Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: The Benefits of Freelancing

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Several years ago, my career hit a serious downtown, the kind most careers never recover from.  I made a series of bad business decisions, including hiring two terrible employees who did everything they could to gut my business.  I compounded the initial mistakes by making more mistakes.  On top of that, my health collapsed.  I was ill twenty days out of every month, incapacitated for at least ten of those days.  In the middle of all of that, I hit my mid-life crisis.  Don’t let anyone tell you a mid-life crisis only hits men.  It hits women too.

During those dark days, I kept threatening to give up the writing.  Now, you have to understand what this means.  Giving up writing—for me—is like giving up breathing.  I sometimes say that I, the daughter of two alcoholics, am an addict too, only I’m addicted to writing.  If I don’t write, I go through withdrawals.  This, by the way, is not a joke.  If I am in a particularly bad mood, my husband will tell me to go write something.  If I take his advice (and I don’t always), I feel much better.

So for me to say that I was going to give up writing—and more importantly, to mean it—meant that something was seriously, seriously wrong.  I felt like I was at the bottom of a very deep pit, and I couldn’t figure out a way to climb out, so I simply decided to give up.

Or I would have, if I had an answer to the very reasonable question my brilliant husband would ask me whenever I brought up quitting.

What else would you do?

I had a list that I worked my way down.  At this time, our local radio station needed a news director.  I was overqualified for the position, so before I applied, I investigated.

The job paid one-third of what I earned during those bad years if and only if you added in the costs of the benefit package—a measly health insurance policy not as good as the one I had as a freelancer, and two weeks paid vacation.  To earn one-third of what I was doing, I would have to commit 40 hours per week (and occasional weekends, if there was a news story) to the radio station.  I would have set hours.

I would work for someone else.

In fact, every job on my list—from waiting tables (yes, waiting tables looked good to me then) to going back to editing—required me to work for someone else.  On their schedule.  With no hope for an increase in pay, except at the once a year or once every two year performance review, and then the increase would be rather small (by my freelancing standards).

The only job I came up with that even marginally approached my freelance lifestyle (but not my freelance income) was teaching at a university.  In order to do that, I would have to go back to school, get a masters degree, and get a Ph.D.  Not so bad. Sometimes I miss living in a college town.

But to get my degree(s) would cost money. I would have had to uproot my husband (and my cats), move to a part of the country with infinitely worse weather than the Oregon Coast, and – oh, yeah—be on someone else’s schedule.

Worse than that, when I graduated, tens of thousands of hard-earned dollars later, I’d be at the bottom of someone else’s totem pole, at the bottom of the pay bracket which was at that point (again) one-third of what I was earning in the bad years, and oh, yeah, I’d be working for someone else.  Deeper in debt, no promise of job security (not as a first-year professor), and no real way to earn my way out of it all quickly.

I could have opened another small business (which required a capital outlay—and oh, yeah—it would have to be something else I loved. Since I’ve only had one job I loved for longer than one year (writing), I doubted the new business route worked for me).  My husband even offered me the option  of loafing for two or three years while he supported me.  (Bless him.)  I know that was a serious offer, but I also know he understands me very well.  He knows that after two days of vacation or two days of “doing what I want”—basically two days  of not writing—I’m absolutely miserable.  He made the offer, but he knew the chances of me actually succeeding at lying on the couch, eating bon-bons and reading all day were between slim and none.  I get cranky when I have a week’s worth of research reading and no time to write.  Imagine how I’d feel if I had years to do that.

Okay, some of this is my personal pathology.  I’m really not wired to do anything else.  But beneath that was an honest, desperate search for solutions by a woman who had hit bottom.  I really saw no way to revive my career.  I had given up.  But I didn’t want to do anything else—or nothing else.

I didn’t have blinding revelation.  I didn’t have a life-changing insight.  I realized slowly and over time that I was doing what I loved, that things had gotten bleak, and I had to rebuild.  I found a doctor who helped me live with the health problems, taking my bad days down from 20 per month to seven or so, and taking my worst days down to a maximum of four per month.  (This sounds so easy.  It took two years of experimentation and work.)

I fired the last bad employee, dug in and figured out what damage he had done, and started to repair it.  Then I slowly rebuilt my career, examining every single part of it, figuring out what I wanted to keep and what I didn’t, and figuring out where I wanted to go in the future, and designing a path to get there.

