Be your own best customer

Hi, everyone. So, I’m Ben.

I’m sorry I didn’t get to say hello to you all earlier because I wasn’t here. But it’s nice to be here, and, yeah, I’m looking forward to having a quick chat to you. So, I’m a window cleaner, and I also run a copywriting agency. And I also co-host a podcast with that beautiful human being over there. But I’ve worked for myself in one way or another for 20 years.

Normally, at this point, I guess you can’t tell because of the face cream, but I’ve got a four-month-old and I feel like I look worse than my age at the moment. So as someone who’s worked for themself, I love meeting other people that work for themselves. Most people here work for themselves? I’m always interested in the why, the why people start working for themselves.

And when I meet people that are employed, I’m always thinking to myself, I can see why you’re employed, but why don’t you just do this for yourself? I don’t have really an employee attitude anymore. It’s a long time since I had a job. A proper job, and yeah, I kind of feel like I’m not employable anymore. And you probably,

maybe you feel the same. But especially I’m interested in the reasons why people start working for themselves. So, I’ve set Fab up here. Fab, if I asked you this sentence. If I asked you to finish the sentence, I started working for myself because… How would you finish that? So, I started working for myself because I wanted to build a life on my own terms in business and

everything else. Yep. Love it. Does anybody else feel brave enough to share why they started working for themselves? Please. I started working for myself because I like doing stuff. Not managing people, doing stuff. Not managing people doing stuff. Yeah. Like that. Anyone else? Penni, come on you? I started for myself, in complete honesty because I wanted to go traveling.

And I couldn’t do it with a job. Love it. Thank you. Great reasons. They resonate with me. Definitely. I started working for myself after I got my dream job. So, when I was younger, all I wanted to be was a sports reporter. I loved sport, I still love sport. I wanted to be a reporter. I really wanted to be a commentator, but I couldn’t really see the route.

I thought if I start off as a sports reporter, then maybe that can be a little route in. So, I didn’t go to uni, at 19 I talked myself into a job on the sports desk of a small publishing company near where I lived. I thought, this is it, this is the dream, writing about sport, going to watch sport, talking about sport.

When I was really little, I used to commentate on our family’s activities. So, we’d be walking around, and my older sister would be going shut up Ben. I’d just be commenting; Mckinney’s doing this, going there. She called me Action Replay, that was my nickname when I was little. So, at 19, I got my dream job and I was this sports reporter.

Amazing. Have you ever achieved a goal and then when you’ve got it or whether you’ve had it, you find out that actually it’s a bit naff and it’s not really what you expected. So those sports that I was going to watch were played on just windy village greens, freezing cold winter, horrible. Stood there on my own with nobody,

nobody else there, not even the man and the dog. They’d be played by people who are, who were probably then, my age now. And my weight now. So. Translation; old and slow. The reports that I wrote would get cut to probably 50 words by my grumpy, miserable editor who would mumble into his soup about apostrophe use, and we didn’t have a swear jar in the office,

we had an apostrophe jar, which I had to fill in quite regularly. I just realized it wasn’t really what I wanted to do. It wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t, just didn’t feel right. And I thought to myself, like, what I really do want to be is my own boss. And the reasons I wanted to be my own boss, I asked you your reasons.

My reasons were partly financial, cash. I wanted to earn more than the 6,000 pounds I was being paid as a junior sports reporter. More than that, I think I wanted to be in control of what I earned. I wanted to think if I put in more effort, I could see more. And actually, if I put in less effort, I wouldn’t mind, you know, if I wanted to travel a bit, or go away then I wouldn’t mind earning a bit less for that, I’d happily take that.

And I wanted flexibility. So, like you, Penni, I wanted to travel. I wanted to go away. All my mates were at uni or off on gap years, and I’d been working in this little sports department for a couple of years. I wanted to travel, and I wanted to be able to say yes to opportunities. That was a big thing for me.

