Reviewing my income for the 2021-2022 financial year, and it’s a bit lower than I would have liked. Over the next few newsletters, I’m going to tell you some reasons why. Here’s the first reason.
I used to work part-time – 18 hours a week. That is not very much! I never bothered with prospecting for work because I had the opposite problem – I constantly had too much on, and was always chasing my tail trying to hit deadlines.
But in September last year, I changed things up, and switched from part-time to full-time.
You can probably see where this is going: 40 hours is a lot more than 18. But I had been so busy with client work, I hadn’t given this a second thought.
So I sat down to work my first full-time week in September, and realised I was going to blow through every single thing I had scheduled by halfway through the month – with nothing scheduled beyond that.
Not a great feeling.
What I should have done
This was highly foreseeable. I had known I was going to switch from part-time to full time, so in June or so, I should have started prospecting by contacting people (like previous clients, general contacts, and even cold outreach to potential clients) and letting them know I would have some availability.
In fact, I should have built an entire prospecting system, with a clear set of processes to keep my pipeline full – because panicked, random acts of prospecting are extremely inefficient.
But whether you have a system, or if you’re doing random acts of prospecting, it’s always going to take time to go from nothing at all to actual work. So June was the time to think about this – not September!
This meant a slow couple of months – which I resolved by making another mistake. I’ll tell you about that next week.