Juggling delivery, admin, and leads: Monthly biz recap

Last month, I posted an overview of my first year lessons from building a solo expertise business. I plan to write on this topic every month, leading to shorter and more timely posts.

As a reminder, solo expertise business means: (1) solo – no employees other than myself; (2) expertise – the value comes from packaging my skills and experience; and (3) business – value capture isn’t limited to selling my labour. I believe that some of what I’m learning would be useful to other business owners, as the lines are blurry between my type of business and early-stage product startups.

This post covers five highlights from August 2024:

1. Discovery package delivery
2. Fractional cash flow and potential product direction
3. Company admin rabbit holes
4. Political distractions
5. Opportunity flow and time constraints

Discovery package delivery

One path towards high profitability is through value pricing, i.e., setting prices for offerings based on the value to the client rather than based on costs. When it comes to selling services, the main cost is my time, so the idea is to move away from hourly billing. This idea has been drilled into me by following Jonathan Stark – his website is a great place to start if you only bill by time.

The idea of value pricing is simple: If something is worth $500,000 to a client, they’d happily pay you $50,000 if they trust you to deliver it quickly. However, it’s not easy to create packages, discover value, and build trust with strangers. It takes time.

In my case, I started experimenting with offering a paid discovery package, where I work with a client to define their problems and create a roadmap. Given the limited scope of such an engagement, I’m comfortable with the risk of putting a fixed price on it. The interesting thing is that the price is somewhat arbitrary, e.g., the package I sold in August was priced at $7,000, but it could have easily been $1,000 more or less. And if I were more established as a consultant, it could have easily been double the price and half the work to deliver.

As I’m inexperienced in delivering such engagements, it took me much longer than I would have liked. But I suppose that’s a part of the learning process. Fortunately, some of what I’ve learned has yielded reusable artefacts – posts on the AI/ML lifecycle and the idea of a universal minimum viable data stack. I keep trying to remind myself that I’m working on building long-term value, so what I’m learning now should pay off eventually.

Fractional cash flow and potential product direction

One problem with learning how to deliver value-priced packages is that it’s all too slow, all along the funnel:

• marketing is a long-term investment;
• converting prospects to clients rarely happens overnight; and
• delivering a high-quality service is time-consuming because I’m far from systematising my packages.

Given enough time, I believe that I can speed up execution and increase the quality of every step – and thereby make my business more profitable. However, in the meantime, the lack of stability (aka feast-famine cycle) has been influencing my morale. I’m also acutely aware of the opportunity cost: While I could be making much more money as a full-time employee, it would come at the price of dedicating significant mental space to a single employer.

As a compromise, I’ve been talking with several contacts about fractional work – the trendy name for part-time work (or retainers, when not billed only by the hour). I recently signed one such contract that will be billed hourly, but will allow me to build the rest of the business while enjoying the peace of mind that comes with some revenue. We’ll see how it goes in practice.

One thing that has emerged from the new contract and from other chats is a new product direction. So far, I’ve been aiming my marketing at well-funded startups in the climate & nature tech space, with services that cover the same responsibilities as those of a first Data-to-AI hire. However, it may be that I’m better placed to help bridge the divide between data science and production-level engineering, or between engineering and science, as most of my work has straddled both areas. I’m not sure what this direction would look like in practice, but if you’re a data scientist who’s struggling to ship valuable work or a software engineer who’s starting to navigate AI/ML, I’d be happy to hear from you.

Company admin rabbit holes

With the fractional contract lined up, I’ve been feeling increasingly uncomfortable about the risks involved with my simple business setup. In Australia, a common way to get started in business is as a sole trader. From an admin perspective, it isn’t much more complicated than being an employee – you’re essentially an individual who can also issue invoices. However, this means that legally, there is no separation between your business and your personal assets.

To create the legal separation between myself and the business, I decided to form a company. Figuring out the correct structure for my situation involved a bit of rabbit-holing, as a company can be owned by a trust, or it can be owned by a holding company that’s owned by a trust, etc. I ended up opting for a simple structure, and Yanir Seroussi Pty Ltd is now its own legal entity. The downside is that there’s a lot more to do to set up the accounting and other aspects of compliance. While I’m happy to pay to get some of this work done for me, I need to understand what I’m paying for – which consumes time I could be spending on other aspects of the business (like delivering the discovery package and building my pipeline).

The whole setup and admin side has been somewhat stressful, and I’m not done yet. But once things settle, I should be in a better position to scale up the business. For example, having a company opens the door to working with clients who wouldn’t deal with sole traders. It feels like it’s in the far future, but at least I’ll be ready when the time comes.

Political distractions

As noted in my previous reflection, being an Australian-Israeli of Jewish descent has meant that the ongoing war in Israel and political reactions in Australia have been impossible to ignore. While I’ve mostly been successful in controlling my exposure to the news, the last week of August presented two new challenges:

1. I was approached to help with a quick analysis of submissions to a Senate Inquiry into Antisemitism at Australian Universities.
2. My local Brisbane City Councillor has used her platform to send a disinformation pamphlet to all households in the area, which I view as modern blood libel against Israelis and Zionists (i.e., people who believe Israel should continue to exist as a sovereign state).

Between delivering the discovery package and dealing with the company setup, I had little time to deal with either of these challenges. However, we live in unusual times, and I’m well-aware of the historical precedent where Jews went from the top of society in places like Germany to a persecuted minority – all in the space of a decade. Therefore, I cleared some time to help with the analysis. I also filed complaints against my councillor with the Queensland Office of the Independent Assessor and the Queensland Human Rights Commission. I believe her actions violated the councillors’ code of conduct and constituted racial vilification.

Abstracting away from my personal challenges, the principle I follow is that life comes before business. While the current wave of hate doesn’t feel life-threatening yet, I’m not going to sit and do nothing as it gets worse – even if it costs me a few followers and a bit of business.

If you’re reading this and you think I’m overreacting, please feel free to contact me. I’d be happy to take you through the details of the pamphlet and other instances of hate. What I and others are seeing is completely different from a legitimate criticism of Israeli government actions. As one non-Jewish, apolitical lecturer put it:

In my entire career, I have never before witnessed such an explosion of political extremism and antisemitism at our universities.

Opportunity flow and time constraints

To end this post on a more positive note, the busyness of August also included increased interest from potential clients. Much of this can be attributed to my consistent marketing efforts. However, I don’t see how I can deliver all the potential projects without employees or contractors, which leaves me with my preferred approach: do less and charge more. Also, as I’m actively trying to think like a business owner, I could generate some revenue through referring leads to other consultants I trust. That’s not something I’m set up to do yet, but it’s important to keep an open mind and expand beyond hourly billing and doing all the work myself.

Bring on September!