Slowly—and I do mean slowly—I climbed out of that horrible deep dark pit.  What kept me on that climb was not the goal, or even the ability to work hard.  It was a daily reminder—sometimes by listening to the new news director on the local radio station, sometimes by watching the waiters at the local restaurant, sometimes by simply reviewing the options of other jobs (or plain old slacking) and realizing (again) how unsuited I am to all of those.

Unsuited really isn’t the right word.  If I had to, I could have done any one of those things.  The real key was, deep down, I didn’t want to.

I didn’t want to give up my freelance lifestyle.

I’ve been an on-again, off-again freelancer for thirty years.  Every time I got a real job, I came screaming back to the freelance life. The longest fulltime job I ever held lasted three months.  Even the news directorship, which I had for years, was intermittent.  I was always acting news director, stepping aside when a new, permanent news director came on board.  (Of course, they lasted only a few months, so I’d get the position again.)

What do I like about freelancing?  Just about everything.  The pros, the cons, the ups, the downs, everything that I’ve mentioned in this guide, I’ve not only experienced, but I prefer to working a day job.  I’ve tried very hard in this guide to keep a measured tone about day jobs because I intellectually understand their necessity.  I know why people have them, why people believe that a day job gives them security, and why they would want such a thing.  And if I had had children in my twenties, I would have followed a different life path. I would have gotten a day job, and hated every minute of it, and done it for the security, for my dependents.

But I have no dependents.  Dean is a co-equal partner with me in our various businesses (yes, we have more than two), and he likes the risks as much as I do.  As I’ve said before, we really don’t see them as risks.  We don’t take risks.  We make educated choices based on all of the knowledge available to us.  That we chose to do so without the “safety” and “security” of a large corporation behind us shows our questioning natures from an early age, not any great wisdom or stupidity.  As I said in the day job sections of this guide, I have never believed, even when I was in my teens, that any job was secure.  I’d seen too many people lose theirs, too many people fired for no apparent reason.

And when I was seven, I watched my dad lose his tenured college position in part because he had the courage to speak his mind. (A long story, one someone [not me] wrote a book about, but suffice to say that you can’t have tenure at a college that ceases to exist, and you can’t easily get a job at another college when you’re known as a whistleblower.)

These things—tragedies, really—helped me become a freelancer. I didn’t have to jump over as many mental hurdles as some of my freelancing colleagues when they started.

But risk taker or not, traditionally security minded or not, all freelancers face the same problems and have the same benefits.  I’m sure every single freelancer you talk to will have a different list of benefits for doing the work, but here are mine:

1. I work for myself. I set my hours.  I decide what I’m going to do every day.  Through the work I chose to do, I set my income levels.  Sometimes I turn down boring high-paying projects.  Sometimes I take a high-paying crappy project because I need the money.  I make the decision.  I don’t get assigned that project by someone else.

2. I do what I love. Yeah, yeah.  If you read the entire Guide, you know there are parts of freelancing that I loathe. But I do those things—well, not exactly happily, but not unhappily either.  Because I’m doing them in service of the work I love.  Without those things, I could not do what I do.  They make the rest of what I do worthwhile.

3. I never complain about going to the office. I’m happy to go to work, even if I’m not enjoying the process.  I found it fascinating that when I first opened the Guide to questions, the first questions I got were about taking time off.  I had to ask other professionals how they take vacations because I don’t take one.

Many freelancers don’t.  Why?

Simple.  The work we do now was the thing we did for fun in our free time.  Why take time off from something you love?  (Yes, yes, I know. Rest and all that.  I do rest.  But I don’t see why I need a vacation from something I would do on vacation if I had a day job.  That makes no sense to me at all.)

The idea of time off—and time off as part of a job description—comes from having jobs that you don’t like, jobs you only do for the money. And if that’s the only reason you’re freelancing, friend, then go out and get a day job.  Freelancing’s too hard to do if you don’t love the work.

4. I get to design my own workspace.  I almost wrote that I get to work at home, but I’ve had businesses where I didn’t work at home. Even then, I designed a Kris-style work environment, one suited just to me.

5. I am a creator.  I can’t tell you how important that is.  The economy survives based on how many creators it has.  Those of us who develop our own product and our own businesses don’t just create that product. We also create jobs. In addition to the people I hire, like the house cleaner and gardener I mentioned in the employees section of the guide, there are also the people I keep employed, people whose businesses I frequent with the money I bring into my local community.  From the grocery store to restaurants, from the local bookstore to the clothing stores, the money I spend here doesn’t come from here.  It comes from all over the world, and it helps to fuel the economy in my small town.

