[I got your mojo...posted by OPHOTON]
Lately, I feel as if I’ve been losing touch with everything that gives me my insight into this world. Ironically, the very thing I feel is the reason we started Citizen Agency (being able to advocate for the needs of the community) is already slipping away because of the amount of time we spend trying to make our clients happy rather than with the community itself.
So much for: we don’t work for our clients, we work for our clients’ clients [link]
And, in reality, we end up working for nobody at all.
What is at issue here?
Well, consulting is a very loaded profession with years of inefficiencies. Some clients understand that logging hours, sitting in meetings or putting together long reports is just a facade and would rather have their consultants doing what they do best: consulting. We’ve already run into one client who didn’t understand that the ‘deliverable’ was our time and advice. Taking that advice is the difference between getting value or not.
So, we end up spending a great deal of time creating tangibles to keep the peace. Someone once told me that the more intangible your business is, the more tangibles you will have to produce and the more tangible your business is, the more intangibles you will have to produce. Marketing, I’m afraid, is very intangible, and I’ve run into this over the years and produced more half-baked strategies than I’d like to admit, just to end up using about 1/10th of that strategy that took me 30 hours to produce.
Therefore, here we are, after midnight on Saturday night in front of our computers, doing as much ‘community’ stuff as we can do…while doing ‘tangible’ things for our clients. Instead, we could be at Santarchy, actually hanging with people, building relationships, having fun…etc.
You may ask yourself: What does hanging with a bunch of people in Santa suits drinking have to do with anything? Isn’t that just you doing what everyone does? Why should you be paid for that?
Good question.
Well, what I learnt a long time ago is that sitting behind a computer or in a boardroom does not inform you about much of anything at all and it certainly isn’t the place to build good relationships.
I spent a good many years as a researcher - first academic, then marketing - trying to figure out how the world ticked. I would study cultures and qualitative and quantitative data and do extensive analysis and produce crazy accurate reports, filled with context and depth…only to figure out when I spent any given time actually participating in the culture that I was dead wrong in my analysis.
You see, people rarely act the way numbers and history says they will act. Sure, sure, there are those who make a living studying how history repeats itself and predicts rises and falls and trends…but how accurate are they? Well, about as accurate as an ‘educated guess’ from a layperson, really. The people who REALLY know what’s coming down the pipe are those who are on the bleeding edge. They are in the ‘ranks’. They are working on projects within grassroots communities.
And I’m thinking, geez, Tara, get up off of your duff and get out there again. Look how much is suffering. Your blog is dropping off of the map because you aren’t posting. You haven’t touched your wiki in months. Every community project you say you want to start/join/etc. is on the backburner. You keep advertising these fun and free events in your space and nobody is showing up. You have no idea what is going on in the world or, even at the very least in the blogosphere.
Something has to give.
So, what is my plan? I don’t know yet. I can write a note to our clients saying, “Your desire for tangibles is reducing our long-term efficacy, so, effective immediately, our ‘logged hours’ for you will be 1 brainstorming meeting + 1 update report per week.” I don’t know if that will work.
We do know that we have gone from being two people in a living room, consulting for a handful of clients on light contracts, to three people + stakeholders in a leased office space, consulting for a larger number of clients on varied contracts and we are really crappy about sticking to our allotted hours (generally, we’ll spend 3x as many hours trying to show that we are working for a client than we are being paid for). This should probably stop.
But even moreso, we’ve been talking lately about the next step. And, mind you, the next step seems to have come 2 years sooner than we expected it to. We are growing in some ways, and becoming obsolete in others. We really need to think seriously about whether we want this to remain a ‘three people consulting’ shop or a sustainable, effective business that can actually change the world in ways we want it to. If it is the latter (and I know it is), we need to find a way to get back to our roots and maybe even hire a CEO or General Manager to do all of the important business-type stuff to get us there. Consulting certainly does not scale, but I love the work (when it’s right).
A couple of steps between now and then, though: 1. better use of our time and 2. more money in the bank.
So, if there is anyone who has some sage words or experience with this, I’d love to hear it.
I need desperately to get my mojo back.
10 Comments
I relate to this more than I care to think.
Sounds like there is a need for dare I say it - strucuture! I said it!
One thing I have found helps me is using GTD. Allocating @items, say 5 max, and one has to be @family. Then tracking within each, reviewing weekly, deleting things that are taking you over the top etc etc.
I also happen to use an outliner, MyInfo, but a notebook is as good.
Some links:
http://del.icio.us/Dademurphy/gtd
Hi Tara,
I think at some point most people have experienced losing their mojo.
One thing that jumped out at me was when you said:
“Your desire for tangibles is reducing our long-term efficacy”
What made this jump out was that it seemed you were placing blame on the client for how the relationship was going. Where did they get the idea that you produced tangibles? Did you define what your services were going to be, but just as important as that did you let them know what your services would not include? Did you find out how they were going to measure if you were successful or producing results? If you don’t know how they measure your success then you end up spinning your wheels while guessing.
As far as the lost mojo, I can offer an example and a way I get out of that state.
