Many (lucky) entrepreneurs like myself need to work a day job while trying to start their business. A start-up doesn’t usually rake in the money immediately, so the bills need to be paid somehow.

I’ve have made a few observations lately about where I’ve gone wrong in balancing my priorities over the past few years and how I want to adjust the course. I need to get this thing going!

The need to set aside time every day

I remember reading a free report called 279 Days to Overnight Success a few years ago and being inspired by one particular story:

For the past nine months, Dave has been getting up at 5:00 a.m. every day to work on his business before heading out to an office. His “real job” is as a senior software QA Manager for a major defense contractor, but lunchtime and late evenings are also spent plugging away at the business.

I often get this false sense that anyone who starts a successful company does it with this magical time in their lives where they don’t have a job and become shabby hobos until they “make it big.” But here is a story about a guy who puts his nose to the grindstone and does what it takes to make it work.

Also to quote the report:

I can tell you from experience that unless you set aside dedicated time to produce your art, the art will not get made.

So you need to set aside time every day to work on your business.

The need to set aside the right time every day

For quite some time, I had been working on my business in the evenings, and that tended to not work so well.

1. I want to spend a little bit of time with friends and family. Evenings are when people tend to be free to socialize.
2. I want to exercise and stay in shape. Also, I’ve found that going to the gym is not a great motivation to get out of bed in the morning.
3. I have a lovely fiancée. She needs my love and attention and the occasional phone call. This usually needs to happen in the evening. (I’d hate to see what this would look like at 6:00 am.)
4. I do fairly similar work at my day job. As I crank out code during the day, I run out of gas by the evening.

That last point has been key. I cannot count how many nights I finished my day job and felt paralyzed when it was time to start working on my business in the evening. Many times, this would lead to firing up Netflix and starting it at, drooling helplessly.

As for the evening, anything that I can muster up after 8 hours of working the day job is also spent on my business. But if a social event comes up (or a haircut or exercise or a call from the fiancée), I can do that in the evening too. And I can rest assured that I’ve already invested a few hours into the business that morning. Win.

The need to prioritize

Of course, the hard part is setting priorities. (Isn’t it always?) Which is more important, my day job or my business? Which needs to suffer a little? Something needs to suffer if you’re prioritizing anything in your life effectively. You can’t say yes to everything.

I ultimately needed to make the decision that starting my business is more important to me. So now I get up early to work on the business first. So far, I get a little tired at the end of the day job, but it’s doable.

Good news: this is only temporary

The final key ingredient is knowing that this entire plan is temporary. One day, I’ll be able to use Clear Crystal Media to pay my salary. I just need to make some sacrifices now in order to make that happen.

When that day comes—if I do everything right—I won’t necessarily need to get up at an ungodly hour in the morning to continue building the business. Utopia is the dream, right? Let’s get to utopia.

Photo credit: IMG_1058 by kevint3141. Some rights reserved.

At first glance, I am intimidated by the idea of documentation of this type. Web design and development changes rapidly. It’s insanely hard to keep up. Sometimes it feels like once I’ve finally mastered a technique, a new tool or technique comes along to replace it. But then again, this very problem makes me a slave to those very things.

5 Reasons to write an operations manual

Now I’m working on getting past those worries and investing some of my limited time to write policies and procedures. Let me clarify that when I say, “policies and procedures” or “operations manual,” I mean more than just an HR handbook with sick day, vacation, and sexual harassment policies. I’m talking about a set of documents that record a business’s day-to-day operation as well.

If you haven’t read E-myth, do it. If you have read it and need some inspiration, here are 5 ways that I’ve further reasoned with myself on the need to write documentation.

1. Writing everything down forces me to make some decisions

This is probably something that most entrepreneurs like myself struggle with. Committing anything to paper forces me to put a stake in the ground and decide how things must work.

The scary part is that I very well could make some mistakes in my first iterations (and beyond). But reviewing documentation will help me to identify room for improvement and fix it.

2. I have an opportunity to focus on my vision and craft an experience

I want to be more than just “some guy” creating websites for money. I want to create a great experience for customers who want websites and technology that work for them. “Some guy” cannot do that, especially if he ever wants to take vacation, retire, and die peacefully one day. Really, the best place to start is by writing all of it down.