6. I am responsible for my own career.  In other words, if I succeed, I succeed because of what I do.  If I fail, I fail because of what I do.  I mentioned the two bad employees in my first paragraph above, and if you read only that paragraph, you might think I blame them for the downturn in my business.  I could, I suppose.  A lot of people would.

But I’m the one who hired them, I’m the one who trusted them to do their jobs with minimal oversight, and I’m the one who didn’t fire them soon enough.  In other words, they caused a lot of damage that would never have happened if I had acted promptly.  Their mistakes are my fault.

7. I control my finances.  I might never make as much money as some writers.  I might not make as much as I would have made working for that friend who offered me a job in Hollywood all those years ago.  But I am not in this for the money, although money is a factor.  I can earn more if I work harder.  I have put myself in the position, as a lawyer friend once told me, to hit not one, not two, but multiple home runs financially.  I might never do so.  But I have the chance, a chance I wouldn’t have had if I had taken a day job.

That chance means less than you think it would, especially if you’re still putting in your 40 hours for a paycheck.  Because you are working for the money, so you’d expect me to as well. But I’m not.  I’m working for the enjoyment.  And study after study after study shows that people who work for themselves are happier than people who work for someone else.

Other studies show that people who are happier live longer than those who are unhappy.  I’d much rather be like Frederik Pohl who, in his nineties, is writing a blog and publishing a book a  year than I would be like a friend of mine who has retired in his sixties, doesn’t know what to do with his days, and is now worried (because of the changes in the economy) that his pension will run out.

Retirement falls into that vacation mindset to me. I retired from editing at the age of 37, and I was happy to do so. Relieved, actually.  I never ever want to do that again.

But retire from writing? Who are you kidding? When I die, I want to die like Jack Williamson did.  He was in his mid-nineties and had just finished a novel.  Or like Robert B. Parker, who died at his desk, while working on the current book.

8. A continual intellectual challenge.  I’m always learning something and doing something new.  Not just related to writing, but also related to business.  I follow court cases that apply to my field, financial regulations that deal with publishing, the changes in publishing methods now happening all over the world.  I constantly work to improve my craft.  I’m always reading something weird and interesting connected to my job (see my Recommended Reading List).  I travel to places I would never have seen otherwise, from places as beautiful as Paris to places as unexpectedly interesting as Salt Lake City.  Each trip is an adventure and each adventure comes from my work.  But I still work.  The last time I was in Paris, I slept very little, not just because of the book tour interviews and signings, but because I stayed up late every night, writing down what I did, and making notes for future stories, doing research, and learning as much as I could about a new city and a new country.  I think these things are fun and challenging.  And lucky me, they’re part of my job.

9. The harder I work, the luckier I am.  That’s the real secret to freelancing.  We seem to have lost the value of hard work.  People want to take things easy, and if you’re one of them, don’t freelance.  But if you like to be busy, then freelance.  You’ll always have too much to do.

But the real secret to freelancing?

Enjoyment.  It’s all about the fun.  When I teach writers, I give them a writing assignment and then tell them to go play. They often look at me like I’m nuts.  But seriously, that’s what I do.  I’m playing every day.  I make things up for a living.  I do something I would do even if no one ever paid me for it.

I’m having fun.

Life is hard enough without slogging through your daily existence.  We all get sick. We all lose family and friends. We all have setbacks and failures and unexpected (nasty) surprises.  Why add on the burden of a hated job if you can at all avoid it?  The biggest benefit to freelancing—for me, anyway—is the fact that it makes life enjoyable.

I even recognized that in the depths of my despair a few years ago.  The worst day at my freelance job is better than the best day at any day job I’ve ever had.

That’s what has kept me freelancing for thirty years.

And, if I’m lucky, will keep me freelancing for at least thirty more.

And there it is. The last installment of the Freelancer’s Guide.  <Whew>  140,000 words of material.  I’ll be spending the next three weeks trimming it down, getting rid of the repetition, and making it presentable.  Then I’ll send out e-copies to everyone who has donated.

Sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll do a short post on the experiment that is the Guide: Did it work the way I expected? Do I consider it a success? I’ll crunch a few numbers, figure out the tangible and intangible benefits, and let those of you who’ve come along for the ride know how it all went.

Thanks ever so much for being a part of this. As I said, it’s been fun.

