17/11/2017

I'm my own first client

For a while I have been thinking about doing things on my own—what people call starting a business, becoming self-employed, going freelance, or whatever the word is where you live. It means making a lot of decisions. To start with, although I have a few guidelines in mind, I have not fully defined what I will do.

Defining the activity should be easy in theory: take everything I have done while working for other people and turn it into my own business. In practice, theory and reality are far apart. I think it all comes down to the details. As an employee, you handle a set of responsibilities based on your role, day after day. If you do a good job or progress, those responsibilities either change or, more accurately, transform. The simplest ones go to another department or become so routine that they no longer matter as much, while new ones appear and take up your time.

But when you work for yourself, all those responsibilities—and others you had never considered because someone else in your company used to handle them—are now yours. Ideally, you would build a team and delegate tasks to the different roles in your business. But when it is just you, things get more complicated. Those roles are not exclusive: most days you are the intern rotating through every department, but you are also the boss, the one who loses money and the one who makes beginner’s mistakes.

And what happens when you are your own product? The services and tasks you used to do for others are now for yourself. You need advice on your accounts and legal matters, and you have to start thinking about marketing strategies and plans to get yourself noticed—and that is what you sell. On top of all that, you have to sell, because remember: you are the product you are promoting and hope to benefit from.

I know this post has no clear conclusion, but that is the point: to make you—or me—think about the next step. Where am I going, and what do I want to sell? If you are starting a business, it does not matter what the activity is: you are the boss, the errand runner and even the cleaner, but above all, you remain the main product of your business.