My online journey to becoming a self-employed freelancer has been a story in the making, I guess. Seven months have passed since I got my first paying client, and I am now officially earning a full-time income from home as a freelance writer and pro blogger.

“I am now officially earning a full-time income from home as a freelance writer and pro blogger.”

Having been a professional chef of over 22 years it was rather scary to make the jump into self-employment, since I knew nothing else. It didn’t happen overnight.

It all started in April 2004, when I joined a network marketing opportunity. I had been very frustrated at work for some time and wasn’t happy in the hospitality industry anymore. This was mainly due to the very low pay and the constant stresses at work. Late nights and long hours at work, standing on my feet all day, and working in kitchens that didn’t have air conditioners (yep, most don’t!) wasn’t enough to keep me happy anymore, especially since I was getting older. I craved more freedom, and evenings at home.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I failed miserably in this first business. Today I know it was partially due to not having the red-hot passion we need to keep working the business when things are tough. There were also other reasons, but they go beyond the scope of this post.

“The only way I would ever be happy would be with something I was truly passionate about.”

When the realization kicked in that I wasn’t going to make it as a successful network marketer after two and a half years of giving it a lot of effort, hard work and a lifetime of savings, I knew I had to get out as long as I had some sanity left in me. So I quit! Cold turkey.

I’d had enough and couldn’t afford to waste one more dollar on a business that wasn’t me in the core of my being. So I took some time out, while going back to my “hated” job as a galley slave to help pay the bills. In that time of reflection, shame, anger and feeling sorry for myself, I suddenly realized that life had to go on. The only way I would ever be happy would be with something I was truly passionate about.

“My failed venture in network marketing made me realize how much I loved blogging and writing about Web marketing.”

As life moves in mysterious ways, I had learned a lot about the Internet, advertising, lead generation, domain registration, blogs and more while working my first business. That experience made me realize how much I actually loved blogging and writing about Web marketing.

Those were the first probing baby steps into what would soon become a journey of self-discovery and total happiness of being able to work from home, doing what I love.

Writing!

Co-working is the popular new way to affordably share a proper office with like-minded professionals. Rather than rent an entire office yourself, a number of independents rent an office together.

Congratulations to Patrick Tanguay and Daniel Mireault, who today open the doors at Station C! It’s a beautiful new 2500 square foot co-working office in Montréal, complete with two meeting rooms and 16 desks.

Why co-working?

Most co-working arrangements are a mix of café culture and shared office space. They provide that important “home base” and a professional place to meet clients, a huge step up from the usual loud, messy, and disorganized laptop-and-cellphone-in-Starbucks.

Co-working also gives independents all the benefits of a room full of peers — keeping up with the latest industry news, people to turn to when you’re stuck, and someone to buy you a birthday cake — without the tedium of office politics. Let’s face it, not everyone can stand being alone all day long!

An interesting model

Patrick and Daniel have a really fun vision for Station C. “We want it to be a year-long BarCamp,” Patrick says, referencing the international “unconference” phenomenon.

While they rent half the desks to full-time “anchor” members for $300 per month, the other half are flex rentals for as low as $130 per month for 14 hours per week. They are also renting desks by the day to out-of-town travellers, to keep the environment full of fresh ideas and energy.

“If we only had full-time people, it would be a normal office,” Patrick explains. They even plan to host a guest lecture series for members — very cool.

Are you into co-working?

I think co-working is the future. More and more people are going independent, but being in an office has many advantages.

I’ve been a fan of co-working since I had a desk in the Centre for Social Innovation, here in Toronto. The buzz in that building is amazing. When I began tele-working for another gig, I moved to Soup.net, a beautiful green space with amazingly friendly people.

I think I would have gone insane if I’d had to work alone all day in my tiny apartment. So I wonder who else out there is interested in co-working.

Do you rent a desk in a shared office? What’s it like?

Or, are you sick of cafés and just wish you knew of a local co-working office?

Then hit the comments — maybe you can find enough like-minded folks in your city to make it happen.

Here’s the best definition of an entrepreneur I’ve ever heard:

“Entrepreneurs are people who are too naive to see the obstacles that are obvious to others”.

I have found myself quoting this phrase a couple times over the past week or so, and while I can’t remember who said it, or if that’s the quote exactly, that pretty much sums it up for me.

By day, Anthony Carbone is an engineer at DuPont Canada. From 6pm to 2am, he’s his own man. Not only does he travel back to his old university town, Guelph, to grow his property management firm, but he also moonlights as a web designer for hire with his partner Vinay Menon.

It’s in his soul. He has to be busy. “I’ve always been an entrepreneur, ever since high school; cutting lawns, doing landscaping, selling my time as a web programmer and developer back in university.”

Why does he do it?

Sure, there’s the obvious reason. “Just extra money, basically.” But it’s more than that. Rattling around the back of his head are a huge number of unexpressed ideas that he feels compelled to act on.

