Around here, we work on a monthly cycle. We also work on a per-project hourly basis, which means that we only get paid (though, paid well) for actual hours spent working on specific projects that turn into real deliverables. That means spending a lot of time trying to figure out each month how to stitch together existing deliverable opportunities in such a fashion that, in the end, we still get to do cool things like pay bills and eat food. It usually works out, one way or another.
Mid-month is the low gravity point in the cycle. By this point, we’ve gotten invoices out and things are at their most quiet. We’ve successfully completed another mad-dash sprint to the billable finish line, gotten deadlines out, and it’s time to start again.
So how do we figure out what to work on?
First, you start with whatever the clients are hot and bothered over. There’s usually something: a whitepaper, a case study, a campaign, something new on a website somewhere. Priority stuff gets priority scheduling. And those are the most reliable sources of good month-end billing. Always good to have a reasonable smattering of OMG-WE-NEED-THIS project tasks to wedge into the load order.
After those, it’s time to go back through email and calendars and all your other project management documents and start touching on the projects that are in transit, or are being delayed because something’s sitting on someone else’s desk and isn’t going anywhere. Emails and phone calls. Get some of that stuff moving. The start of the billing cycle is the ideal time to try and get some of those jobs out of the mud.
Once that’s done, it’s time to start pitching. We spend a lot of time reading Google News, and on any given day I have a dozen Google Alerts about a variety of client-related topics. There’s never a shortage of good, trendy, timely ideas to mine. You have to have a good sense of timing to do this, and you need good relationships with your clients, but if you do it right, you’re just being helpful. Got an idea. Think this would work. Any interest in this? Just letting you know. A lot of our project load starts out this way.
Then it’s time to check back in with the prospects who dropped in two months ago ready to launch the OMG Awesome Big Projects and then subsequently vanished under a cloud of corporate red tape. Call around, see what’s going on, you never know. Our biggest and most profitable clients started out like this. You have to follow up, even months (or years) later. You never know.
99% of the time, once you’ve done all the above, there’s workflow again. It’s just a matter of keeping momentum.
When you’ve done all the above and still there’s nothing happening – and the last time this happened to us was early 2009, after the bank panic of 2008 and all of our clients were in paralytic shock – then it’s time to start working cold. That’s when you start feeling that chill that says that you might not make billing that month. Paranoia and the larger fear sets in.
That’s when you can only deploy what I think of as the Foundation option, named after Asimov’s novels. In the book Foundation, a massive galactic empire is dying and the greatest living historian predicts tens of thousands of years of barbaric collapse; the story follows the efforts of a small group that collects and safeguards all the empire’s knowledge, in a project aimed at reducing the collapse to a mere thousand years. The basic idea in Foundation is that you can’t always avert the disaster. Sometimes you have to shift your efforts towards reducing it to manageable proportions, and laying the base for greater successes once the storm passes. It’s when you start making things and building things without expectation of a short run payoff.
Sometimes that means building a new website, or developing a new long term vision, or making some hard long term growth decisions. It could mean learning a new skill, writing the Great American Novel, or starting a band you always wanted. The Foundation option happens when you’re unshackled from the tyranny of the now, and your only choice is to step back and work on the larger picture. It’s the last card to play, the hope at the bottom of Pandora’s Box. But more times than not, it works. Or at least, it’s never yet failed for us. It’s the planted seed for your future life.
I guess in an ideal world, we’d be constantly employing the Foundation option while getting all the usual work done. You probably shouldn’t wait on the long term game until all is bleak and despair. We’re still working on that.
No idea why I felt like writing all this on R&K today, but there ya go. We’re currently in the early stages of our June billing cycle, picking up the threads of May. Phone calls and email, pitching and picking up. Another week in the life of the business.