Success in Sweatpants

Quite a while before the internet hit the world, I ran a business in San Diego, California, writing, designing, and producing marketing collaterals for small companies in my immediate area. I wrote and designed newsletters, brochures, small magazines, and various other items that were being used to promote business.

I was as technological as a small business could get in the latter part of the 1980s. Since the internet was not yet available for public use, fax and overnight mail were my "high speed" delivery options. The leading edge part of the business was a new thing called "desktop publishing"–I used the then-revolutionary Microsoft Windows on a PC along with design and page layout applications that worked with it.

The hot shot designers in my loft office building who used Macs looked down their artsy-fartsy noses at me, but I didn’t care. My clients didn’t give a hoot what computer I used to do the work-they just wanted top quality for a good price. And that’s what I delivered.

Generating revenue and growing the business was quite the learning experience. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I had to really stay on top of my invoices and accounts receivable, and that clients didn’t necessarily pay their bills according to agreed upon terms (and sometimes not at all). 

I also figured out pretty fast that no matter how much work I had on the schedule, I needed to keep marketing. If I took my eye off the business development ball and concentrated solely on the work at hand, the day would come when everything was done. I would then have to start marketing from scratch without any billable work.

This caused a "work-no work" roller coaster that made revenues choppy and unpredictable and caused life to be very stressful.

Having learned these lessons, my time slicing ended up being something like 60-40, with 60% of my time spent running the business-marketing, selling, paying bills, sending out invoices, following up on invoices, and other nonbillable tasks-and 40% doing billable work.  Not a good ratio, but without the financial means to farm out the bookkeeping or hire a sales agent, the only way I could increase my billable hours was to increase the amount of time I spent at the office.

And I did just that, until I was putting in an average of 12 hours per day at least six days a week. Basically, I was your average 1980s sole proprietor–I owned a job, not a business. I had to work really long hours to generate the level of income that I needed and I attended to all the operational details myself. 

It was a mixed bag in terms of personal satisfaction. I loved steering my own ship but I definitely didn’t love having the "business" dominate my whole life.

I hadn’t bargained for such high demands on my time and energy, and didn’t know how to get out from under.