A client emailed me this morning asking me if I was free to teach some classes this month.  It’s a Sunday, and I was still in my PJs, drinking coffee and wading through my mail.  Most of us who are self-employed and carry our offices in our computer bags know the deal.  Get up, do a little working out, then get some coffee and fire up our laptops to see what’s happening in the wild worlds of our professions.

My husband, upon hearing that I’d have some more classes to teach, took a picture of me working and posted it to his Facebook account.  (Hey, he’s proud of me.  This is no bad thing in a husband!)  But it was what he asked me before he posted the picture that got me to thinking:

“Honey, are you worried this might come across as unprofessional?”

Yes, this is my writin' chair. Students? This is where I tend to prep those wonderful handouts I give you, too!

Well, no…

I wouldn’t go teach in my jammies, but c’mon…  Not everyone who works from home has a dedicated home office that’s the sole place they work.  I think this is pretty common knowledge.

Oh sure, I could get one of those stock photographs of a pretty smiling woman leaning over someone’s shoulder and pointing to a computer screen as part of the teaching image for my website.  And sure, I could imply that I work from an office, and keep quiet about the fact I haul my laptop to coffee shops, on trains, on planes and even on balconies watching the sun come up on the beach.  I could imply a staff, but I’m a hired gun.  Have laptop, will travel; that’s me!

While I still get an enormous kick out of doing this, it’s not unusual.  Lots of people live this way.  I think putting the reality of contracting out there (yes, we can work in our jammies, but yes, we also tend to work seven days a week) is a good thing, though.  Being self-employed isn’t the rock star lifestyle some like to make it out to be, but neither is it without some nice perks.

To add a blank character between words, type a space between quotation marks. This adds a blank character between the separated texts.   Whatever is between the quotes, be it a space, text or characters, it will show up in the concatenation.

So, if you were trying to create an email address at Hogwarts, the formula would be:

=CONCATENATE(A3,”.”,B3,”@hogwarts.edu”)

What?  Your end users are complaining?  Your staff hates the system?  Your IT person has rolled her eyes at the users so often that her pupils have fused to the back of her skull?

What happened?

Upgrading often has some resistance, yes.  The reality is that people often don’t like change.  The longer a person has used a system, or the more expert the user is in other areas, the more reluctant the user will be to embrace the new system.  Fact of life.  Even in the face of this, you might want to make sure that you didn’t fall down on the training end.

It is not uncommon to shoehorn teaching duties into your IT staff.  They know the material, right?  So they can teach it, no problem!

Wrong.

Teaching –especially teaching a technologically resistant learner, is an often frustrating job requiring a specialized skill set.  Your IT guy may be brilliant at what she does otherwise, but might be exactly the wrong teacher.

5 signs your subject matter expert might be the wrong teacher

1. The SME is contemptuous of the end user.

Yes, everyone in the tech field has spelled “end user” “l-user” at one time or another.  We’re human.  We get frustrated.  I’m just saying that if your IT person has a shrine to the BoFH or has a mug that says RTFM¹, this person might lack the necessary empathy in this particular area to be a good trainer.

2. The SME has a lack of verbal facility.

If you can’t translate “geek” to “normal” you’re not in a position to train the end user on the new system or software.  Can that IT person you’re thinking of yanking away from his computer do that?  Talk to him.  If he uses expressions like “dumb down”, let him get on with what he knows and can do well.  Find someone else to teach.

3.       The SME equates technological expertise with intelligence.

This is an incredibly common sin among the IT crowd.  While in theory it needs to stop, in practice, you get someone like this as a teacher and you’ve set yourself up for a real mess.  There are several professions notorious not only for intelligence, but for resistance to change in computer systems and applications.  Don’t believe me?  Go to your nearest hospital and take someone from the IT department out for a drink.  Ask them who they hate to teach the worst.  You’ll get an hour on why they hate training senior physicians.

I think we’re agreed that to get an MD, one must be of at least slightly above-average intelligence, yes?

The problem is a bit of a lack of empathy on both parts.  Doctor Labrat really is used to being an expert.  She’s not used to the pain of being incompetent at anything.  Chances are good it’s been a long time since she’s perceived herself as having the time to study anything outside of his field.  IT is Ms. Sysadmin’s field.  Part of her job is learning new applications and systems.  This is routine for her, and it’s in her field.  Ms. Sysadmin, unless she’s a teacher as well, won’t know how to guide an intelligent, accomplished person through the pain of being incompetent and will likely chalk it up to mental laziness on Dr. Labrat’s part².

4.       The SME hates public speaking.

Teachers are public speakers.  We’re good at it, we know how to engage an audience.  We know how to be clear and we know how to inspire.  If that’s not happening, it might be because your teaching candidate doesn’t like talking in front of people.  There’s no shame in this.  Let her get on with what she’s good at and why you value her work in the first place.  Don’t shoehorn her into something she doesn’t know or do well.  Training your employees is too crucial a job to give to someone who doesn’t know how to do it.

