax issue out of the way, you can think properly about whether you want to think of yourself as a freelancer or that you are running a business.

If you’re already there

If you’ve been freelancing (or been self-employed and running a business, whatever you’ve been calling it) for a while and you’re thinking about getting to the next level. You might want some help to get there faster.

The next steps for a freelancer

When you’re ready to quit thinking of yourself as a freelancer and adopt the growth mindset of being self-employed or running your own business, you’ll want to start working out how you can quit trading time for money and break the relationship between how you spend your time and how you make your money. 

And you will be wondering about how you can charge more money as well. My Sweetspot Pricing book can help with that, with lots of advice about how to raise your prices to the sweetspot point where you’re charging the right amount of money and getting the right number of clients at that price.

Get my best content exclusively by email

Also, I’ll send you some exclusive resources by email for running a successful business. Let me know how you like them.

Other blogs about freelancing vs running a business

What happens to my limited company if I die?

The transition from a freelancer to a grown-up business

My business models series – choose the right business model and move away from the freelancer/contractor/prostitute/billable hours model

The Tesco Test – does your business pass the Tesco Test, or do you need to make some changes?

How to feel good about charging more 

Photo credit – Jonatas Cunha from Flickr on a creative commons license,  grains, man and time on Pxhere and Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

The post To be self employed or a freelancer – what’s the difference? appeared first on The Joy of Business.

To make sure I finish it, I want to tell you guys about it, so I’m accountable and have to finish what I started. Taking my own medicine, in fact. This is a little glimpse of the introductory chapter, and I’ll be giving away and testing out some more excerpts as I go along. Comments, encouragement and supplies of posh coffee (this writer’s favourite fuel) are all welcome.

[Update – I did finally finish the book, and it’s available right here…]

The price is right

I’m Julia Chanteray, and I’ve been running the Joy of Business for the past 12 years. The Joy of Business is all about helping little companies grow up to be bigger companies. My job is to help people to make more money, and have more fun.

This book is to give away one of my secret weapons in my crusade to help people build their businesses.

Here it is: you probably need to charge more money

Not exactly rocket science, is it? It’s pretty obvious that if you charge more, you’ll make more money.

Anyway, that saves you having to spend any money on actually buying the book, and you’re all set now. Right? All you have to do is…(probably) charge more money.

My other secret weapon

The other “secret weapon” I use with lots of my clients is this one: pricing is a marketing issue.

How (and what) you charge for the stuff you sell affects how your customers see you. If you charge bottom dollar, your customers probably won’t appreciate you, and may well not see what you sell as being as good as one of your competitors. Your stuff might be a million times better than the other guy’s, but if you price it cheap, they won’t think it’s as good.

The rest of my Sweetspot pricing book is about those two issues – it helps you to work out how much more money  you need to charge to earn your target income, and how to feel confident that you’re charging the right price for your business. Not too much, and not too little, but the right price for you. Your sweetspot price. And the book will help you to start to do the work that you need to bring in the business at the right price.

Who is it for

This book is not for people who work in big companies. If you have more than 150 staff, you probably have esoteric pricing matrices, and goodness knows what to help you with setting your price. If you’re reading this and you work for a corporate, put the book back on the electronic shelf right now – unless you’re thinking about leaving that world and setting up your own company, in which case you should be walking to the checkout, cos you’re going to need this baby.

Sweetspot Pricing is for people who want to get serious about their business.

Maybe you’re a freelancer who wants to get paid what you’re worth, but you’re not really sure what that is. This book will help you to work that out.

Maybe you’ve got a business which is doing okay, but you know that it could be making more money. You want the first and most obvious way of increasing turnover, but you’re not really sure how much to raise prices by, or whether it’s too cheeky.

Or maybe you’ve got a business which is in serious trouble, and you want to know if that’s because your pricing is all wrong. Quite possibly, it is.

As you read more, you’ll see that I’m very serious about helping businesses to make more money. I’ve had the sleepless nights in the past because of cash flow nightmares, and it was horrible. I don’t want anyone to have to go through that.

I think that we all deserve to make decent money, and not have to worry about cash flow, making payroll, or about long-term financial security. This book (and my work at the Joy of Business) is all about helping people to create enough money to live a good life, and not have to worry about whether you can afford to invest in your marketing or pay your rent.

Why you should read it

There are lots of books and blogs out there about pricing. There are lots of sets of instructions from the business schools on how to do pricing “properly”. I’ve read them.

Sweetspot Pricing takes all of that knowledge, throws out the out of date and the crappy thinking about pricing, and distils it into a short, easy to read manual for small businesses who want to grow into bigger businesses. If that describes you, a friend of yours, or your partner (or your boss) then you should be reading this book.

It helps if you pay for it too. Not just because I’d like some money for all the hours I spent on it (although I would) but because if you pay cash for it, you’ll take more notice of it. Price is a marketing issue, remember.

Sweetspot Pricing is now available. Tra la!

It took a while. Three years, in fact. But my second book, Sweetspot Pricing is now out there and available. Here’s how to get your copy of the book which is changing people’s lives.

And if you want to a few more hints on pricing

A simple way to increase your prices

Pricing strategies for business

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