When & Whether To Hire A Pro

Indies, let’s get a jump on the New Year by looking at how you look at your business.

This post was sparked by an email I received from an indie copywriter in Illinois which concluded that my seminar, website and blog provided a “vast array of resources” for the self-employed. Then she added, “but to be honest I would just like to hand over my materials to someone that I trust to do the job right.” She asked if I could I be that someone?

She didn’t ask for someone who could “help” or “assist” her but someone to whom she could hand over her material and whom she could trust.

Oh my goodness! I have a number of clients who are musicians, a career that has a long history of performers who didn’t want to have anything to do with business and were stripped clean of their money through the musician’s inattention, blind trust, or through the guile or incompetence of their managers. Haven’t you all heard one or two of those stories? The most recent: Leonard Cohen. It happens to talented, intelligent indies who don’t want to deal with the business side of their endeavors. They get ripped off. Somebody else ends up owning their copyrights. They owe Uncle Sam. Royalties are lost. I’m sure there’s no need to go on.

Indie: You are a business! Your business is you. You must develop what I call an indie-business mindset. I’ve talked about it before.

Self-employment requires that you take complete charge of all aspects of your business. It isn’t like writing copy as an employee of Callous Corp where your taxes are withheld every payday, you get paid for sick days, and if you have questions about pensions you go up to the 14th floor and ask the pension guy about it.

By taking charge I don’t mean that you can’t delegate tasks to someone else -- if you have the right person and the funds to pay that person. But you can never just hand it over. You have to be sure that the person doing whatever it is you hired him or her for is trustworthy and competent, well-informed, follows through, uses good judgment, knows when to take the initiative and when to come back to you for guidance. You can’t do that unless you understand the elements of what you have assigned to someone else.

You don’t have to be an expert on websites to hire a web designer but you’d better have a basic knowledge of how they work and what one will do for your business. Do you do it yourself? Spend $500? Spend $15,000? You don’t want to put three hours a day into FaceBook or Twitter or Google without some understanding of whether 15 to 20 hours a week will give you that much valuable business visibility and promotion.

Whether setting up your fee schedule, engaging a tech guy, or hiring a bookkeeper or a tax pro to do your taxes you must make the decisions. You have to assess whether your choice is clear-headed, sure-footed, and reality-based. Are you deciding based on the facts, on price only, on what’s convenient, on what Aunt Tillie told you? Without some understanding of and some familiarity with the aspect of your business that you're turning over to someone else, you can't make competent decisions and intelligent choices.

It’s only the employee who can just do the work and let the company make all the decisions. You are an indie. And whether you’re self-employed by choice or by circumstance due to these difficult times, you don’t have big daddy taking care of you.

You need information. You must educate yourself. As the copywriter from Illinois said: I offer a “vast array of resources.” You are in the right place to access them. Start educating yourself. Start reading.

And a new resource will be available shortly, The Confident Indie. Please be on the watch.

I wish you a creative and successful 2010!
June