5.       The SME doesn’t have the time!

 Teaching a good one-hour class takes about three hours of preparation for new material.  If the system is less than three months old, or the teacher has not taught a live class in this very subject more than once, it’s new material!  While it might look like a good teacher just gets up in front of a class and spontaneously spouts that entertaining and informative lecture, it doesn’t really work that way.  Spontaneity is often a matter of careful preparation.  Don’t mistake the casual competence for a lack of prep time!  If your employee doesn’t have three times the prep time that he has for face time in front of the class, your employee doesn’t have time to teach!  Get a contractor, hire someone, spread the duties around.  Do what it takes to get your employees trained properly.

The subject matter expert can be the right teacher.  Just keep in mind that teaching is a skill set all its own.  Study your people carefully and see if they have the skillset for training.  If not? Well, there are lots of trainers out there ready to help you on a contract basis.  Check around and good luck!

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¹Please read the manual, sir.

²Not that mental laziness doesn’t happen at that level. It can anywhere.  But unless you’ve got a real teacher, it might be hard to spot.

If that client is now providing more than about 20% of your business, stop cheering right now and start panicking.  No, seriously.

There’s an expression for this sort of client – the Gorilla Client.  Sure, that big client seems great, and yes, big projects with lots of work/pay really are.  But like having a big, powerful gorilla in your office, it can be a problem that becomes bigger and stronger than you are.  Any problem with that client is now a potential threat to your entire business.  You’ll find yourself structuring your business around the needs of that single client. You’ll find yourself tempted to leave off working for other clients and concentrate on that one[1].   Sure, you want to provide good service.  Good service should be at the heart of your business.  But you do not want to rise and fall at the whim of a single client.

So, why do we accept Gorilla Clients?  It’s mostly laziness and greed, from what I can see.  If you don’t love marketing (and plenty of freelance writers don’t), any excuse to be able to write and not market sounds like a lot of fun.  If you’re getting plenty of work, it’s hard to be motivated to do something you don’t like.

A good way to avoid this is to budget your time carefully.  Since you’re in charge of your work day, make sure you dedicate a certain percentage of that day to marketing no matter how busy you get.   Yeah, I know.  If you’re swamped with work from one client, it’s hard to make yourself go looking for more work.  Suck it up and do it.

Remember that as a freelancer, you can choose how much work you’re willing to accept as well.  How many hours a month are you willing to work?  I go monthly rather than weekly, because there will be plenty of weeks that you’ll be hammer and tongs at a deadline for one particular client.  That’s okay as long as you’ve got more work on deck, and are keeping up on your marketing. What you don’t want to do is let any one client suck up your professional time over a significant period of time.

I actually consider myself a client for purposes of time management.  As a writer, there’s a certain amount of non-commercial “sharpening the saw” that’s necessary to stay fit, stay alert and stay skilled in my profession[2].  Now I don’t dedicate anywhere near to 20 hours a month on it, but I do make sure that I leave time to write, to work on projects with no direct result and to make sure that I’m exploring avenues that might be useful in the long run.

This article is meant for the one-man shop.  If you’re finding that you need at least 40 hours a week specifically to spend on client work, chances are good that what you really need is at least a part-time admin assistant or sales person.  If you’re in love with being a one-man shop, raise your rates.  That’ll take care of the problem well enough and you’ll bring your time management back into balance.

But, I have a bone to pick with you web developers, business owners, and bloggers out there.  Many of you don’t have mobile-friendly sites.  Why is this?

Even back when I was living in the dark ages and was not using a mobile device myself, I understood that there were plenty of people around who were.  My sites all have a mobile version.  Granted, I’m running WordPress-powered blogs for the most part, so getting the plug-in wasn’t exactly hard or anything.  I did it because I know that when you’re bored, reading short pieces appropriate to a blog is a common way for the wired to entertain themselves.

Don’t think it’s just for blogging, though.  More and more, people will be using mobile devices to search for information as they’re going about their day.

Categories for which a mobile-friendly website is crucial:

• Restaurants

Every one of us has looked around, at our friends and voiced that time-honored phrase, “Where do you want to go for dinner?”  We don’t always ask this question in front of a computer or phone book.  Make sure that you have a mobile-friendly page that shows your location, hours open, menu and a general idea of prices.  It’ll make it more likely for your customers to pick you.

• Bloggers

Yes, that theme you designed is very pretty.  Guess what? I can’t see it on a screen smaller than the palm of my hand, and I’m not visiting your site because it’s pretty.  If I read a blog regularly, it’s because I find what you have to say entertaining, informative, or more likely both!   Have a mobile version.  And if you’re worried about ad revenue, don’t.  On your mobile version, you can set it so that the ads show interspersed with the text or at the bottom of the screen.