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: “The Benefits of Freelancing” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Because I was teaching last week and madly finishing up a novel (which I’m still working on), I got behind in posting the new electronic stories. WMG Publishing is reprinting my entire backlist of short stories in electronic editions, and WMG’s imprint, Five Story Publishing, is publishing groups of those stories by theme in collections. The collections are economical, cheaper than buying the stories individually. The blurb about the collection lists story titles, so you can make sure you’re not getting the same story twice.

I’m only going to post the most recent collections here. I haven’t yet notified you of about ten short stories, so poke around your favorite e-book site. You’ll find other things by me. Also, remember that Smashwords has e-books in all formats. I’ll also list Kindle here. It takes about six weeks for the books to hit Barnes & Noble, and the iBook store, so you can either use the Smashwords file or check back. The books will hit those sites eventually.

First the largest Five Story collection–Five Short Novels:

Five novellas, or short novels, for about 120,000 words of fiction, which is much larger than most fantasy novels. In this collection, you’ll find “Coolhunting,” “Broken Windchimes,” “Dragon’s Tooth,” “The Recovery Man’s Bargain,” and “The Spires of Denon.”  Three are from ongoing series–Abracadabra Inc. (“Dragon’s Tooth”), The Retrieval Artist (“The Recovery Man’s Bargain”), and the Diving universe (“The Spires of Denon.”)  The other two are stand-alone award winners.  You can also get all five as single books.

Kindle, Scribd, Smashwords.

What these five stories have in common is this: They’re set in Oregon and I wrote them.  Otherwise, they’re a group of very diverse tales.  Two are nominally sf (“The One That Got Away” and “Going Native”), two are mystery (“Patriotic Gestures” and “The Moorhead House”) and one is…well…just a Kris story (and one of my favorites): “The Amazing Quizmo.”  There will be other five-story collections with matching settings. This just happens to be the first, and set in my home state.  Go figure.

Kindle, Scribd, Smashwords

Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine’s September/October issue contains my story “Mr. Alibi.”  It’s about an unusual detective and an even more unusual situation.  A bit fun, a bit weird.  You can order it here or get it at your local newsstand.  Or download entire issue on Kindle or Fictionwise.

Due to some publishing weirdness that no one can adequately explain to me, Hitler’s Angel won’t be available in the United States until January of 2011.  Except at one bookstore.  The exception came because I live near that bookstore.  North by Northwest Books has copies for sale and they are signed. The bookstore will ship anywhere in the United States.  You can contact them here:

North by Northwest Books
Sheldon McArthur, proprietor
Streetcar Village
6334 S. Hwy 101 #9
Lincoln City, OR 97367
541-994-3087
mcarthurca@earthlink.net

You can also order the book through British bookstores.  Bookbrain.co.uk has a handy list of the stores that have the book in stock.

Hitler’s Angel has been getting stellar reviews in England. Crime Time has a thoughtful full page review.  The Daily Mail called it “a little gem of a thriller. Startling and wonderfully effective.”  So find yourself a copy.  I think you’ll like it.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-1290621/Thrillers.html#ixzz0uejjUWzx

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: The Benefits of Hindsight

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I don’t know if we get wiser as we get older, but we certainly gain a lot more experience.  The experience comes in handy, if we chose to use it.  And sometimes that experience is just there, a part of our personal history and nothing more.

I had a discussion with someone this recently about hindsight.  We both discussed our fathers, both of whom discouraged us from our first marriages.  The person I was talking to is going through a divorce right now.  I went through mine 24 years ago.

We both agreed, in the course of our conversation, that our fathers had been right. We also agreed that if we had looked at those relationships now—from the outside (with someone not us) and with the benefit of another couple decades of living—we would see the upcoming problems as well.

Relationships follow patterns, and people often get attracted, particularly early on, to someone who might give us an opportunity to heal problems that currently exist in our own lives.  Watching other people’s relationships have given me insights into my own.  But that all comes from experience (and an annoying tendency toward nosiness).

The conversation with my friend wasn’t a bitter one though.  In fact, we both laughed about our poor fathers’ inability to stop us, and we both expressed some empathy for our fathers in that situation.  Because as clearly as our fathers could see the situation, their experience didn’t extend to preventing it.

Then, of course, both of us contemplated what might have happened had we listened to our fathers. If I hadn’t married the first time, I would probably never have met my current husband.  If I hadn’t met Dean, I certainly wouldn’t be typing this now.

