We all know people in our fields and social circles that we like as people but do not respect as professionals. This disconnect between affinity and evaluation of skill often causes us to make bad business decisions for the sake of friendship. DON’T.

This is especially true of arrangements of subcontracting work. Ultimately, your bottom line is based on the timeliness and quality of the finished product you present to the client. All subcontracting arrangements require management and direction. Editorial decisions must also be made to ensure that what you deliver is something of which you can be proud; as well as what the client has requested.

Therefore, I posit that working in your social circle is not entirely a bad decision; but certainly one that must be based on respect for work instead of respect for friendship. These arrangements can build social capital, but often create tensions and ego problems.

The reason you do what you do is because you believe you are good at it. Good enough, in fact, that what you offer is better that what someone else can offer. Your opinions matter. Your clients buy your services because of their faith in you. Make sure you trust your reputation to the people you think are the best at what you don’t do.

Side note: I have said before that I believe that it is almost always better to refer work out instead of subbing it. I stand by that. Unless you want to run a company, firm, or agency; at which point I say subcontracts should be converted to employment contracts.

Hugs and Headbutts,

-Bully

The strategy listed below is simply a suggestion; however, the prime directive here is that pricing of services is not a dart throwing game.

Let me start with this: don’t price yourself based on your friends; or your last salary. Your last salary is probably closer, but you shouldn’t be building your rates based on anything except the expenses and profit expectation for your business.

Freelancers are bad at this. Small service businesses are bad at this.

So how do you do it if you can’t just take another person’s rates and make them your own?

For a freelancer, this will sound really complicated because you just want to throw out a number and call it a day. Bear with me.

Look at one month.

1. Figure out your expenses (living, business, maintenance) and
2. Figure out how much you need to be making over and above that (work with a financial planner to determine what your life plan is).

Now this is your monthly income figure; but you may work hourly or by job rate.

If you work hourly, divide your monthly income figure by the number of hours you plan to work. This is your time value.

(Expenses + Profit)/160 Hours = Time Value

You have now valued your time, but not your services.

If you are not going to subcontract anything out to others, you will need to take that time value and divide it by .75 in order to come up with your Service Value. This will make sense in a moment. Maybe. [Think of it this way, if you are doing all the tasks - regardless of value - you need your average income to be the Time Value.]

Do this exercise:

1. Take a full job and break it into task groups by category and specialty based on just the general skills needed to complete them;
2. look at the groups and prioritize the work by difficulty. In most cases you will find at least 3 to 4 categories and difficulty levels (try to make this 4).
3. Now take your Service Value and multiply it by 100%, 85%, 65% and 50%.
4. Correlate the tasks by difficulty level to your newly developed prices.

Remember, not every task you complete takes your full skill, but it takes your full time. This is where the idea of subcontracting comes from.

If you want to increase your profit margin, subcontract your lower priced and lower difficulty work out. You should be spending your time doing your best work and your client shouldn’t be paying your full price for menial work. Price your services based on the difficulty values; and find your subcontractors based on these rough numbers. This will help you bid competitively.

A small service business has many more considerations due to different possible models and tax arrangements, but the fundamentals are the same. The differences here are complicated enough that you should engage a business consultant that can help you with a salary development exercise.

Do a purposeful analysis of what you should be charging and stop comparing yourself to people around you; because most of those people threw a dart.

You owe me.

-Bully

There is something to be said for the production processes forwarded by the industrial revolution. There is also something to be said about knowing where those processes end and individual thought becomes a facilitator of speed.

Corporate America is full of lower level jobs where the individual is expected to perform specialized repetitive tasks for the sake of efficiency. When one of these processes backs up, the solution is to automate or throw people at it. However, there are many areas where we have simply decided that ’specialized’ and ‘repetitive’ means efficient.

Example:

I was recently asked to review a client’s process for handling what is essentially an escalated customer service response mechanism; in order to assist in developing interventions to mitigate a huge backlog. The process had regulatory requirements for timeliness that were not being met and the regulator was coming down on the client for sending out formal requests for extension to the timeframes en masse. In this process, they had broken down the necessary activity into specialized production tasks:

1. Sorting – Sorting is a simple repetitive task, so it was given to a lower level staff member.
2. Intake – Intake is a data entry and scanning job; also given to a lower level staff member.
3. Assignment – Assignment – or distribution of workload – was given to management based on trending and supervisory expertise; but was not considered a time consuming task.
4. Research and Response  – Research and Response was given to skilled workers hired for writing and critical thinking skills. (this was described as a combined task performed by one tier)

My initial observation was that this structure makes theoretical sense. It was only upon observation and review of the work product that I was able to determine the problem.

