Scaling Your Business By Investing In Your Home Team

by Ben Toalson | Dec 3, 2014 | In The Boat

The Power of Delegating

When it comes to growing your business, much of what we hear has to do with employing people or resources to do the busy work so you can focus on doing what only you can do. As a father of 5 trying to get my business up and running, I definitely feel the pinch on my time when I find myself doing tasks that I would rather hire someone to handle for me, so I can focus on doing the work that I do best. For me, busy work comes in the form of things like audio editing, filing, invoicing, deposits, etc. I am still a ways off from being in a position financially to make that investment, but you can be sure that I’ve got it on my radar.

Where Am I Spending 85 Hours Per Week?

As I have considered how my business might scale in the future, I realized there is another area that I also need to scale. The home/family. We don’t often think of our home as something to grow or scale, but if you look at it from the right angle, the home is very much like a business (except that you can’t really fire the “employees”). The home has a monthly budget, needs regular maintenance and cleaning, has a set of routines and rhythms, and also goes through various seasons of growth. In my current season, the home/family is very demanding. I spend an average of 12 hours/week preparing food, 3 hours/week bathing children, 1 hour/week doing some form of yard work, 15 hours/week tidying and cleaning, 30 hours/week spending time with my kids/as a family, 15 hours/week caring for children while my spouse works, 7 hours/week spending one on one time with my spouse, 1 hour/week fixing/maintaining things, and then there’s travel time, holidays/vacations, birthdays, accidents and spills, sleep, and the list goes on. Oh, and there’s a baby on the way. Yikes, I spend nearly 85 hours per week on average on home/family related stuff and at least 35 hours of that is stuff that I could have someone else do without taking time away from my family.

Investing When You Can’t Hire Someone

I have to remember that my time is valuable. If I am capable of producing more value in an hour than it would cost to pay someone to do the things that currently take up my time, hiring someone is a good investment. Also, the time I get to spend with the ones I love is WAY more valuable that what it would cost to hire someone, which is an investment I plan to make as soon as I can afford to. I want to free up my time right now though! What are some things that I can do now without hiring people, to make the home run more smoothly and save myself some time?

Here are some ideas and some things we already do:

1. Scheduling time more intentionally
When we don’t have a good schedule in place for home related stuff, we are in danger of using our time inefficiently. By adding better structure to our schedules, we may only be saving 15 or 30 minute/week, but over time, those minutes add up.

2. Getting help from family
About once/quarter our extended family schedules a family work day to pitch in and do maintenance work on someone’s house. We rotate from family to family. One weekend, we had Grandmas and Grandpas, aunts and uncles, cousins all come to help us get started on a storage shed for my backyard. We finished it that weekend! Not only was it a great way to get the work done, but it also allowed us to spend some quality time together as a family.

Additionally, if you have parents living close who may be willing to watch their grandchildren for a few hours/week, that could be a tremendous help.

3. Getting help from friends
Similar to what I said above about family, you can work out arrangements with close friends. One of the best things you can do in either case is to present a clear picture of what they are helping you do. You might even go as far as to make a business presentation so they can see the value their help is providing.

4. Dialing back the perfectionism
I tend to be an all or nothing kind of person. My wife gives me a hard time because I take so much longer with some of the household chores than she does. I realized one day while cleaning the baseboards that I was cleaning at a rate of about 6 inches per minute. I wanted them to be spotless! At some point, it’s better to let something not be perfect, than to spend unnecessary time. It might mean letting some of the mess go *twitch.

5. Employing my spouse
Regardless of what it is, I always see what my wife is doing as in support of my business. Even the stuff she does just for herself is ultimately a benefit to my business. She is an equal partner with me in everything. She is a much better writer than I, so from time to time she edits my writing. Alternatively, I have much of the web and design knowledge that she lacks, so from time to time, I do some work for her. Though you can do this, in our situation we don’t give each other paychecks, but we do recognize that our time is valuable. If your spouse has a skill set that your business requires that doesn’t essentially have to come from you, they may be willing to invest in the business with you by freeing you up to do other things.