• Anyone that sells things over the Internet

Amazon has a mobile-friendly site.  Big department stores do, too.  If you sell products online, you really want your potential customers to be able to make an impulse purchase from their mobile phones.  You don’t have to spend a fortune on a site that’ll be friendly to your mobile customers,  and you want to be able to make it easy for them to make that impulse purchse.

Let’s assume you’re convinced.  So, what makes a website mobile-friendly?

• Vertical Design

Mobile devices generally have a screen that is narrower than it is wide.   The user will be scrolling down a great deal to get to content.  Make sure the most useful content is right at the top – rather like going for page rank on Google.

• Minimized clicks

Make sure that your user doesn’t have to click on too many internal links for the site to be useful.  However, resist the temptation to put all of the content on one page.

• Minimized textual input

Typing on a mobile is a pain.  Make sure you’re not forcing your user to fill out too many forms.

• Minimized Image Use

Think icons here.  Don’t integrate the image into the usefulness of the site!

• Good Content organization

Make sure you sit down and draw out not only a generalized design, but make some flow charts about how your user is likely to navigate the site.  Test this with people who are not web developers until you can get a usage flow that makes sense and is fairly intuitive.

Remember that your main site, the one that people will be browsing on larger screens, can be considerably more elaborate.  What you want here is a version of the site built specifically for your mobile user.  If you’re considering a new website, make sure that you get a designer that understands these principles.

Do you need project management software?

Do you like it when it’s free?

Okay, silly question. We don’t like to pay for stuff when we don’t have to.

Well, I have a program for you that you might like. I’ve been using this one myself for over a year and couldn’t be more pleased. It’s called Clocking IT and is designed with the IT professional in mind. That said, I use it for an awful lot of writing and document design project where I’m being paid by time spent rather than by project.

It works like most project management software. You can have multiple clients and projects, a discussion group for any project that you choose to make collaborative, and you can have multiple users for each company account. There is a Gantt chart option to ensure appropriate allocation of time and resources, and the reporting methods are both powerful and flexible.

The program is web-based, but you can enter time spent offline into the database quite easily.[1]

I find it useful not only to track how much time I’m spending on clients, but also to make sure that I’m dedicating enough of my time to marketing and development projects. Since I do also collaborate with other people, I sometimes give them user accounts with my company to ensure that we’re on track with whatever project we’re working on.

All in all, for the small business, this is a very cool program and the price can’t be beat!

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[1] Which I actually did for about ten hours on a train trip up the East Coast last year!

So, for a couple of weeks, I used OpenOffice and Google Docs instead. Now, I was familiar with both programs. By the nature of my work, it’s useful to be familiar with as many computer applications as possible.

Open Office’s interface is more or less like Office 2003 or lower. You have a menu bar, and a customizable toolbar with buttons. Unless you memorize the steps you need to do something rather than read menus and popups, you’re simply not going to have any trouble. For minor differences, the help files are clear. I’ve already accessed them about three times writing this and always found my answer pretty quickly.

Writer works well and plays okay with documents created in Word. Calc can handle the most complex spreadsheets I work with in Excel, and the Impress presentation application could handle the presentation I created in PowerPoint for an SEO talk I give, though would require some minor cosmetic tweaking were I to use it to give the presentation. I have no idea how Base and Access play with each other. I have little occasion to use database software other than when I am teaching.

Microsoft Office or Open Office: What Do I Use When I Have the Choice?

I prefer Office 2007. Here’s why. I’m used to it[1]. Once I got used to it, I did find that I liked the intuitiveness of the ribbon interface. It’s as simple as that. There’s nothing I do in an Office program that OpenOffice can’t. (Well, other than study to teach Office 2007, mind!) If you’re looking into a productivity suite and are short on cash, I can’t urge you enough to check out OpenOffice. The features are great and the price can’t be beat.

What about Google Docs?

I’ve used Google Docs professionally. No, seriously. I’ve had clients who wanted me to write the documents in Google Docs and share them. I also use it when I’m collaborating with other authors. It’s not as robust a word processor as either Open Office Writer or Microsoft Word, but it gets the job done for basic tasks.

Its spreadsheet capabilities are pretty limited, though. If you’re doing charting, use named ranges or perform complex 3-D calculations, you really want to use either Calc or Excel.

As far as its presentation capabilities? Eh… Animations don’t seem to work on it[2], but other than that, it’ll play static slides okay. Some might consider this a feature rather than a bug, and I don’t blame them. There are people who overdo the animations!

Still, the takeaway for all of this is that you’re not limited to buying a very expensive productivity suite for most of your computing needs. Sure, I like and use Office 2007, but you really don’t have to.

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[1] And I teach most of its applications, so it’s a suite I know very well, indeed!

[2] At least, how to add animation is not immediately obvious and is not susceptible of a right click!