Many wildly successful businesses are prototyped, tested, tuned, and documented. The late Steve Jobs and his team prototyped a full-working Apple Store in a gigantic warehouse before building a real one, just to make sure that Apple got the experience right. Ray Kroc used his first McDonald’s location as a testing ground to get things right before building more locations and a killer franchise business.

Instead of spending all day focusing on the drudgery of tasks at hand, writing documentation gives me some time to craft and tune my vision. And it’s an investment, not a waste of time.

3. I will be well on my way to being able to hire help

If I want to change the world in a significant way, I’m not going to be able to do it by myself.

Creating policies and procedures means that tasks can be delegated to others. If the policies and procedures are written well, then employees can be trained in a way that empowers them to deliver a particular experience to customers.

4. The operations manual gives employees ownership of the company’s operations

You would think that it would be the opposite, and I suppose it could be the opposite if I ended up running my company in an oppressive, draconian way.

I am excited about having employees that take ownership of the operations manuals for their own roles. Areas identified for improvement can be prototyped, tested, and refined in an objective manner.

Those who “get it” the most can be promoted to a position where they take ownership over a team’s operations.

5. Tacit knowledge needs to be squashed

Oh, tacit knowledge. Often, I’ve heard technicians joke about their knowledge being job security. In the end, this attitude hurts a business and its customers. What happens when that guys leaves?

As long as the documentation is taken seriously, everything important to know to keep the business running will be recorded. If someone moves on to another position at another company, they should leave behind some of the knowledge in the form of policies and procedures.

I’m not saying that documentation should turn employees into cogs that can be easily replaced. But the business must survive and be bigger than any individual person’s talent. Ultimately, this is in the customers’ best interests.

Now the rubber hits the road

I’m sure that I will learn some stuff along the way, and I plan on sharing some tips. Does anyone out there have any tips to share? Leave them in the comments!

Photo credit: Checklist by peretzpup. Some rights reserved.

Technorati Tags: business, documentation, policies, policies and procedures, policy writing, procedure writing, procedures, Writing

Life is all about showing up.

This statement is true, but it’s only half-true in some situations.

“Showing up” every day is important. Persistence and consistency in pursuing your goals will undoubtedly cause you to accomplish what you set out to do. Being present and intentional no matter where you are makes a difference.

But then I entered real life as I got a little older. Over the past couple years, showing up hasn’t been enough. I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t remember everything that I want and need to do. I can’t accomplish everything that I set out to do if I set my goals in an ad hoc fashion.

You can call this revelation maturity or common sense (how humbling for me to admit). I’m assuming that a lot of people either get this or don’t. I’ve refused to believe that I can’t do everything. I’ve suffered a lot of grief as a result. I’ve been guilty of missing deadlines, dropping promises, and neglecting relationships.

Now I’ve changed my mantra because my life is much more complex than it was at 25 (and I suspect that it will only get more complex as I move forward with some of my goals):

Life is about choosing your priorities and then showing up.

Oh how the subtle details make a difference. With clarity in what I need to show up for, everything becomes quite a bit easier to manage.

I hope that I can detect the difference when I enter the next stage of my life, whatever that may be.

Technorati Tags: ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, goals, internet marketing, life, life lessons, priorities, prioritization

John Sumser describes this problem and provides worthwhile solutions to counter it in his post, Networking Is Not Working. SURPRISE! The solutions all involve hard work, which most people are unwilling to do. Instead of spending time working hard on shipping a great idea, people schmooze to feel like they’re getting things done.

I love the statements at the end of his list of solutions. Here they are, cut out:

1. Being known as a net contributor is worth 75,000 fake smiles.
2. Being known for your work is worth 100,000 insincere compliments.
3. Flaking out and not keeping up with your membership is minus 90,000 gold stars.
4. Being knowledgeable is worth 50,000 conversations with feigned interest.
5. Being a good friend is worth all of the money you will ever make.
6. Being relaxed and self-confident is worth 30,000 LinkedIn connections.
7. Being good for your word is worth all of the other elements combined.