6. Employing the kids
So technically this may fall under “hiring” someone, and I don’t have much experience with this yet. Our oldest is 8 years old, and right now he and his younger siblings (5 and 4) help with the after dinner chores. We pay them a base monthly allowance for the after dinner chores and a few other responsibilities we’ve given them. At first it was really difficult and time consuming. It would have been easier to just do the work ourselves. But as time went on, they got better and better at doing their chores and now it saves us a lot of time as a family to do other things. We are already talking about other responsibilities we can start giving them that will allow us as a family to share more of the load.

It helps me to remember that, while I keep aspects of family and business separate, both influence one another as to how I spend my time. An investment in one is a benefit to the other, therefore it is a good practice to actively look for ways to scale the “home/family business.”

Are there things you are doing that I didn’t list above that have allowed you to spend more time doing your best work or with the people you love? If so, please share them in the comments below. I’d like to do a comprehensive follow up on this soon to share more detail with you about how our home and business runs from day to day, and how these ideas are helping me.

How I Wish I Had Managed My Expectations When Expecting My First Child

by Ben Toalson | Nov 19, 2014 | In The Boat

A Lifetime Ago

When I was expecting my first child, I was in a very different set of circumstances. I was working full time at a bank and Rachel, my wife, was working full time at a newspaper. I was dabbling in design and web development (at the time, web development was entrenched in the flash trend and I was so excited when I learned how to animate a loading bar – shudders). Rachel and I were also writing and performing music together regularly and were starting to grow a following for our music. As soon as we found out we were expecting, we shifted gears and decided to move from Austin back to San Antonio where we felt we would have more support from our home church family. We also bought a house and a minivan. I didn’t really expect things to change much beyond that. We kept our full time jobs, I kept doing some design work on the side, and we kept playing and recording music together.

“This Is Easy!” Right.

When our first was born, it was amazing and life changing in all the wonderful ways you would expect. We actually got permission from our jobs to bring our relatively quiet infant to work with us for a few hours per day, so we were able to maintain our full time jobs without getting childcare. He did great at shows too… we just put him next to the stage in a playpen and we’d play our set with very few, if any interruptions. It was the “best of both worlds,” we got to enjoy this amazing new human being, keep a steady income from our day jobs, still pursue our passion together, and still have money to put away in savings. I still remember taking him with me in his car seat to meetings and thinking, ‘wow, this is pretty easy.’

Shattered Illusions

This lasted for a little while, but then our quiet infant got older and Rachel and I started to feel a little self conscious about bringing him into work. He became less tolerant of the playpen during shows and grew bored more easily when I’d tote him along for meetings. I wish I could say that my illusions began to diminish then, but it wasn’t really until number two came along that my illusions were finally shattered and I realized how self-centered I had been. This was a change I had not prepared myself to deal with and it sent me in a bit of a tail-spin. I would spend the next few years oscillating between accepting and dealing with my new reality and trying to fight that reality to assert my own idealistic desires. Fight as I might though, reality always wins. Don’t get me wrong here. I could not ask for or imagine a better reality. My kids are amazing and my days are filled with more wonder than I could ever find searching for it on my own. Looking back, I wish I had managed my expectations differently and had actually prepared myself (as much as one can) for the new reality I was to experience.

Whatever Your Change May Be

Though I intend for this to speak most directly to those of you who are or will be expecting children soon, or even those of you who have recently become parents, I want this to be helpful for anyone anticipating a change in circumstances in the near future.

Ways You Can Prepare Yourself and Break Free From Your Illusions

Expect things to change. Expect things to be different from the way they are now and deal with those possibilities today so that you can come into the new season, unknown as it may be, prepared to face your new reality. Below are a few simple things I have learned to do when preparing for changes that, had I taken more time to do them when number one was on the way, could have saved me and my family a lot of undue strain:

Talk To People With Experience
I have quite a few friends with teenage kids, and there’s nothing I dislike hearing more than how much busier they are now that their kids are grown. I feel super busy now and my oldest is only 8. A close 2nd is hearing from them about how much and how constantly teenagers eat. In my fantasy world, I don’t have a grocery bill that rivals my mortgage payment. In my fantasy world, I like to think that things only get easier from here… the more independent they become, the less crazy my life will be, right? Almost everyone with ACTUAL experience has told me the opposite. Those teenage years are around the corner for us, and I’d rather be prepared over-prepared for what may be our reality, than living in the fantasy world of my own false expectations. You can almost always find someone you know who has personal or at least similar experience with what you are about to go through. Not only can they serve as an informative resource, but also may become a source of support and encouragement as you face your new circumstances.