In fact, there is one idea in particular Anthony and Vinay have been
driving towards since they met in undergrad. As Anthony tells it,

I met my partner outside of the engineering building at the University of Guelph in my second year and the topic was cars, money and the Internet. It was just at the time when everything was peaking and the Internet bubble was at its prime.

They decided since to moonlight as web designers to raise enough cash to launch their true passion, a car spotting online community called MadWhips.

Car spotting?

Taking photos of sweet rides. Whips? Well, I had to ask too.

Anthony

Obviously the “whips” is referring to the new slang term for your ride.

Sunir

Is it really?

Anthony

Yeah, well, like your crib is your house, your whip is your pimped-out ride, right?

Sunir

I feel old now. Thank you very much.

But isn’t moonlighting a problem for DuPont?

Anthony says,

I have a really good relationship with my boss and he knows that I’m not really interested in going anywhere for the next two, three, four years and I still enjoy that corporate education that I’m getting by being at DuPont and interacting with all the different business units. That kind of corporate experience to me is more important than venturing off on my own right now.

Moonlighting is a distraction, though.

They’ve been striving to achieve their dream for years, working hard on the side. But it’s on the side, and their day jobs rule their schedule. The question Anthony left me with was, “when do we take on that certain level of clientele and when can we afford to say, ‘Okay, one of us can quit our jobs’?

Rob just left me a comment over on my blog:

Hi Mike. I read somewhere that being an entrepreneur can be the loneliest job in the world. I didn’t understand until I started my business. I think it’s great that you recognize the value of good advice. Do you currently mentor up and coming entrepreneurs?

I have long been convinced that mentors provide great value, and I because I am outspoken on the topic, I frequently get asked by other entrepreneurs if I know any mentors that could help them, or if I can help them myself. I don’t and I’m not able to presently, but here’s what makes a good mentor and how to discover a mentor for yourself.

Step 1 - Admit you don’t know everything and you need help. No mentor is interested in a know-it-all who is closed to the advice they bring. While this may sound obvious, many entrepreneurs are not open to mentors or their advice - it’s a shame.

Step 2 - Consider your personal network of family and friends- consider it long and hard. I’m willing to bet you already know someone with great business and management experience, or someone in your network who does. I recommend appealing retired business people and/or people who are a few years ahead of you in the same industry. If your network comes up dry, create one. Go to a conference, talk to the local chamber of commerce, reach out to your accountant, your lawyer, the local coffee shop owner - entrepreneurs know other entrepreneurs, and so do the professionals entrepreneurs rely on.

Step 3 - Reach out to your prospective mentor and ask if you can buy them a coffee, a donut, 15 minutes of their time. Do not make it a pain to spend time with you; fit yourself into their schedule (i.e. this is why lunch is a great option - everyone has to eat, and it’s during the workday so it does not cut into family time). Travel if you need to, a good mentor is worth the commute. Since it helps to establish a personal connection with a prospective mentor, don’t send an email asking if someone wants to be your mentor. Instead make a phone call, visit their office or send an email and say you are wondering if you could take them out to lunch and “bounce some questions” off of them because you are wrestling with some things as you grow your business. This will appeal to their vanity (they are human after all!) and it gives you the chance to “try before you buy” which is *always* a good idea. If they are not interested in meeting with you after you make this ask, then they may not be the right fit for you anyway. If you are sure they are, be persistent and follow up after a suitable period (measured in months).

Step 4 (key ingredient) - When you do finally meet, lay yourself bare. Wise people are drawn to less experienced people who are open about their areas of weakness and concern. Tell your mentor (or prospective mentor) your true state of affairs. Sugar coat nothing. This will foster trust and stir genuine desire to help in a prospective mention - it’s the un-written rule: mentors need to be needed.

I hope this helps.

I just got my most recent copy of the Harvard Business Review, and there is a lengthy interview with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in it. Here’s what he had to say about competition:

“We don’t ignore competitors; we try to stay alert to what they are doing… But a lot of our energy and drive as a company, as a culture, comes from trying to build… customer focused strategies… I think they work better in fast-changing environments”.

I believe many companies spend too much time setting strategy against what their competitors are doing—especially in large organizations like banks. One of the things I love about FreshBooks is our proximity to our customers. Everyone on our team answers the phone, replies to e-mail and is in contact with our customers, and we make decisions and set strategies based on the close relationships we have with our community.

When people ask us about competition, from now on I’m going to direct them to this post.

A few years back I spoke with a sales guy at PC World about buying some advertising. Every month since we’ve received a copy of PC World and every month that we do, I am reminded of that sales guy, PC World and buying their advertising. That’s the power of leaving something behind.

We built FreshBooks to help manage our design, development and internet marketing agency. When we ran that business we used to have to present/sell to new clients, frequently at meetings and I know many FreshBooks businesses do the same. Whenever you have the opportunity to present, be sure to leave your prospects with something tangible that reminds them of the value you add. We used to leave a one page sheet of case study summaries. The summaries included the client name and website URL, the percentage amount we helped them improve their online selling capabilities and how long it took for the project to achieve its ROI - usually measured in months. We also included a short testimonial with a contact name who was willing to endorse our services. The summaries were food for thought, demonstrated our value and surely left the prospect pondering what upside they were missing if they did not work with us.

