Archive for category Overthink business
Overthink: Targets, targets and targets.
Posted by Robbie Scourou in Overthink business on October 17th, 2009
I was recently asked how I measure success in what I am doing. How do I know what is enough?
Overthink: Short lessons…
Posted by Robbie Scourou in Overthink business on September 24th, 2009
It’s been a busy couple of months. I would hesitate to say maybe too busy, because all work is good work, but a few breaks in the schedule would have been nice.
It’s easy to book in a full month or two of work, and it feels good to be able to say to yourself “I’m on target”. Remember though, if you book a full 5 days to your clients, when do you do your admin? If you book out a full month, when do you sort out your invoicing. You need to be careful with it otherwise you’ll soon be doing 10 hr days to keep up with it all.
I’ve found that so far, running my own company (of one person) is quite easy once I got things off the ground, but there is a constant admin cost associated with it – small, but it’s there. Make sure you keep room in your schedule for it.
Beyond that, when you do get your down time, make sure you enjoy it and step completely away from the work. Working for yourself so you can work in a flexible manner is great, but not if that’s all you do.
Overthink: In the event of an emergency… (the disaster recovery post)
Posted by Robbie Scourou in Overthink business on August 1st, 2009
I’ve asked around and there are three camps when it comes to backups and disaster recovery:
- Even my bookmarks are on a RAID with off-site backup
- Yeah I keep meaning to get around to that
- What’s disaster recovery?
Most people coming to freelance/self employment will be coming from an employed background. I.e. They’ve had a company surrounding them which provides more then a few creature comforts, one of which was most probably an IT department which looked after things such as network file stores, Internet access and backups.
However now you are on your own.
If you fall into camp 1 in the list above, then pat yourself on the back and go take a look at something else for a bit. If you don’t fall into camp 1, then read on, as you need to get seriously worried about your recovery plans.
Overthink: First steps in starting a ltd company.
Posted by Robbie Scourou in Overthink business on July 12th, 2009
I like to think I know a lot about my chosen profession. In the last 11 years I’ve worked in Web/IT I’ve had many different job descriptions and worn many different hats. From management to client liaison and of course my favourite, coding. So when I made the decision to go into business for myself, I wasn’t worried about having too narrow a skill set or doing the work I could get in.
Overthink: Prologue.
Posted by Robbie Scourou in Overthink business on July 1st, 2009
Two weeks ago today I found out that I was due to be made redundant.
Great.
I can’t say that I experienced either Denial or Anger, being as I was kind of expecting the whole thing. I found myself almost instantly in the Acceptance phase and quickly turning towards one question: What next?
Building a vanity site.
Posted by Robbie Scourou in Overthink business on June 21st, 2009
Well, this isn’t exactly a vanity site, and it isn’t exactly a business site. I’ve always thought it a bit … odd that people try to separate the two when essentially they are the only person in a business.
Overthink, the business entity, is me. It represents me in a legal manner that allows me to do work for clients in an above board and safe (for both me and the clients) way. When I get hired to do some work for a company or person, they get me, so why would I hide who I am from them via an ultra un-personable business site?
Clients aren’t going to be scared off if they can see from this site that I am a human being with my own thoughts and mind. As it is I don’t tend to blog about personal things anyway – for the same reason I don’t shout out my personal business in the street (it’s personal!). So please assume that everything you find here is “safe for work” and non scary.
To be honest, the biggest issue I had with setting this site up was ideological – do I roll my own bespoke site, or use something already built? As you can probably see from the site itself, it’s quite clearly a wordpress based website. I wanted something up and running quickly, and I didn’t want to re-invent the wheel, so this excellent software is perfect for the task.
I have many plans for this space eventually, but my driving concern at the moment is to get exposure and to communicate with people. As such, rather then spending 3 weeks developing my site from scratch and being anonymous in that period, I installed and configured wordpress in about 30mins.
Every so often, you need to use the best tool for the job at hand regardless of whether it’s your favourite or not.