A few years ago I worked for family (I didn’t listen to anyone about the downside of working for family). I made them a lot of money and of course they liked that, but after a year I started feeling less and less alive. They sent me to school and I had a lot of freedom, but the longer I stayed the more dead I felt–no matter how many benefits they offered. I ended up leaving the company and my husband and I started our own business, which was scary as hell, but it made me feel very much alive again. Nothing like the fear of starving to make you feel alive.
When I’m feeling in a “low mojo” state I resort to a simple measure of: Does this thing make me feel more alive or less alive? If the answer is less alive then I don’t do it. It makes it easier for me if I measure things in the “more alive” “less alive” scale mostly because there isn’t much in this world that is worth doing if it makes me feel less alive.
Very good questions, Misty. You are right. We have been terrible at setting down from the start the expectations. We are too loose about the relationship, how it will work, etc.
Thanks for your feedback and your stories.
I relate to this entirely too much as well. When my husband and I founded a business around our artists’ community, it was to fill a niche that I as a working artist myself found lacking. Fast forward 6 years and 2 kids later and my life has become work and parenting, with no art from me since child #1 arrived, unless you count my non-serious photography. The more and more I did things to help my community and business rock, the further I got away from my personal reasons for creating the business.
It’s such a catch 22. I don’t doubt that I am doing what I am meant to do with my life, and get great joy from each new opportunity and site development I can bring back to my people. But oh, I am so envious. Why can’t I just be one of the people who paints all day the way I used to? Instead, I spend 60 hour weeks doing “business” because, well, I have to so I don’t let my customers down and so I can support my family.
I think the answer for both of us may well be structuring in time to fufill those passions that brought us to our respective businesses. I think your posted New Year’s Resolutions go a long way toward that end. I probably ought to do the same. All work and no play makes Jill a dull girl, lol. Reclaim your inner diva, m’dear!
Very good post Tara!
Just like Adam with your Wordpress transition I’m willing to help you on this “work with clients and hours” issue.
In this regard, like Adam and yourself we Canadians can be quite helpful in this world
and [2] You’ll have to be willing to do the work otherwise it would end up being a waste of time for both of us, and this ancient guy has no time to waste!
Email me in the new year!
Best wishes coming your way for a totally AWESOME Happy Holidays and a totally AWESOME 2007!
One other thought on “tangibles”: It helps to reframe them as “artifacts,” or better yet, something that you and Chris are very familiar with, “Leave A Trail.” Tangible work products are critical, but they shouldn’t be artificial, and they don’t have to be in the form of long, dry prose. A picture representing the outcome of your conversation or even the conversation itself counts as a tangible, for example. A blog entry also counts. The key is that the artifact is a natural outcome of the work, not something artificial that is tacked on. Also, as Misty points out above, it’s critical to set expectations accordingly, both for your client and yourself.
Another thing that I do that helps justify my client work in light of my larger mission is that I insist on open licensing the vast majority of my tangible work products. This way, the community gets to share and benefit from the work I do with every client.
Hi Tara. If it helps, I think everyone is balancing some of these same issues. I’m learning to say no more often, but I’m also getting better on leverage where certain activities feed multiple projects or goals.
With regards to business, if you and Chris ever want to chat, let me know. I have some experience with some of the issues you are dealing with and be happy you give my experience for what’s it’s worth.
-Austin
PS - I also recently posted my own version of my time management & community projects strategy. It’s at
http://www.billionswithzeroknowledge.com/2006/12/11/making-sure-my-peanut-butters-thick-crunchy/
Tara, thanks for posting this. I ventured into consulting a year ago now, and I’m starting to face these same issues. As I draft a social mission statement for my practice, I realize that serving clients’ (legitimate) need for collateral accountability from the artifacts of work (the trail of consulting breadcrumbs) is not core to that mission, but is part of the cost of doing business that makes the mission possible in the first place. And the tension with my pro bono and community work increases daily as the demand for my help increases.
I echo Austin’s point about leverage. Doing more good in the world requires the citizen agent to gain leverage. Focusing on a unique area of emerging knowledge allows you to leverage that knowledge and reuse some of those artifacts. Trying to be the go to person on everything and anything does not provide leverage. Every project is unique, but they better have something in common that is reusable, otherwise you get ground down.
Good luck finding your mojo. I found mine recently under a pile of documents in a corner of the home office.
Tara,
No particular wisdom to add here, Tara - just a big Amen that this is a major, major issue. I think I’ve felt the same way and sometimes do feel the same way.
I’ve started asking myself questions:
What’s most important? What do I do now? What is my wildly important goal - so wildly important that if I miss that one, nothing else matters?
But it’s not not not not not not easy!
I don’t know how much help this will be but Shimon Peres’ words at LeWeb3 took off some of that stress of past expectations but pointing out that the “past was not that good”, and that we’d be better off setting new expectations in the future.
http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2006/12/shimon_peres_im.html
There is an assumption that basing what we do on the past (and asking customers what they want can only expect answers based on their previous experiences which can’t be that good - or why would they be employing a new company?) is better than sticking yourself out on a limb to do things differently and, just maybe, better.
Set your own (different, new) expectations as those of your customers and THAT will make you exceptional to most people.
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