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This article discusses why startup business plans should be short and action oriented. It is mostly intended for new entrepreneurs wondering ‘what makes a good business plan?’

The Hockeystick. My favourite work of fiction.

There’s no such thing as a perfect business plan, but that’s ok. You’re not going to win or lose on the back of it. All you really need is to describe your situation and what you plan to do. The intention is to organise your thoughts, and make sure you’re clear about what you want. Many academics and business analysts will have you believe that your plan should be 100+ pages long, define multiple scenarios, provide detailed resource allocations, and include hundreds of statistics or fancy charts from authoritative sources. This is a colossal waste of time for most if not all small startups. If you don’t have teams to coordinate and millions to spend, you’ll be better served by a lean simple plan.

It’s a business fantasy

By its’ very nature a startup business plan is attempting to predict the future; and we all know the future is unpredictable. So whilst it feels reassuring to write an enormous plan, the first two things you should consider are:

• No matter how hard you work on it or how much time you spend, your plan is fictitious. It’s just the story you’ll tell yourself and others.
• It can never include all possible outcomes or details.
• It is neither right nor wrong. Don’t get fixated by striving to make your plan ‘right’. Likewise, don’t worry about things not going as predicted. Remember it’s just a story, it’s too early to know if it will work as planned. Read the rest of this entry

This article aims to save you time and improve your project success by discussing how to systematically select the best freelancer bids. It is part of a series of articles “How to Find a Great Freelancer Online”.

On any given project, you’re likely to receive somewhere between 10 and 50 bids if you post it to one of the larger recommended sites. As a general rule, the larger the project the more interest you’ll get. Bigger projects are far more lucrative, and occur less often in the marketplace, so freelancers tend to queue far and wide to try and win it.

Don’t bother talking to everyone…

If you don’t have a system for managing this deluge, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of bids you receive. Reading them is hard enough… responding to them all… no way! Read the rest of this entry

There are literally hundreds of websites now where you can hire individual freelancers or contract to full service outsourcing companies. Your choice could make or break your project. So how do you find a good one?

This article is part of the series “How to Find a Great Freelancer Online”.

In this article we will discuss the best websites to find a high quality freelance or outsource service providers. These are the sites that I’ve used, or had personally recommended to me by other entrepreneurs. I consider these to be the market leaders for services, and I really don’t think there’s much need to look further. Just like I don’t really need more then 1 or 2 eBays… the same idea applies.

Without further ado, here are my top 4, in order of preference:

• www.rentacoder.com
• www.guru.com
• www.elance.com
• www.odesk.com

If you think I’ve missed an important one let me know and I’ll add it!

Want to blaze your own trail?

Suppose you don’t like the above four, what should you look for generally? These are the features you want as a minimum: Read the rest of this entry

By far the best way to manage change, is to not have any… but we all know that even with the best planning and the simplest task there are bound to be a few holes. 

Sometimes it may not even be you that causes the change- it could be your freelancer. So we need a way to keep it organised, and reduce the risk that the project will spin out of control.

In this article I’ve included a few examples of how things can break, and at the bottom is my current system for managing change in *any* small or medium project.

Read the rest of this entry

This is a brief discussion on controlling change within a live outsourcing project; in particular, ‘reducing scope’, or removing or simplifying functionality. This was a topic I was completely unfamiliar with when I first got into using freelancers. Over the course of a 12 month project, small uncontrolled compromises compounded each other, and in the end ‘broke’ many of the business objectives. Expensive rework, flawed functionality and a system that didn’t work as expected were the price I paid for inexperience.

On a smaller project, a few corners cut here and there may seem like no big deal, and sometimes they aren’t. On larger projects (starting at several $K), or projects that extend over longer periods of time (weeks/months) small reductions in functionality or simplifications of requirements can really start to have a negative impact on your finished product.

Why would you want to cut corners?
You’ve done your plan, you’ve worked out what you need, you’ve found a freelancer who has agreed to do the work. The obvious question is why would you want to cut anything out? Well from my experience, once a project (software in particular) gets underway a couple of things happen that will force your hand.

Your outsourcer for the first time actually takes a good look at your requirements. If you’re not careful, up until this point they’ll have been giving your requirements lip service. It seems totally crazy to agree to a project that isn’t understood… but that’s the way many do it. They’ll have been focussed on the sales effort, and will have committed only very limited resources to actually understanding your requirements. Now all of a sudden they’re responsible for building it and payday is guaranteed… all they need to ensure is that they can turn a profit on it. Read the rest of this entry

In a recent post on  Entrepreneur’s Journey blog, Yaro has an interesting discussion on being a successful entrepreneur. To (crudely) summarise the post, his point is that to be happy and successful you need to have positive patterns of behaviour. Do what you know you should be doing, and positively reinforce that behaviour (think positively about the actions you’ve taken). Check out the link to read it in full.

I read this post and it struck a cord. This is a battle I am currently waging, and one that I am winning for the first time in my life. I used to believe that fixing my behaviour would make me more successful. However, I now believe that behaviour is a symptom, not a cause. If you are struggling to fix your behaviour, you are probably focusing on the symptom and aggravating the cause.

Ok, so what does this have to do with outsourcing?