Do Some Research
In the rare occasion that you are unable to find someone you know with experience, there are countless people out there with experience they have generously shared online. When researching, it’s important to consider your source, but even more important is weighing the information you are consuming against your own expectations and personal beliefs. There may be an expert with years of experience that has a completely different value system, and there may be an every-day-person who clumsily articulates exactly what you need to hear. A few sources I keep coming back to are sub-reddit communities, bloggers with whom I personally identify, and the good old-fashioned google search.

Brainstorm (Play the “If This, I Will.” Game)
One of the ways I try to prepare myself both mentally and emotionally for any change in circumstances is to have a brainstorming session with myself or with Rachel and play the “If This, I Will.” game. Often times, when coming into new circumstances, we try to protect what we believe is essential, often to the detriment of that very thing. An example of that for us was our savings. We believed that putting money into savings was so essential to our budget, that we never considered an alternative employment setup that, while temporarily may have prevented us from saving, could have freed us up to grow in other ways that would have allowed us to be saving even more today. These days putting money in savings is hit or miss. It would have been better to accept this potential reality and have a plan for what we would do, than to have it just happen to us. Here’s how it could have looked had we done this exercise when we were expecting our first:

-If we have to put our baby in childcare, we will keep our full time jobs and cut back on our savings for now.
-If it makes more sense for us to take care of him ourselves, we will cut back on our hours and cut back on our savings for now.
-If we have to cut back on our savings, the world will fall apart and we will crumple up and die… okay, that’s probably not going to happen, but what could happen.
-If we can’t save money right now we will make due with what we have until we can save money again.
-If making due with what we have right now causes us to go into depression, we will seek counseling.
And so on and so forth…

I’m being a little humorous, but you get the point. This exercise is not meant to help you track down every single possibility, but it is meant to help you grow in the belief that you are powerful in the face of your circumstances. It’s not about having a plan as much as it is about knowing that you are capable of making decisions and doing something about whatever might come your way.

Rachel and I have baby number 6 on the way (another boy) and we are just as excited and nervous as we were when expecting number 1. I have to ask myself, what false expectations might I be carrying into this new season? How am I preparing myself now for the changes that are coming? Hopefully doing these few things will help prepare you for the changes that are coming in your future. Now excuse me while I go and take my own advice.

Strategies to Prevent Losing Time and Money on a Project

by Ben Toalson | Nov 5, 2014 | In The Boat

I wanted to take a few moments to share some strategies with you that I have found extremely valuable when approaching the question of whether or not to take on a project. We humans, by nature, are bad estimators. I’ve seen this show up time and time again for projects where I have made time or cost estimates that turned out to be way off and ended up costing me hours upon hours that I had not previously accounted for. However, with the right data, some added structure and some practice we can narrow the gap between speculation and reality and ensure that the projects we take on a truly worth our time.

Understand your base hourly rate

Knowing your base hourly rate is key to being able to determine what you will and wont take on. For example, if you’ve determined that in order to be able to “keep the lights on” you’ve got to average at least $50/hour on a given project, you’re not going to take on a project that pays $250, but will take you 10 hours to complete. How do we determine our base hourly rate? I’ve put together a formula that helps me determine my actual time cost:

Variables:
wbH (weekly billable hours) = (Weekly hours worked) – (non-compensatable hours)
W (weekly budget) = ((Monthly Budget need – external contributions) x 12) / number of weeks per year you intend to work (for me it’s about 46)

The Formula:
W / wbH = your base hourly rate

Example:
$1121.74 per week / 30 hours = $37.39 base hourly rate

*Weekly billable hours should ONLY include hours for which you are directly compensated. This would normally not include other work related activities like handling invoices, preparing quotes, work related recreational time, etc. Unless it’s a line item that your client is paying you for, don’t include it here.