Often when you’re, you know, you feel like you’re in something, you can’t say yes to things that come up. So, I want to separate at this point reasons from goals. I’m obviously older now. My family circumstances have changed. The goals I have for my business and for my personal life have changed as well. I definitely go on fewer holidays, you know, that was a goal when I was younger, I go on fewer holidays now than I used to.

But the reasons I work for myself are still the same. I still want to be in control of what I earn, how I earn it, and I want to be flexible. I want to be able to choose my own hours. I want to be late to events and not get told off, that kind of thing. So, we’ve all got our reasons, and depending on how long you’ve worked for yourself, you might feel, I feel like this.

Sometimes I feel like those memes you see online, is it meme or meme? My mum says meh meh, but I don’t think it’s meh meh. You know those memes online, you’ve got how it started, you know, really bright, positive, and then how it’s going or the expectations and the realities. Because those expectations that we set ourselves,

we have them with the best intentions, don’t they? So it might be that when perhaps your reason for being self-employed is that you’ve been made redundant, or perhaps you didn’t earn enough in your, you know, your previous job and you want to earn more. It might be that that’s an expectation that you go self-employed. You think I’m fully in control.

I can earn more than I used to, but maybe that hasn’t happened. Things are really difficult. It’s really difficult to run a business and earn money. Maybe you are earning money, but the way your cash flow works just means that you never feel like it’s yours or it’s never available to you. Perhaps you are making money, but every working hour or every hour under the sun you’re working, and you don’t feel like you’re in control of your time.

Maybe you just don’t enjoy what you’re doing. Maybe you think, like, in my case, I wanted to be a writer, so I changed, you know, 6 or 7 years ago, I wanted to be a writer. And actually, it’s really hard work, and sometimes I don’t enjoy it. That might be part of it too. When those expectations kind of get out of hand

in that way, they can feel as if, they can lead to a kind of a fear of failure, I suppose. A stat I came across a couple of weeks ago when preparing for this talk, was that nearly half of all small business owners feel trapped in their business, and I’m in that half. I’ve worked for myself for 20 years.

Like I said, I can think of at least 4 or 5 occasions where I’ve either felt trapped or out of control in the way I run it. Now, I’ve said the word control a lot already today, and I say it a lot on our podcast, and it’s a funny word. I talk about it so much that I do,

I’ve started to worry that I’m a bit of a control freak, and I’ve never thought of myself as that. I still don’t think I am really, but without an element of control. When working for yourself, the expectations that we set ourselves when we start out can lead to those feelings of failure if they’re not met. And the problem when we work for ourselves is that it’s really easy for the control in your business to be given to somebody else willingly.

And it’s a baddie, a nemesis. It’s your customers. And that sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Because we all need clients. Whatever business you do, you’ve got clients, I’m sure. And one of the two most important things in your business is cash, and cash comes from your clients. But the other important thing in your business is time. I’d say that time is probably your most valuable resource.

And if the need for the cash has started to outweigh the time that you have in your level of control on time, you can feel trapped or out of control. So, I’ve got a really obscure movie reference here. I used to be a big fan of movies. I don’t get to watch them too much anymore, and when I ran this reference past somebody in the audience yesterday, she was completely blank and said she didn’t know.

But it’s a film called Lady in the Water. It’s from about probably 15 years ago by M. Night Shyamalan. I can’t remember the premise of this one character, but there’s a guy in the movie who I think he’s trying to set a world record, and he walks around with one dumbbell, quite a big one, and he never switches hands.

All he does is walk around with his dumbbell in his right hand, doing this, all day, and as a result, he’s got one enormous bicep. He wears a vest all day. One bicep is huge, but his other arm, it’s just normal size. He walks around all day, and I reckon that if you solely focus on the needs of your customers all the time over yourself in your business, you end up like you’re doing bicep curls with one arm and never switching to the other and

you end up lopsided, and this arm would be super strong, so you’re probably giving your customers the best kind of service that you can. I bet that you know, customer comes to you. Yep. Do it. I can jump whatever all the time lifting, lifting and doing the, doing the things your customers need. But at some point, you’re going to need your other arm.

