Last week, I told you how I made the expensive mistake of forgetting to prospect. Today, I’m going to tell you how I doubled down on that mistake and made it worse.
To recap: it’s September 2021. I’ve just switched from 18 hours a week to 40 hours a week – creating a huge gap in my schedule.
First things first, I started doing the prospecting I should have done back in June. Contacting old clients, prospective clients I hadn’t heard from, etc.
October rolled around. Had had some good bites from my prospecting, but things take time to go from initial contact through to actual work. I was still at around 60% capacity.
So I took on some ongoing discounted work to fill the gap. Steep discount too! Around 50%. It kept me busy for about two days a week. This seemed like a good idea, because the alternative was earning $0 – 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing, after all.
But I was wrong about that alternative! By November, the prospecting I’d kicked off in September was turning into requests for work at not-discounted rates. But since I had committed a good chunk of my time to the discounted work, I had to turn some of this work down.
What I should have done
I should have just enjoyed the rare break in my schedule and had a bit of a holiday. I’ve been kept pretty busy for five years – there was no real reason this would be an exception.
Alternatively, I could have taken on discounted one-off projects, rather than tying myself up for a long period of time.
Instead, I panicked and did the worst of both worlds: long-term, discounted work that prevented me from taking on higher-paid work.
Expensive!
Next time, I’m going to talk about the last decision I made that reduced my income. Mercifully, this upcoming decision wasn’t a mistake, but rather a deliberate move.