The back up was clearly in the tier related to Research and Response, as expected. This is the most time consuming part of the process. The client was aware of this and began adding people to the tier expecting that less volume per person would increase efficiency. There are two problems with this solution:

1. Efficiency is an equation = work output/work input x 100. The solution increases neither value because you are simply adding more people with the same capacity for input and output. And you’re going to bleed money. Executives don’t look at the traditional energy equation when they think efficiency; they look at “how much am I getting for my money?”. By the economic measure of efficiency, we change people to dollars: $50 gets you 50 files; $100 gets you 100 files. Do you feel more efficient now?
2. Secondly, you will have to perpetuate the model unless the increased volume is a temporary condition. What happens with periodic spikes? You end up workload managing instead of improving capacity of the existing resources.

This solution is temporary and expensive. Increasing the efficiency of the current staffing is a much more desirable outcome.

Further observation of the work functions and product were extremely revealing. The Research function is meant to determine whether rules were followed by both parties and whether subjective professional judgment was appropriately applied. The R&R team was tasked with reviewing the incoming inquiries; determining the nature of the inquiry; and distributing their caseload to subject matter experts for responses that would be placed in a letter to the inquirer. The job description function of this team was to draft the response letter and ensure that it contained a restatement of the issue, a description of the research that was performed, and provide an expert determination of validity.

This is how they did it. They reviewed the inquiry and typed the issue (generally verbatim) into a database. They copied this database field into an email which was sent to a subject matter expert. The subject matter expert would work through a queue of questions and respond based on their knowledge of the rules or circumstance by placing a comment directly into the database record. The team member would then pull up a form letter template that contained paragraphs of introduction and a statement that the inquiry was reviewed by a subject matter expert. Into this template, they would place the issue description and response paragraph from the database.

You see the problem?

The Research and Response team was not performing either task that they were ostensibly assigned to; and their job functions were intellectually far below their employment level.

The responses from other departments were never read by the team member. Rather than becoming a subject matter expert in their own right; they simply cut/pasted information into the form letter and sent it out. Therefore, anytime that a similar case came in, the time consuming step of sending the information to another party for review and awaiting response was needlessly taken.

The team was filled with robots and the robots were slowing down the process because they had been instructed not to think beyond the level of identifying – based on keywords – who else should research and respond.

My instruction to the client was this: Stop automating a process meant for humans and you will see an increase in efficiency.

The client needed to remove the instruction to simply populate templates with other people’s content and allow for the team members to read and absorb the inquiry and it’s associated expert response in order to train it’s employees up. Let the people that you pay to write well thought out responses write well thought out responses; and learn the business rules at the same time. Subject matter experts also often speak in jargon; so a cut/paste response probably wasn’t serving the company very well in the long run either.

There are still many instances where the Research and Response team needs to have a subjective decision reviewed by an expert prior to formulating the response to the customer; but this intervention removed the need for many of the time delays built into the “efficient” process and the need for additional expenditure for temporary assistance. The R&R team members are now able to draft many more responses autonomously and only pull out complex cases for the review process.

Faster production. Same amount of money. Workers empowered. Client happy.

I am not a robot,

Bully

I have said one million two hundred and twenty-seven times that no one can do everything (well) alone. We need specialists to make things great.

Being a ‘linchpin’ – a term I am tired of hearing – as Godin suggests in his book of the same name, is not being able to do everything; it is being able to understand how many things are done. I am broad, not deep, in many subjects. I have an intellectual curiosity for knowing how other people view their work and their worlds because I am interested in understanding how to communicate with those people. I don’t need to possess the technical skills to do a specialists job.

My favorite thing about my job and my volunteer work is that I tend to become the central clearinghouse for workflow and information passing between others. I get to see everything that is happening and make sure that everyone is on the same page. It is not creative direction; but rather project management. What this teaches me on a daily basis is that I am good at what I do and others are good at what they do. A mutual respect society is created.

I am not critical of others; but instead I find out through interaction what others are capable and incapable of. This leads me to recognize what I am capable of at the same time. It is self-realization. The statement that “you don’t know what you don’t know” rings both true and false in these instances. It is true from the standpoint of understanding that there are things you simply aren’t even aware of until someone else shows you that it exists; or is possible. It is false based on the availability of that information if you are paying attention.

So open your eyes and recognize the talents, skills, and value of those around you and, in turn, you will recognize your own contributions and shortcomings.

Or not,

Bully

The key to sleeping at night is not to freak out at the – sometimes crazy – things that pop up in your well laid plans. Strategies for mitigation are myriad. Try these:

1) plan well in advance and write it down – you can’t plan for every contingency (and you shouldn’t; just make one path), but a plan is something solid that you can point to and identify where the cog was thrown. The best way to calm down is to identify the monster; then plan to kill it.