As I’ve said before, I don’t regret that first marriage, despite the pain and anguish it caused me and my ex.  Not only do I (we, I hope) have some good memories, but that relationship was a critical one in forming both of us.  Fascinatingly to me is this:  Had my ex and I stayed together, his children would never have been born.  Had we done things “right,” he would have lost the family he has now, and probably not had a different one in its place.  I never wanted children, which we discussed at the beginning.  My ex, at nineteen, figured (without telling me) I’d change my mind.

I never did.

Most of us use hindsight the way I did here, to explore the various possibilities of our lives, the paths not taken.  I actually looked at that very topic in a story I just published in Analog, called “Red Letter Day.” The idea being if you could write a letter to your younger self, helping that person either change something in their life or not, what would you write? Would you write at all? (Still haven’t entirely answered that one for me.)

But we can use hindsight for more than what-if exploration.  We can use hindsight as we build our businesses.  In fact, I believe hindsight is an essential tool of business building.

In my post on failure, I wrote, “Failure is something we need to practice.  Handled well, failure leads to success.  In fact, I know of no long-term successful business person who lacks a failure in her background.”  Later in that post, I wrote that I believe that failures handled well are more properly termed setbacks.  Of course, I wrote three posts on the topic of setbacks as well.

What changes a failure to a setback? Attitude.  I know a number of people, several of them men, who have not remarried after their divorces.  Most of those men never even dated again.  They were so rocked by the failure of their marriages that they simply could not conceive of another relationship at all.  They weren’t willing to try again.

Sometimes this attitude is healthy.  It comes from suffering physical pain.  It’s hardwired in.  When we get hurt badly, we don’t want to repeat the behavior that caused us that pain.  This makes sense when it comes to touching a hot stovetop with your bare hand—you’re not going to do that again if you can at all help it—but makes a lot less sense when applied to everything in life.

If we avoided everything that hurt us, emotionally and physically, over the years, we’d eventually stop doing anything.  I’ve turned my ankle crossing a room without tripping on anything; does that mean I shouldn’t walk again?

Back in the failure post, I used the analogy of the child learning to walk. Toddlers don’t give up.  They want to move on their own too much to stop, even though they fall constantly and often hurt themselves.

But that’s a simple analogy.  I don’t think (don’t remember, honestly, and don’t really know) whether or not toddlers analyze what made them fall.  I suspect toddlers just get right back up and try again without any real thought except some version of I’m going to conquer this thing; everyone else I know has.

That bullheadedness serves us well in many areas of life. Sometimes you need to get right back on the horse, the bike, whatever cliché you prefer.

And sometimes you need to analyze what went wrong.  You need to use hindsight.

Because I have a driving desire not to ever make the same mistake twice, I get really angry at myself when I do make a single mistake over and over again.  I don’t quit whatever it is I’m doing—I’m closer to that bullheaded toddler than I let on in public—but I do rethink it, and sometimes I take a vacation from it.

Case in point: Business.  Business, unlike writing, is something I learned as an adult.  I’m a very organic writer.  I read, gather information, and eventually apply it.  I can teach what I’ve learned—somewhat.  But as I recently explained to a group of professional writers who had all come to study with me, if you delve too deeply into my ability to express my knowledge about writing, you’ll learn that my ability to describe what I know is pretty shallow. At some point, I just shake my head and say, “Look, just do it.  If you can’t do it then, we’ll see what else we can figure out.”  Not because I’m frustrated with the student, but because my own learning process in that area is so subconscious that I can’t even articulate how I know what I know.  And sometimes expressing what I know is equally hard.

On the other hand, I learned business in the school of hard knocks.  And when I say hard knocks, I mean the kind that make little cartoon birdies and stars revolve around your head for years.  I can point out each wound and scar, each dent to my thick skull, and every single slight that every happened, my fault or not.

Why am I not bitter?  Sometimes I am.  I occasionally indulge in the pity party or the nasty analysis of someone who has hurt me years ago.  But mostly, I learned relatively young that looking backwards and wallowing in regret does me no good whatsoever.

Life moves forward whether we want it to or not.  Our choice is whether or not to move with it or to give situations the permission to batter us around.

Hindsight is the tool that allows us to move forward.  It is also the tool that allows us to go near a stove again.  We assess what went wrong, and then we see if it’s even possible to move forward again without repeating the same mistake.

Once you put your hand on a hot stovetop, you realize that you have to approach that stove with caution.  A toddler might stay away from the stove entirely, since a toddler can’t see the top, and judges the entire thing harmful and can’t yet understand a stove’s benefits.

