A recent question came up on LinkedIn.com recently (connect with me here, introduce yourself!) asking what one of the biggest issues was in starting up a business, something I’ve done on three fronts already and will do again in 2008.

Money

As the answers came in, some people mentioned money. When you start out working for yourself, there is no certainty of income. Even after three years in one particular business, there is no “certainty” of income - you still have to go find work and complete work in order to earn money. People found it hard to either find clients to get cash, or further back again, to find the cash to start a business in order to try and find clients who had cash.

Marketing

Some people mentioned marketing - getting yourself known, attracting clients, pitching for jobs, chasing leads, building up your own brand. It’s a time-consuming activity - yes, something that has to be done, but not at the detrement of your livlihood.

My Issue: Time Management

My issue in starting out working for myself? Time management. More specifically, time management in relation to open projects and taking on one job too many at a given time.

There is an urge to go out and grab a client, maybe a second one and a third one to match, take on their work and immediately put yourself under unneccesary pressure. When you’re starting out, there is zero point in spreading yourself too thin. I’ve fallen victim to it once or twice in the past, but the lesson was learned. While it is great to be able to say you’re really busy, juggling too many jobs can have a negative effect on the work you end up delivering to a client. It is better to be patient and deliver a top-class result rather than to rush in to a job and finish up with a half-assed attempt, something that could have been improved upon if you had more time or simply weren’t juggling as many projects.

After a while you’ll get a feel for things and come up with your own time management system, deciding how many hours you can dedicate to a job in a week. There is no written formula for determining how long a job will take you and ultimately how many jobs you’ll be able to run concurrently, but if you start slow and remain patient, you’ll soon develop you’re own time management routine for working through jobs.

Rome wasn’t built in a day and all that.

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