2) have resources/options in your rolodex – often the problem that arises to freak you out is that you have too much work and too few hands to complete it. Make sure that you have a few pocket aces that you can turn to when needed.

3) always have an escape hatch – if the worry is your clients pulling work, keep your pipeline stocked with people who know what you do well and have expressed that they could always use your skills. Keep in touch with these people and express that you are always willing; and if the opening arises, you’ll be there at the ready.

4) have a diversion – sometimes, what you run into is a delay. This is the worst for a project or timeline oriented person. We want to be on course and on schedule and sometimes we pack these too closely. If you simply can’t get a task done until something else happens, fall back on the list of things you either gave low priority or no priority to. Let everyone know that the project is off schedule and get all the “dead” resources on other tasks, then get yourself otherwise occupied.

5) breathe – you’ve made it through bad situations before. I don’t want to advocate ignoring problems, but I do advocate giving them only the appropriate level of life/death importance. You will wake up tomorrow. If you have to, remind yourself that there are people in Scottsdale, AZ without WiFi access. Your problems aren’t that bad.

6) step away and remember conversations – there are always important comments made by your superiors and peers that clue you in to the big picture importance of things and also let you know where you and your project stand in the grand scheme. Think back to whether you are on firm ground. How was your last review? Has your work been praised up until now? Is there a parachute around should you – gasp – fail on one thing?

7) don’t think about money – think about need. Are your bills paid? Do you have a roof over your head for the month? Is there food (even ramen) in the cupboard? Good, now go back to breathing and get a plan together for next month.

These are all very simple things that are not always easy but, applied in the appropriate situations, you should be confident. It looks and feels bad when you hear the bad news; but you’re a champ and will survive.

Calm Down Crazypants

-Bully

That is the point of this post: do you know when to share your knowledge and when you are just adding to the noise?

I have attended multiple events with both structured and open-format opportunities for people to share their knowledge and interests with others; events like Ignite, TED, Pecha Kucha Night, xCamps, and their many peers. There is value to this type of sharing and there is a slippery slope in it as well. When anyone is given the chance to share – even under application and vetting – we are assuming expertise.

Audiences, by their nature, check their filters for authority at the door of an auditorium. I am not saying that audiences are sheep; but what happens in these types of situations is a kind of exchange of credibility. The unfortunate result is that, when the presentation is full of holes or inaccuracies, instead of simply discounting the speaker, the subject matter loses status or becomes vilified as well. Often the wrong thinking in the presentation creates an environment for personal attacks in place of discussion about the content as well; which is also damaging to the intended takeaway or inspiration.

Presentations are best left to people who are not simply passionate about, or interested in, a subject; but who also have some academic or research background to support their authoritative position.

This proliferation of ‘experts’ is almost certainly a result of the culture of blogging and micro-blogging. When people such as myself are allowed a platform to speak from a personal position on any subject, there is the tendency to take an authoritative stance after a time because others are cosigning this position with their continued readership. People are listening, so I must be saying something of value.

On top of this problem is that of parroting or consolidation. If your presentation on a subject is informed by the statements or research of others, are you clearly stating their results or commentary? Do your authoritative sources actually support one another? Could you be extrapolating or embellishing incomplete fact? Are you helping the cause or driving it in skewed directions?

I do not make presentations on any subject, but instead offer my opinions and advice when I have the opportunity. I disclaim many of my statements to ensure that others don’t think I believe I am the final word on any subject. I know a lot; but unless you want to hear me prattle on about how to ruin romantic relationships with cold calculation, I’ve got no speeches to make.

Taking the step back to recognize that our value isn’t in whether or not other people will listen to us, but rather in whether or not we have anything to say that hasn’t been heard before, is an important motivator for digging deeper into our interests.

So, if you are an authority on a subject matter, please share with others. If you are an enthusiast, be sure to keep listening to the experts and learning more.

But hey, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.” So I can’t write you a prescription.

-Bully

This need to help others is driven by two fundamental facets of my personality:

1. I like contributing.
2. Helping other people with their problems helps me put mine in perspective.

The one part of working in the same environment for a long time that burns me out is that I begin to become personally attached to the culture of the company and it’s problems become my personal ones. When the problems of my work become personal, I lose the perspective of distance and the ability to “de-clench”.

Thankfully, I don’t know many people that have so many problems that they need a permanent ‘me’ around; and the short term nature of problems means that I can have a new goal every so often. So I eschew the normal assumption that you work for someone for as long as they’ll pay you what your worth. I stand on the platform that says “give me liberty; and I’ll gladly do the work.”

