Independent Consulting: Balancing the Value Equation News & Views Feature Article

by Haydon Rochester, Jr. Independent Technical Communicator (Vorhees, New Jersey) Originally published in News & Views July, 1996 issue. Copyright 1996 STC-Philadelphia Metro Chapter. For permission to reprint this article, contact the Managing Editor.

It's 8:45 p.m. on a Saturday in November. You've been working since early in the morning on a document that absolutely, positively has to be in your customer's hands on Monday. Now you're driving to Cargo City in a sleet storm, hoping to reach the FedEx counter before it closes. You're doing this because you've chosen to be an independent technical communicator, providing writing, editing, and related services directly to business customers. A lone wolf. A free spirit. Etcetera. If you're really doing this, it should be because it satisfactorily balances the minuses versus pluses in your personal value equation. For those who might be considering joining us hardy independents, here I explore some of the elements of the value equation as I have encountered them during 15 years in business. Learning from GOD You've seen the trucks--roaring down the interstate, their sides painted with G-O-D in huge red and black letters. They might be delivering small packages of divine intervention: a blessing for Ms. Jones, a curse for Mr. Smith, or a 200-pound barrel of eternal damnation for the guy on your street with the Harley-Davidson. In fact, GOD stands for "Guaranteed Overnight Delivery," a company name that gets noticed and advertises its service in one clever stroke. Achieving such clarity of purpose and message is extremely difficult for the independent technical communicator. When you start out, you may have no specialty, so you stress your breadth of experience. Later, customers who trust you prefer you without experience to a person they don't know who may be better qualified. They say things like, "We know you've never done HTML authoring, but we like the way you did our user's guide, so we want you to do our Web site." Meeting customers' needs is why you are in business, but doing so can frustrate your efforts to define yourself in the marketplace. What you can control are your service standards: that is, how you perform as a business person. Do you deliver on time, every time? Do you stress creative solutions and innovation? Do you understand the conventions of your field and follow them? All these characteristics of your service are yours to control. Decide how you want to do business and stick to it. It will simplify decision making and save you time because you will respond consistently to each situation, and it will define you in the minds of the customers as "dependable," "creative," "businesslike," or whatever, regardless of the specific services you offer or the tools you use. Playing the market Every supermarket has many brands of toilet paper, ranging from products with "cloud-like softness" to those capable of removing squashed bugs from your bumper. The prices match the quality. In the market for technical communications, however, nobody wants the scratchy stuff. Top quality is expected on every project. As a result, you can charge lower rates, but you can't decrease the quality if you want repeat business. (See sidebar.) My approach is to maintain a rate that meets my needs yet ensures plenty of work. I undoubtedly could get more per hour on some projects, but higher rates mean fewer projects and more marketing. Another person might prefer to charge a higher rate, but doing so can mean a lot more "possible" projects that never materialize or projects that stretch the budget and leave the customer reluctant to call again. You must decide what you prefer, because there's no best answer. Once you've found a rate that works for you, believe in it. Someone may offer you an "opportunity" to prepare a manual for an undeveloped software package or a miraculous invention--and you get paid if they sell the product. Just say no! Would you lend several thousand dollars to a stranger? If not, then why consider lending an equivalent amount of your work? The same applies to "worthy causes" that need talent. Few people expect dentists to give free exams and cleaning to the employees of a museum or a private school, yet writers (and artists, too!) are sometimes asked to "lend their expertise" to a newsletter, annual report, or fundraising literature. Before you work for free or for a reduced rate, look at the numbers. Is this an organization to which you would donate several hundred dollars in cash? If not, then why do it in kind? Watch those twofers If you work with quotes or estimates, as most customers demand these days, you must be able to estimate accurately. If you estimate too high in order to cover yourself, you may lose the project (bad). If you estimate too low in order to sell the project, you may get it (worse). If you base an estimate on $50 per hour, but underestimate the hours by half, you face the ugly choice of accepting $25 per hour or begging the customer for more money. I track hours spent on every project, as well as hours devoted to "miscellaneous" business activity and commuting. I then relate the hours spent to measures of work--pages and words--and to the nature of the task--writing, rewriting, editing, and so on. Once I feel confident about the scope of work for a proposed project, I plug in the figures from past experience, multiply by my current rate, and Voila! an estimate. I go to this trouble because I like to get paid for every hour I work and because one of my own service standards is to stick to the figure I quote. Accurate estimates are the key to achieving these objectives. What safety net? As an independent in charge of your own business, you naturally decree a lifetime no-layoff policy on the very first day. It's one of the easiest decisions you'll make. You also have absolute control over the retirement program. You will never be asked to take "a package" except the one you've made for yourself. Subject to the realities of the marketplace, you may work when you want, where you want, and for as long you want. In today's business world this is becoming something of a privilege. Of course, there's a cost. Independent technical communicators are living examples of today's "new economic order." No cushy corporate welfare for us. Our compensation is 100% performance-based. Most of the Sunday morning talk show gurus who tout this flexible economy stuff for others actually hold salaried jobs with big corporations, TV networks, or rich foundations. However, even hypocrites can be right sometimes. It is profoundly satisfying to know that you are surviving by your own wits and energy, and nobody can lay you off, downsize you, or move you to a foreign country. Home alone Being a technical communicator