Four more years

Four years ago, I left the Civil Service and started trading, rather than simply blogging, as Helpful Technology.

This time last year, we’d become a team of three, and by this July, we’ll be six strong. A business that started out as some optimistic freelancing has become something that pays people’s mortgages. It’s all got rather serious.

Paul McElvaney of Learning Pool has a lovely description of himself as an idiot entrepreneur – a phrase which really captures my approach to business over the last few years. I’ve bumbled around chatting to folks, emails have materialised in my inbox, proposals been agreed, and invoices despatched. It’s worked quite well, albeit at a small scale – a sort of ‘freelance-plus’ model. But it’s felt increasingly terrifying not having much of a plan beyond tomorrow’s inbox. The Something Always Turns Up (SATU) school of business management.

So I commissioned a bit of consultancy help from Matthew Cain, author of the excellent Made to Fail and founder of two startups himself. He put me through a ‘small business MOT’, helping me to work out what I’m not doing in terms of managing the business, benchmark myself against my peers, and give me some tough love about my freelance-plus ways.

It’s been a richly productive experience with lots for me to digest. It also made me realise, both in how I manage things, but also in how I explain what we do to people, how much of it is backward-looking: to the last four years, but even more so my years before that as a civil servant. They’ve been great years, but it’s time to look ahead.

I’m not about to radically shake up the pleasant shambles that’s served me well so far, nor launch an aggressive sales and marketing push. But there are three things I’ve not been doing, which I’m resolving to work on now, to set the foundation for a bolder and smarter next four years.

Choosing

The SATU school of new business is certainly low-effort, and has a rather good success rate. We’ve worked with some really tremendous organisations and individuals in recent years, from the Royal Academy (team pictured above on a visit to our iPad app in situ at the recent Sensing Spaces exhibition) to the FCO and the Big Lottery Fund; Heathrow Airport to the Singapore Government.

The team is full of ideas and experience, and it’s time we made some connections with the inspiring organisations we can really help, and move on from the projects and tasks for which we’re not such a good fit – and which we don’t really enjoy either. It’s not about dumping the small and medium-sized client organisations which have got us this far: if anything, they’re often the ones we’re best suited to help.

Planning

I’m making some more time for myself to look ahead financially and in terms of planning new business and product development. It’s embarrassing how little of this I’ve got away with so far.

We’re also hoping to plan day to day life a bit more – like lots of small agencies, the struggle of balancing ongoing support against project and product work risks driving us into the ground without some proper scheduling. And just as important, we all need a bit more time off the clock to learn and experiment, participate and tidy up – and planning makes the space for that to be possible.

Linking

As a freelancer, you see the links between projects and people naturally. But as the team grows, it becomes more important to link up. We’ve tended to run our social media crisis simulation work entirely separately from our digital skills training and tools, which is a little daft.

The civil servant in me finds the concept of cross-selling somewhat alien and a little distateful, and I can’t picture myself doing it anytime soon. But our clients’ worlds have changed over the last few years (accelerated by the Government Digital Service for sure, and the rise in management interest in social media) and the line between websites and training, content and campaigns, consultancy and knowledge transfer have blurred quite a bit.

We’re a team with a great mix of skills now, with lots of smart friends and associates, and we can help people in lots of ways that – walking out of Westminster on that sunny day in May 2010 – I couldn’t possibly have imagined.