-There is Brevity in Bully

When I was young, my father spent a lot of time reminding me of my responsibilities and prodding me to finish what I started. Lists of chores half completed; promises to “get to it tomorrow”; dishes left in the family room; and clothes in the washing machine from the day prior all contributed to his frustration with my work ethic. I didn’t see the harm, myself. I mean, I always got these things done eventually. I usually ended up forgoing recreation to finish up these tasks; that’s dedication, right? [You know where I am going with this] No. I could have finished the tasks when they were in front of me and not had to forgo anything.

So, as an adult, I sometimes have to remind myself of the lessons learned earlier. I repeat this mantra to myself as I walk my house or begin to pack up my mobile work station for the day: “take the extra step”. I look for the things that remain half finished and I force myself to finish them while they are in front of me. I take the glass back to the kitchen, rinse it, and put it in the dishwasher instead of leaving it on the counter. I write the summary email and send it out before I walk out the door. I take the trash out to the dumpster when I need a new bag under the sink.

I have taken these extra steps and they make my day better and my head clearer. I also find that I have a lot less to remember to do later so my stress level is much lower when I am out relaxing.

This can also be applied to your conversations. Don’t stop yourself from having a necessary conversation when the other party is right in front of you. Carrying a thought away with you for later discussion leads to misunderstandings and allows you to have an inner dialogue about it that may lead you down a bad path. Say it now. [this shouldn't be universally applied; I think some angry thoughts need to be held for diffusing]

Finally, the extension to this policy is “if you see it needs to be done, do it.” We all have a habit of walking by things that are sitting where they don’t belong or doors that are open that should be closed. I think of the fastidious mom of my past; who would always be closing blinds, putting the lid on the peanut butter, turning off the unwatched television. Those undone things weren’t the result of her actions; but she saw they needed to be done, so she did them. I do this in my daily life now. I don’t go looking for things to do (i’m not crazy), but if I see something – regardless of whether it is mine – that needs doing, I do it if I can. This makes my life better and the lives of those around me. Others may not ever notice it, but it won’t pop up in their face later and you can satisfy yourself with that thought.

So, there you have it. Finish your chores. Simple as that.

I smell cookies,

Bully

You can’t put “I do anything” on a business card and you wouldn’t want to either; because it is not true. I don’t consider production work in my “anything”; that isn’t something I am good at. I assist people with examining and streamlining their production, but at my core I am a knowledge worker. I also shy away from rote administrative functions like switchboard and data entry. This doesn’t mean that I won’t chip in and do that type of work to get the job done, but my clients pay me quite a bit for my background, judgment, and ability to move large pieces; not to do entry level tasks.

What I do in a nutshell is this: I am a short-term mercenary executive-level proxy. If there is work that needs guidance and you or your executive team do not have the bandwidth to manage it along with all of the everyday strategic management tasks, I can be called in to handle it. I have firsthand knowledge of business best practices; financial and operational controls; contractual compliance auditing; and communication strategies. I do not have an MBA, so letters and certifications will not tell you right away what I know. So I have chosen the catch-all ‘Consultant’.

Ask me what the hell I do and I will tell you I:

• manage projects, resources, and production;
• write, manage, and audit contracts;
• assist in business development;
• run a non-profit organization;
• and manage the administration of small events.

Look at that! You all helped me figure out that Management is in a lot of those items. We’re going with Management Consultant from now on.

Dave ‘Bully’ Bjorn, Management Consultant

What does that mean to you?

Truthfully, that feels wrong to me. I am so much more – and also much less – than that. I have never held the title of manager, but I will try and manage.

Forever yours in metal,

Bully

But where do you start? By guessing.

If I sit down with a client, ask them for specific information, and get guesses in return; my first thought is “this company could be making more money.” How are you making rational operational and financial decisions if you are only using your P&L and a discerning eyeball to see how you are doing? You aren’t. It’s simple. You are guessing; and you are missing the money that flies out the door when you think your resource allocations are best left to an accountant.

So, what do I advise? Start today. Start tracking your production and task oriented expenses. Start looking at how your employees are really working and whether you’re getting your value or undervaluing them.

The best way to start is to implement 3 simple functions:

I put some really rudimentary examples of charts here too.

• Estimation of duration and costs – break your production work into chunks that can be valued both financially and by time expenditure. (be careful to estimate these separately). Chart
• Expense tracking with hourly wage calculation – track materials used and salaries paid in the completion of your production work chunks to match against estimates.
• Periodic analysis of results against estimates – gathering the stakeholders/workers to discuss where estimates were off and why. Analysis Chart

This is all very similar to running a project plan. The results will be much more helpful on a daily basis for decision making though.

…or you can just call me.

Bully