can be lonely, even for a permanent employee. You have meetings, lunches, coffee breaks, and gossip in the hallways, but the job often amounts to sitting down and working by yourself. When you work as an independent, the isolation is far worse. There's nobody to give you a 15-year service pin, nobody to admire your baby's picture, and nobody to give you an annual review--good or bad. You can go to lunch with a customer once in a while, or you can attend STC chapter meetings or PIC meetings, but in the end you must be your own psychological reinforcer. Unfortunately, satisfied customers don't help much, because they usually are the ones who say nothing. Often, you find out that someone liked your work only when a stranger calls and says something like, "I got your name from Liz Blank, who said you did a great job on her Z-799 Capabilities Guide. I need help with a manual on..." This could be two years after the other project. For the independent communicator, interactions with other people tend to be more business-focused. As a professional, you are expected to work immediately and productively with people you've never seen before. You may interact with your fellow team members entirely through phone calls, faxes, or e-mail. Sports, family, cars, pets, and other staples of over-the-cubicle-wall chitchat rarely come up. Of course, you also are spared most office politics, so there are compensations. Ignorance is fun One of your many responsibilities as an independent is training. First, you must keep up with the tools of your trade. You must learn how things work at a deeper level than most permanent staff, because you don't have support people to call. Need a tape drive and accelerator card in your PC? Grab your screwdriver. Installed it yourself and it doesn't work? Dial 1-800-GET-LOST. If you end up with a diversified customer base, you also must learn about many different technologies. Do you know what an STU is? a Pelton wheel? HTG? guardian objects? natural language processing? Neither did I when I first met these things, but I had to find out quickly as I worked. Grabbing knowledge on the fly can be a treat for the naturally curious or easily bored, but it is mentally exhausting, not to mention rough on the ego, to be continually struggling with new concepts rather than coasting along on previously acquired knowledge. What's more, as you encounter new things, you have to decide how much effort to invest in learning them. You can't afford to buy all the books and training videos on Microsoft NT just because you're editing an eight-page brochure on its use in banking. Buck stopping done here Independence means freedom, but we grownups know that freedom means responsibility. As an independent, you are responsible for everything--good or bad--that happens to you and your customers' projects. If an e-mail goes astray, or your new printer jams, or your grammar checker crashes your Windows 95 system, there's nobody assigned to help you but you. In practice, this responsibility is both exhilarating and terrifying. Do you accept a huge job with a company you don't know? Do you buy a Mac or a PC? Do you upgrade your software now or later? Do you rent an office or use your family room? It's always your call. You'll never have to fill out a cumbersome requisition form, plead with a stingy boss, or cajole reluctant building services people to get what you want. Just do it! Then, just pay for it. That's how independence works. Apple and orange souffle Almost everything you encounter as an independent can be assigned a value and compared with an alternative. You can compare an Okidata printer with a Hewlett-Packard printer. You can compare working for a computer company with working for a pharmaceutical company. Unfortunately, to get the best results from your personal value equation, you have to place values on fundamentally dissimilar items. Is it worth accepting $5 an hour less to learn a new technology? Is it worth working on Sunday to go fishing on Monday? Is it worth working at home to be able to meet your kids when they get off the bus? Only you can say. Being an independent technical communicator relates to being a permanent employee as choosing the "Custom" installation for software relates to choosing the "Typical User" installation. All the choices are yours to make. With time and patience, you should be able to build a unique, perfectly balanced career--and a life to go with it. It's 9:45 a.m. on a Tuesday in May. The sun warms your back as you gently ease your little sloop into the main channel. You cut the motor and hoist the mainsail. A gull cautiously circles the boat, eyes your tuna hoagie and bottle of orange juice, then settles on a nearby buoy. A fish jumps, your mainsail fills with breeze, and you glide away. Why are you doing this? You're doing it because you've chosen to be an independent technical communicator. A lone wolf. A free spirit. Etcetera. The Market Rules To succeed in the business world as an independent technical communicator, you must play by the same rules as General Motors, Sony, or Procter & Gamble. There are three main positions you must balance to avoid economic natural selection. To be viable, a project must first satisfy the customer's values, which usually include price, quality, and delivery schedule. There may be other details, such as choice of style guide, delivery file format, and nature of the final product itself (for example, multimedia or printed). If you're lucky, the customer may ask you to help define his or her values, such as by recommending a certain communications medium for a certain purpose. Second, you must satisfy your own values, which include reasonable income, the degree of match between the project requirements and your abilities, and realistic delivery schedule and working conditions. There may be other factors, such as kinds of work you avoid for ethical reasons, desire to learn about certain industries or communications tools, or geographic preferences. Finally, you must satisfy the values of the market. Neither you nor your customer can significantly influence these values. For example, the two of you might agree that leather-bound illuminated manuscripts make the best software manuals, but end users won't pay $50,099 for a $99 software package, so that's that. More realistically, the market influences both you and your customer in hidden ways. For the customer, experience and the customs of his or her industry determine both what is needed and what is considered a fair price. The market controls your cost of doing business and your living expenses, which determine your minimum fee. "I never accept less than $40 an hour," is a statement of market values, even though you may think of it as your own.

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Last updated: November 8, 1996 (rst)