So if you are meeting people, strategize about what you want to leave behind. If you go to a conference, does your business card communicate your value, or does it just offer your contact information? Think about it.

When you are in business, it’s really important to be able to tell your story well—it’s both an art and a science. To do this effectively, I find it helpful to have a good verbal logo.

The key to a verbal logo is to focus on the benefits—not the features—of what you do. For example, when people ask me “what do you do?”, I could say, ”I help run an online bookkeeping service,” but that doesn’t really compel the average cocktail party guest to ask more, does it? What I say instead is, “I’m in the business of saving people time,” and that never fails to hook people… they are inevitably compelled to ask, “geez… how do you do that?” And once you have people curious I find the conversation has a lot more momentum… and once you have momentum your correspondent will indulge you with their attention and their time and you’ll have the opportunity to describe what you do in Technicolor. Once you can do that you’ll be remembered for sure, and chances are whomever you are talking to will be well enough informed to refer people to what you do—and that’s when you know you’ve hit it out of the park.

Depending on my mood and the company I’m keeping, my verbal logo tends to vary and that makes things fun for me.

So… what’s your verbal logo?

Introducing AideRSS.

A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting the folks behind AideRSS, a truly amazing new tool for bloggers based in nearby Waterloo, Ontario. With AideRSS, you can just plug in the address of your blog and it tells you very quickly how much buzz you’ve generated. Think how useful this is: you can quickly determine who is saying what about you, where, and how much. Figure out at a glance what rocks your audience, and what bores them to death.

Give it a whirl. Here are a few examples:

Ilya Grigorik and Kevin Thomason were kind enough to invite me into the beta last week, and I have been waiting impatiently for them to go public so I can tell you about it.

Well, this past Tuesday, they launched. So I want to highlight some things that are particularly awesome.

A masterpiece of clarity.

Nothing about AideRSS is confusing. Everything about it is charming. It didn’t take long before half the company were huddled around my desk looking out how our blog was performing. The essence of its appeal is that it doesn’t take more than 1 second for anyone to understand exactly what to do, and what it’s good for.

Start at the beginning.

Let’s start with the clean design of the front page. Look how well balanced it is. The elements on the page are well separated and obvious. The description of the product at the bottom is cleanly segmented into Features, Benefits, and Video tours. The call to action is obvious. Type a blog URL and click Analyze!

Where I spend too much time a day.

The analysis is clean, direct, and uncomplicated. First, they quickly segment the blog posts into quartiles, and they use nice, simple visual cues like the bolder the colour, the higher the quartile. Second, they make it easy to figure out which posts are outperforming others with their nifty sortable table. Third, their PostRank system is fantastic at quickly visually identifying which posts are hot and which are not.

Let’s hear that noise!

The real benefit is that AideRSS subscribes to all the services that track blog conversations, and then organizes them in a handy table. This saves so much time tracking down who is saying what about you, and where. In this case, it is showing comments on our own blog, and impact on Technorati, Bloglines, and Digg. Just click on the little logos to swim in the sea of buzz your latest musings on cat pictures generated.

Why it matters to me.

For someone who is entrusted with the health of the FreshBooks blog, AideRSS is really my new favourite tool. The cold hard reality of this gig is I need to demonstrate that we’re saying what people care about. While FeedBurner gives me readership, AideRSS measures impact, and that is powerful stuff.

Dial this conversation up to 11.

FreshBooks has been looking for a web designer, UX expert, and marketing master lately. I received a cold call from a recruiter today who I presume found us through our job ads. He wanted to sell us his services to help fill this position.

I asked him what his process was. They interview candidates at their premises, and summarize their skills, personality, and communication skills for us. Communication skills were rated on a scale of 1-10.

Confused, I asked him to explain the last point. “10 is like you.” Oh, how flattering. He continued,

9 is someone with an accent. 8 is someone with a heavy accent but doesn’t have to repeat themselves. 7 is someone with a heavy accent that has to repeat themselves.

What about the Liverpudlians?

Riled, I said straight up that I didn’t believe in that since we live in Canada, and he honestly insisted on defending his position: “well, many companies only hire people with communication skills of 9 or above.”

Translation: natural-born, english-speaking North Americans only. South Asian? Quebecois? Newfoundlander? Get lost.

Some pigs are more equal than others.

In this industry, in this country, accents are par for the course because this industry and this country are global in scope. I would never have thought that an accent would mean poor communication skills; I would assume a tendency to use animated clip art in PowerPoint presentations did.

Sadly, this is no surprise to me. Immigrants in Canada have a hard time finding work because of attitudes like this. A lot of people claim to be equal opportunity employers, but really aren’t.

So, folks out there, tell me if you’ve hired someone with an accent? How’d it turn out?