You’re gonna need your left arm, in my case. And if this arm is really weak, it won’t be able to hold you up or lift up what you need when you need it. So, the title of this talk is; Be your own best customer. And what do I mean by that? Because it sounds a little bit oxymoronic.

Let’s just take a few minutes. I want to look at what makes a really good client. Can you picture for me in your mind, your best client, if you’ve got one, hopefully you have. And if you haven’t, picture what you want one to be. I’ve had times in my career where I haven’t really liked any of my clients, and I’ve wanted something different, so it’s important at those points to try and picture the kind of customer that you’d really like to have, and let’s picture how you want them to behave, the kind of qualities that you want.

Here are the three things that I want in a customer. So, in either business, however we get them, I want a customer that is open to change, has an openness to being different, to doing something different, because growth more often than not requires change. I want a customer that is willing to invest in themselves because effort is required on one side, and obviously I want them to pay me.

We’re not going to focus on payments at this point. And I want them to commit to a process once they’ve made a decision. I want them to see things through because transformation doesn’t happen overnight. So that’s my client. That’s what I want for my client. That’s my goal. But I’m going to flip those qualities onto myself when I run my own business.

So the first one was openness to change. And when I talk to clients and say, I think you need to change something, often this, they’re looking so closely on the macro level of the way they run their business that they can’t see it. It requires space, doesn’t it? So, if I’m thinking about my own business, the openness to change requires me to step away and to look at a bit of a bigger picture.

That is really hard to do if you’re feeling trapped, if you’re feeling uncomfortable in what you’re doing, you’re going to feel even more uncomfortable trying to change it. I guarantee that that’s just life, isn’t it? It requires being honest with ourselves and admitting that something we’re doing isn’t working. In the 20 years that I’ve been working for myself, I think that if I was honest with you, this is the hardest thing that I’ve had to get my head around, because I don’t know whether it’s the comfort of just doing what I’ve always done, the way I’ve always done it, or a fear of failure.

Maybe even a fear of success. I’m not sure I still struggle with making change in the business because, I don’t know, it just requires that ability to step away. And I think probably a lot of the time I’m too busy. The second thing was a willingness to invest in themselves. I don’t want to make this about money. You know, everybody’s income has been up and down in the last few years.

So, this is not necessarily a financial thing. Invest doesn’t always mean putting your money into something, but it might mean opening up things in a different way. Opening up time and being open to do, to stopping doing something that is taking you away from making a correct decision. And the last thing was a commitment to a process. Who here has set out an intention to make a change, made a difficult decision, started doing something, bought a course, announced on LinkedIn that you’re changing something in the way that you do it, and then not seen it through? me.

I’ve definitely done this, and the thing I would ask, the question I would ask at this point is why? Because if we flip it back round again, if we talk about the way that we deal with our customers, these are probably the things we would say to them. We’d say, why? Why won’t you do this? And I guarantee doing another flip, that’s the last flip you would do it for your customers or you would encourage your customers to do those things.

But it’s much harder to make that decision and encourage yourself to do it and to see it through. So, I’m going to wrap up a little bit because I feel like those are the three key questions that I ask myself. Those are the three key questions that I have the hardest time answering. There are lots of other questions that we ask ourselves in in business in terms of, you know, time and money.

And obviously we want clients to pay us. We want clients to treat us well, and we want clients to respect the way that we work and respect our boundaries. Those are things as well. When it comes to being, you know, your own best customer. They’re important too. But these three things openness to change, a willingness to invest in yourself, and a commitment to a process.

I feel like those are the things that if you’re struggling with your business at the moment, if you’re new in a business, if you’re doing something new and you’re wondering whether it’s working and whether you want to see it through, or if you’re thinking about changing something yourself. Respect your time. Respect the way that you work and be your own best customer.

That’s all I’ve got for you today. Thank