Technorati Tags: ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, internet marketing, networking, social networking

Here’s what happened on this here internet marketing blog in September, in case you missed any of it:

• Umair Haque on constructive capitalism
• Quote: What God thinks of money
• Getting started with HTML
• Becoming the authority

And here’s what happened on Polymorphism, my sister web development blog:

• Follow me on Twitter
• ColdFusion on Rails is almost here
• SuperPreview: Microsoft has done something good for a change
• Accessible links in printer style sheets
• Aggregating RSS feeds with Delicious, Yahoo! Pipes, FeedBurner and CFML

Technorati Tags: ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, internet marketing

So how do you learn HTML? You start with the basics. On Mondays, I will be teaching you some of the concepts that professionals think are “over your head” so that you won’t be lost with this stuff anymore. I am a believer that education is the best way to end the frustrations that we feel on both sides of the client/agency table.

A simple definition of HTML

HTML is a document format. Please let me emphasize that HTML is not a language, even if that’s what the L in HTML stands for (Hypertext Markup Language).

When writing an HTML document, you format your information with tags. The purpose of tags is to give your content meaning. You use tags like <p> to denote a paragraph, <strong> to give emphasis to parts of your text, and <ul> to denote an unordered list of items.

Here is an example using those scenarios above:

<p>This is a paragraph about HTML. With HTML, you can do things like this:</p>
<ul>
    <li>Create an unordered list, which typically appears as a bulleted list.</li>
    <li>Add emphasis to your text by <strong>bolding it</strong>.</li>
    <li>Link an HTML document to <a href="http://www.example.com/">another document</a> on the Web.</li>
</ul>

How HTML is used

When you go to a website, your web browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, etc.) asks a web server for a document. Think of the web server as a computer that’s connected to the Internet whose job is to wait for requests and send out content when those requests arrive.

The web server typically sends HTML back to the browser (though it can send things like movies, images, and PDFs too). The browser then reads the HTML and decides how to display the code.

In your browser, if you go to the View > Source menu to see what the HTML for this page looks like. That was the code that the browser examined to display what you are reading right now.

More to cover

HTML works hand-in-hand with many other technologies, which I will be covering in the coming weeks. I will describe how it works with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a programming language called JavaScript, Flash, search engines like Google, and how it relates to data in a database.

Please ask questions as I describe this stuff. And be sure to point out anything that I may be missing. Clear as mud so far?

Technorati Tags: ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, design, glass case, html, internet marketing

(Shout out to Reality Check, a book by Guy Kawasaki.)

Technorati Tags: ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, dorothy parker, glass case, god, guy kawasaki, internet marketing, money, quotation, quote, reality check, wealth

Umair Haque @ Daytona Sessions vol. 2 – Constructive Capitalism from Daytona Sessions on Vimeo.

I like the idea that idealists will lead the real innovation/revolution. We’re already seeing it out of companies like 37signals and Google.

Spare 50 minutes and give this one a watch.

Technorati Tags: 37signals, business, capitalism, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, constructive capitalism, economics, glass case, google, umair haque, video

• Aug 3: Avoid slot machine marketing
• Aug 5: Information as payment
• Aug 10: Setting up your GI Joes
• Aug 17: Measuring organic keywords referring traffic to a given web page
• Aug 19: Measuring organic traffic sent to a given page
• Aug 21: Permanence of email marketing
• Aug 24: Full posts now available when you subscribe
• Aug 26: Gravatar: A profile picture that follows you around the Web
• Aug 28: Online marketing suite: I have a dream

And for the nerdtastic out there, here’s what happened on Polymorphism, my sister technology blog:

• Aug 14: Improving the tutorial: Object- and query-driven partials in ColdFusion on Wheels
• Aug 18: My first usage of jQuery
• Aug 20: Improving the tutorial: using the same view for multiple actions in ColdFusion on Wheels
• Aug 22: Designing navigation for web applications
• Aug 25: Wheels + jQuery partial for setting form focus
• Aug 27: XHTML 2/HTML 5 comic

Technorati Tags: blog, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, internet marketing, marketing, polymorphism, round-up, Technology, web development

If you have a big idea, do it now. Don’t feel like you have to save your best stuff for later. And don’t put it off. If you get in the practice of coming up with great ideas, then you will find ways to outdo yourself later.

It’s funny how some lessons can stick with you years later.

Technorati Tags: ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, ideas, internet marketing, marketing