Both a lot and nothing Like many entrepreneurs I have a… shall we say ‘peaky’ personality. I experience high-energy high-productivity highs, and low-energy, low-productivity lows. For the last 6 months I’ve taken the conscious effort to ’smooth’ this out, by being more disciplined in how I think about things; in particular problems and challenges. I’m not bi-polar, but I’ve discovered that I do have some thought processes that promote ineffective behaviour.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a fluffy-wuffy touchy-feely kinda guy.

I am a big fan on the power of being positive, but I’m not into new age fluff. However, I recognise that I struggle to sustain ‘positivity’ and am prone to fall off the wagon. As part of a long search for a solution, I picked up a book called Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life written by a renowned psychologist Martin Seligman.

Without sounding like a vegetable-kissing-tree-hugging-hippy, this book has dramatically improved my life. It will help you understand your cognitive thought processes- it is not fluffy, and will not have you chanting-positivity or star jumping at dawn. It does give you a great set of tools to apply discipline to your thoughts. Read the rest of this entry

Welcome to Part II of how to use customer feedback to select a freelancer. This article covers how to analyse and vet customer comments, as well as how to do a simple web background check.

This article is part of a series on How to Select a Great Freelancer Online.

You can find Part 1 here.

Read the recent positive comments

Don’t just take an average rating as your guide, jump in and read customer comments. In particular, find jobs that sound like yours and see what customers had to say. Were they ecstatic or just so-so? Check the English quality in the posts, if you find recurring grammatical errors, or strangely recurring comments. Not everyone is an English major, but sometimes these little things can help you identify falsified comments, or at least suspect ones.

Customer’s Seem to Have a Positive Review Bias

Be aware that customers are often coerced, begged, cajoled by their freelancer to leave favourable comments. The freelancer may also try and use their personal relationship with the customer as leverage to ensure that ‘minor issues’ are left out of reviews. Some flippant examples…

“Look how hard we worked for you, it COST ME money to finish your work!”

“Hugh my friend, it has been an honour to work with you. I will leave excellent feedback for you. I would be privileged if you would do the same!

Why mention this? Are they bad people for trying to sway your grade? No… it’s just business. A bit of a gentle squeeze can add a few points to their average rating, and a few extra dollars in their pocket.

The point I want to make is that glossy reviews are more the norm than the exception. Average providers with charismatic ‘front men’ will have very similar high positive ratings, to technically excellent providers. You need to look very closely to see the difference.

An average quality freelancer will provide a worse experience then an excellent one; but they’ll do a better job convincing you that there were good reasons why you had trouble! The fact that there is a positive bias in customer reviews is another reason why outsourcers with bad ratings should generally be avoided. Read the rest of this entry

This post is the first of a series on How to Select a Great Freelancer Online. It specifically discusses how to use past customer feedback and work histories to ‘read between the lines’ and reveal a freelancer’s real performance. You can find the index for the series and the first article here.

Part 1 of How to use customer feedback/ratings covers:

• How to use the average feedback rating (or score) to weed out under-performers
• How to assess past work performance and determine a freelancer’s credibility
• How to avoid being Scammed

Part II of How to use customer feedback/ratings (find it here) covers:

• How to analyse customer comments, what they mean, and reading between the lines
• How to do a background check on your potential outsourcer

So, On With Part 1. Customer Feedback, Past History = Future Performance?

The only way to verify someone’s past performance and identity online is by reviewing their customer feedback and interaction within outsourcing websites. All freelance/online outsource sites have customer feedback because it’s extremely useful for filtering out the trash (scammers, fly-by-nighters, psychos etc.). When using feedback and ratings it’s essential to remember that it isn’t perfect. As any investor will sorely tell you, past history is no guarantee of future performance! Add to this the fact that feedback histories can be gamed/manipulated, you’re left with an information source which is only useful if it’s used with care.

How to analyse customer feedback:

All feedback is not created equal, some reviews should be given more weight then others, and there are hidden stories in the data. Here are a few things to look for to keep you safe. Read the rest of this entry

This series of articles will help you achieve a much higher success rate on your projects by discussing how you can determine a good outsourcer/freelancer from a bad one. While it’s not 100% perfect, using my approach will dramatically improve your chances. I’ve used this approach on dozens of projects, and found that it has a excellent success rate.

When hiring a freelancer, we’re looking for someone who is adequately skilled, can communicate effectively, and who is going to take an interest in your work. It can be frustratingly difficult to find all of these qualities.

It’s also pretty common knowledge amongst freelancer’s that this is what most entrepreneurs are looking for. So it’s not surprising that on any given project, many of the bids received are designed to convince you that the bidder has all of these qualities… some bidders even go to the extreme of not addressing your project criteria at all; and instead focus on the touchy-feely ‘look how friendly I am’ stuff.

If you’re new to outsourcing, it’s normal to be drawn to the happy-friendly-feel good bidder. They make you feel comfortable and they always seen nice. I made this mistake early on, believing that many of these bidders must be so experienced, so smart, so great, that they need not concern themselves with the details of my project. I’ve had some major disasters (projects breaking down once the details are worked out) as a result, and I implore you to ignore feel good bidders and focus on my criteria below. Getting someone you can work with is important, but it’s essential that you don’t get drawn into the empty sales pitch!

So how do you pick a good freelancer? Read the rest of this entry