*For the number of weeks you intend to work, it’s very important that you not only account for vacation time, but also account for the possibility of sick days, emergency time off, etc.

*External contributions can be stock returns, a day job, a spouse or partner’s income, or even a monthly check from Gam-gam (Grandma).

*It’s important to note here that if your base hourly rate exceeds what you believe you are worth, start charging that much and see what happens. My good friend, Sean McCabe poses a great question to help you consider doubling your rates: “Will you lose more than 50% of your clients by doubling your rate?” If the answer is no, then go for it! If you do not stand to lose more business than you will gain in monetary return, then upping your rate is a good business decision.

There’s so much more nuance here, but we can talk more about this another time.

Over-estimate the length of each task of the project

It’s not enough just to over-estimate the project itself, though you may find that you give yourself better margin this way, but take some time to get to the details of each task and step involved in completing the project. Over-estimation of each task of the project will result in a more accurate picture of what the project will actually take. Certainly, the more experience you have with a given project type, the more accurately you’ll be able to estimate the length of each task. For this reason, it’s also a great idea to record how much time it actually takes to complete a task versus your original estimation. This will help you to be more accurate in the future.

Know what you will and won’t do for a project

It’s important for us to be diligent about defining the boundaries within our projects. When we were preparing our home for our twin baby boys, we tried to look at things from their perspective and imagine all of the ways they might get into things that could potentially harm them. In the same way, we want to put ourselves in our client’s shoes and imagine all of the ways they might find ways to undermine the success of the project by exploiting a hole in your process. A client doesn’t want to undermine the success of the project, but where we haven’t created clear boundaries, the client, not really knowing any better, will find their way through the holes. Where boundaries are clear and secure, the professional operates with the most creative freedom, the client most respects the professional, and the project get’s the best of what it needs.

Over-communicate expectations with the client

Expectations should not only be written down in your contract, but should be a part of your verbal and email conversations as well. You should take as many opportunities as possible in the beginning to reiterate the expectations and to allow the client to express their understanding and agreement with the expectations. This will be very important as you get to different places in the process, in the case that you need to point back to specific conversations to reinforce expectations. This should always be done in a professional manner and in the spirit of keeping the client’s best interests in tact.

Be prepared to walk away

Hopefully through proper filtering and communication it doesn’t come to this, but from time to time, when expectations and boundaries are not clear enough, we still find ourselves in a compromising situation with our client. We should always take responsibility for a lack of communication on our part, but if that lack of communication could possibly result in working a ridiculous number of hours with a client who doesn’t understand their role in the process, it may be better to give them their money back, walk away from the project and address the places in your process that caused the issue. You have to ask yourself a few questions: Is this project going to be a strong reflection of the value I provide? Does the number of hours I will have to spend to complete this project justify the work I’m missing? Is my time more valuable than what I would stand to lose in giving back the client’s money and moving on to a new project? Again, hopefully this is a rare case, but one I find valuable to prepare myself for mentally. I always want to be free from the scarcity mindset that tells me I can’t walk away from a situation like this, so that I don’t put myself into a compromising situation in the first place.

Don’t take shortcuts

I’m hoping this is also a rare temptation, and that you are already saying to yourself ‘I never take shortcuts.’ I just want to take an opportunity here to reinforce this value and say that shortcuts are NEVER worth it. If you can do something more efficiently while maintaining a high level of quality, that’s great! But taking a shortcut and skimping on the quality of something can have catastrophic results. At worst, the shortcut won’t work and you’ll have to spend even more time correcting the mistake and making it right. At best it works and no one notices, but it eats away at your soul at night. Always, always, always provide the highest level of value you can. If you do, your efforts will be returned to you tenfold!

These strategies are just a few ways we can prevent lost time and money when taking on new projects. Things aren’t always going to go by the book. Most potential clients don’t understand what really goes into our work and, if left to their own devices, will find and exploit the holes in our process. That’s why it’s so important to assert our professionalism and to practice these strategies, so we can protect our time and do what is best for our clients.

