I approach it like this – I have 3 targets I try to hit every month. The first is to earn enough money to keep the company costs ticking over for the month. The second is to earn enough so that I can also cover what I take out of the company each month for me (a wage!). The last target is to earn enough on top of the first two to cover an amount that can stay in the company for lean months or dividends at the end of the financial year.

You can keep these targets as financial ones, or convert them via your daily rate to bookable hours in a month. Then all you need to do is ensure you put enough sales effort in to hit the targets. Booked work is key.

Whatever the measurement you use the key thing is to track your progress. Printout a calendar with all 3 targets on them for the next year and as you do the work and pass the targets, tick them off. It’s key to give yourself the boost of knowing that you’ve done what you need to in a month – or the kick in the rear to get you chasing work.

The side benefit of all this tracking is that it can help stop you from overworking and booking in too much work. It may seem counter productive, but don’t take on all the work you are offered, just what you can handle.

Burning out makes you no use whatsoever to your clients.

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.

1. Even my bookmarks are on a RAID with off-site backup
2. Yeah I keep meaning to get around to that
3. 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.

One thing that all IT managers/Sysadmins etc will do before anything else is ensure that they have adequate backups. With a decent backup and disaster recovery plan, you can get yourself out of pretty much any IT hole with the minimum fuss and stress. Ever noticed how when something on the network goes critically wrong your sysadmin is completely laid back and un-stressed (sometimes almost annoyingly so)?

It’s because he/she has that safety net behind them.

Think about this scenario for a bit:

You’ve got work booked in that has to be delivered today, but your main work computer has [been stolen/died/had milkshake dropped on it/got a horrible virus]:

• How do you get back to being able to work for clients as quickly as possible?
• What steps do you need to take to get back to the status-quo?

What I do

Now – having been working in the IT industry for a long time and having been responsible for company IT departments for some of that time, I’m naturally quite obsessive about backups. This is what I currently do – hopefully this can give you a few ideas about how to secure your disaster recovery plans, and therefore secure your turnover.

Geographical separation

Quite simply don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Want to host client websites for preview etc? Don’t do it at the end of your ADSL line. Make sure that all key resources you use are split out over physically different systems. I currently have three resources that I use: My home computer, web server and Amazon S3 storage.

Version control

Store anything important or even mildly important in version control. I use SVN, but you can use whatever you like. All code, writing, notes, configs get stored in SVN. That way I can rollback easily in event of an error. If I am rebuilding my server as it’s failed, then it’s one checkout command to get back all my configs for apache etc.

The SVN server is offsite (not in my house), so is not at the whim of a break in/fire/flood etc. If I do work locally, once the data is checked in I can stop worrying about the security of it on my local machine.

Backups

Backup all this data that you store. As everything of importance that I use is stored in SVN, I just worry about backing up SVN on a regular basis rather then backing up 50 distinct locations. All my backups are stored in multiple locations and on separate physical devices/media.

The main backups are the SVN system and associated files, these upload themselves securely to Amazon S3 daily and, in addition, copy themselves onto an NFS backup mount. So I have each file in 3 secure locations: SVN server, Amazon S3, NFS mount.

Ad hoc backups (images, other binaries that need to be stored once and not version controlled), are stored in S3 as well. I dump these in a local folder on my machine, and this pushes up to S3 daily via a cron job.

I use the s3sync ruby script to manage all these transfers.

Once the data is on S3, I don’t really need to worry too much about it being lost:

Amazon S3 gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service was designed for 99.99% availability, and carries a service level agreement providing service credits if a customer’s availability falls below 99.9%.

However I do also grab down from S3 on a regular basis and backup the files to CD, just to ensure I have an offline copy of data in an emergency.

Local Machine

I, like any other tech worker, am very fussy about my machine. The mouse sensitivity has to be just so, the desktop environment has to be set up in a specific way and of course the applications I need to use have to be at my finger tips.

In order to get this back as quickly as possible, with minimum fuss, I’ve used mondo rescue to image my machine to DVD(s). It’s linux specific, and your mileage may vary for Windows/Mac partitions. Have a hunt on Google for other options for Windows/Mac – Symantec Ghost suite is a windows app I’ve used in the past.

Remember, all important docs go into SVN, so all I really need to back up here is the system – not personal files, these are already covered.

If my machine dies, and I can’t recover manually, I just pop the mondo rescue DVD into my drive, boot, and it sorts out the rest.

Summary

These are the main systems I use to ensure that I can recover from most problems. Beyond this I use various forms of encryption for data security, but again this is down to user choice and the type of data you store. I’m also about to get a laptop so I am not so reliant on my home machine and Internet connection.

One key thing to remember: when you have to use these systems to recover, try to make a note of what didn’t work too well in the recovery process. I image my local machine because the last time I did a rebuild it took too long.

If you can make a change now that will make your life easier in the event of a problem occurring, then do it.

Please ask any questions about specifics in the comments, and I’ll collate and respond in another post where appropriate.

However, I know nothing about starting a business and running it. The nuts and bolts of getting things done that have to be done. Accounts, insurance, taxes, expenses, PAYE, VAT – the list of things I knew nothing about towered over me and I was scared. Chances are if you are at this stage of striking out on your own, you are probably feeling the same. Luckily help is on hand.

For me the help came in the form of NWES – a local, council funded, business advice organisation. Most cities will have a place like this. Business Link are another that cover the UK fairly well and have a sizable online presence.

You can’t be afraid to ask for advice, and if the advice is free, all the better for the potential entrepreneur who is looking to bootstrap a company on the minimum needed.

Before starting a company, or registering anything official – seek out the advice of those that know.

I had an hour long session with an NWES advisor in which I laid out my plans bare, talked about what I knew and more importantly – what I didn’t. I got a lot of advice but essentially for my problems (the nuts and bolts of running a business) it boiled down to one thing:

Get an accountant.

They will register your company for you, and set it up in the most tax efficient way possible. Shop around, I had one guy try to charge me over twice on a monthly basis what I am being charged by the guy that I chose to use.

All accountants should offer a free first meeting, don’t just email them and ask for a quote – get to know them on a face to face basis – you will be placing your money in their hands. Prices will vary but from what I’ve seen the average monthly fee for running the books on a one person ltd company is about £60 – £70 in addition to one off charges for company registration.

In this period of the company (described on the Tim Ferriss blog as ‘Uninformed Optimism’), I don’t want to be worrying about tax liability or sorting out the PAYE, I want to be getting out there and getting work in, finding clients and pushing for business. If Overthink ltd survives past it’s first year or two, then I’ll look at doing some of the books myself – maybe.

At the moment my energy as the director (and caretaker) of the company is to ensure success. I can’t do this if I am struggling with end of year accounts and VAT returns.

Good Luck!

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?

Going freelance/self-employed was something that has always appealed to me and I had flirted with the notion for some time. However it’s always quite hard to leave a well paid and ’stable’ job for the uncertainty of working for yourself. Having had that decision taken away from me, I figured that I would give it a good go and see where I got. Not trying would leave me with regrets further down the line.

So fast forward two weeks and I find myself having gone through a whole rainbow of emotions but starting to settle into the idea.  There has been stress (loads), anxiety (a fair bit) and confusion (a whole lot), but it’s also been exciting, fun and hopeful. I’ve netted my first client, sorted out my workspace and am starting to get my head around the way I’ll be working. I can also see one thing in my future that was in short supply before – Time.

For anyone considering making the jump, I would say do it.

I’m going to try and use a series of posts on this blog to describe the lessons I’ve learned in this process and any pit-falls I’ve managed to plunge down. So watch this space.

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.