When Is a Client Really Your Client and Why Does It Matter?

by Ben Toalson | Oct 15, 2014 | In The Boat

Of the many great interactions I’ve had with clients, I’ve had a few unpleasant ones (an understatement), and from these experiences I do my best to learn and adjust my process to make sure I don’t have these experiences again. A few examples: I do the work for a client and even though I’ve got due dates and late penalties on my invoices, their payments are still late (much later than I need them to be to pay my bills on time). And another scenario, I get a really good feeling from a client and they seem ready to go so I clear my schedule only to find out a week or two later that they are not ready or are thinking about going with someone else. Neither of these work for me. After all, I’ve got a family to take care of and bills to pay and I can’t afford all of this uncertainty.

If you’ve had, or are currently having experiences like this with your clients, you know how frustrating and disheartening it can be. One thing I learned that turned around the scenarios I described above is this: The people that “put me in this situation” are actually NOT YET my clients. I put quotations around “put me in this situation” because I believe that it’s not clients who put us in compromising positions, but our own shortcomings as professionals. A true professional uses every opportunity to find ways to learn and grow when they experience challenges with their clients, because it is ultimately the professional’s responsibility to facilitate a smooth interaction with their client.

So here is where we as professionals can be more responsible: until a potential client has paid a reasonable amount of money to secure your services, they are not your client.

-But what if they’ve communicated with me via e-mail and said “We’re ready to go?” They are not your client.

-But what if they’ve sent their content and shared their goals with me? They are not your client.

-But what if they’ve signed a contract and sent it to me? They are not your client.

-A potential client doesn’t become your client until they PAY you.

I’d like to share a few guidelines and some reasons why I believe it’s vital to require payment from your client first:

Guidelines

I highly recommend requiring payment in order to secure not just your services, but a place in your schedule. This means that even if you are booked up and can’t start working on their project until 4 weeks from now, their up-front payment now secures their future spot in your schedule.

Depending on the size and scope of the project, you may be able to get full payment up front. If it’s a smaller project and it’s a sensible investment for the client, this shouldn’t be a problem for them. If it’s a larger project you may get 50% or more up front, or you could break the project into phases and require up front payment before commencing each phase.

Remember, when your client sees you as the professional, you get to set the tone and expectation for how the project is going to work.

Benefits

Establishes trust – This is one of the biggest benefits of accepting payment from your client up-front. When a client pays money for a service they have not yet received, they are communicating that they see you as a professional and that they trust you to carry out your end of the deal.

Positions your services as an investment – A payment up front is an investment. The client is essentially saying “I’m willing to invest in your design solution now, because I believe the potential return on this investment is worth it.”

Places you and the client in your rightful places in the client/professional relationship – This one is tremendously important. The healthiest client/professional relationship is one in which each party fully understands and is fully equipped to carry out their own respective roles. The role of the client is to provide content and goals as they relate to their vision for their business, and the designer’s role is to use their expertise to craft an effective solution, using the provided content, to meet the client’s goals. When you’ve already received payment, the client must submit to you as the professional. That means that they don’t have the leverage to insert their subjective ideas and opinions into the design process, and you have the leverage to support this idea. This is good news for everybody because, as long as you’re carrying out your role as the professional, your design will be a solution that will be most effective at accomplishing their goals, regardless of whether or not it satisfies their (completely unrelated) style preferences.

Can put an end to the feast or famine cycle – I’ve talked about this cycle before, where you get a bunch of client work, so financially you’re good for a while, then you have to do some administrative/on-boarding work with new clients, and things are thin again. The benefit to requiring payment for scheduling your services, is that you can potentially be booked weeks in advance with fully paid projects that you have yet to do. As long as you are smart about how you budget that advanced income, it should make for a relatively even experience when it comes to your cash flow.

Note: don’t book too far ahead at the same rate. If you do book more than a few months out, take into account the fact that the more experience you have, the more you can charge. This means that you’re probably going to be worth more to your client by the time you start on their project. Price your services accordingly.

If you’re reading this thinking ‘I can’t ask that of my clients, they’ll just say no and go to someone else’ then chances are you might be allowing the wrong people to become your clients. You should only allow someone to become your client who is willing to entrust you with their investment, sees you as a professional, and will submit to your process. This is how you will do your best, most fulfilling work, and how you will offer the most value for your clients.

As always, if you have thoughts, stories, questions or comments, please feel free to share below!