But an adult realizes that there are many ways to approach that stovetop, most of which will not hurt, if you’re careful.  One thing most of us do, however, is keep our bare hands away from any part of the stove that’s on.  Most of us never put our hands on that top without looking at it first.

Simple caution, based on experience.  It allows us to have a useful, if dangerous, item in our home.

But let’s move hindsight away from the realm of the physical into the realm of the mental.  Pain can be emotional.  The emotion comes from severe stress and trauma.

I’ve owned many businesses, and I’ve failed at a lot of them.  I’ve approached each one with the idea that I won’t make those same mistakes again.  Often, I decided not to go into the same kind of business again.

When Dean decided to open a collectibles store as a hobby, I wanted nothing to do with it.  I had worked retail from the age of twenty forward, and my ex and I owned a frame shop and art gallery that was a retail shop.

I hated most of the aspects of owning a store.  I hated the hours.  I hated the stuff.  I hated the cash outlay required to get inventory, to rent (or buy) a building, and most of all, I hated waiting for customers to come in.

But Dean had owned several shops, and had loved them.  I was not about to stop him from doing something he loved.  So I helped him plan, using the mistakes my ex and I had made in the past, combining those mistakes with the ones Dean made in his early stores.

That planning, and all of that hindsight, allowed us to build a successful business.  I didn’t ever stand behind the cash register, but I was part owner.  Dean and I made the major decisions together.

Our experience paid off.  Dean’s expertise in collectibles made the store a destination stop within its first year.  The inventory came from Dean’s collections, and his judicious purchases of other people’s collections.

Because Dean knows himself quite well, he also realized that the joy in any project for him is building that project.  (That’s why he became an architect.)  He literally built this business from scratch, making a deal with an owner of a strip mall that we would pay to fix up a dilapidated space inside that mall in exchange for three years of rent.

The nice thing about that rent deal and the previously owned inventory is that together, they gave us the opportunity to walk away from the business if it didn’t work.  We had three years of free rent, so we had three years to see if the business could sustain itself.  We had more than a year’s worth of inventory, so we had relatively few start-up costs.

The business became so successful so quickly (which we did not expect) that Dean realized he was going to have to put more time into it than he had planned. That realization too came from experience.  He had done this before, and he knew how to grow a business.  He did not want to become a collectibles mogul. This was supposed to be his hobby, not his life.

Once he made that realization, he sold the business—for a profit—six months after Oregon, already ahead of the curve, had sunk into this deep recession.  The new owner, who had worked at the business from the start, maintained it, and it continues to grow even now, doing extremely well in this tough economic climate.

Every single plan we made about that new business came from hindsight.  We knew, first of all, that Dean needs to build things.  He always has something going on besides his writing.  Before he wrote, he had two or three new things happening as well.  He must create on a variety of levels, and it’s impossible to hold him back—although he’s great at analysis, and able to figure quickly if a new project is the right project for him.

That ability to figure out if a new project is right also comes from experience.  In our lifetime together, he’s started projects only to abandon them within the week as it became clear that he wasn’t suited for them. Time has taught us to evaluate first, sink money in later.

Experience taught us to do the financial plan up front.  We’d both started businesses by the seat of our pants, with just a vague idea that it would work out.  Once or twice it did, but mostly it failed.

We also learned that we needed to spend as little on start-up as possible because we were taking no outside investors.  We needed to be able to walk away from this business.  Because of our years of experience we knew that the economy was headed downward (long before the “smart guys” in Washington had it figured out), and we had to make the business as recession-proof as possible.  We’d both started businesses in a recession, and we lost Pulphouse Publishing in part because of our response to the recession of 1992.  So we knew how dangerous the overall economic climate could be to a business.

We planned for that.

We also knew the price we needed if we decided to sell the business, and we knew it up front.  Mostly, we expected to shut it down if it didn’t work. The fact that we found a buyer with little effort had more to do with Dean’s planning abilities than with me, but he doesn’t like building things only to take them apart.  So he worked hard to keep potential buyers interested, even while he started the business up.

All of this planning was extremely different from the planning we had done in our early businesses.  Those, as I said, were done without enough planning at all.  In fact, as I mentioned in the business plan post [link], I didn’t understand why places like the Small Business Administration wanted a business plan.  How could we know how the business would operate when we hadn’t operated a business?

I recently watched a business go through the same by-the-seat-of-their-pants start-up, and I haven’t even talked to or met the owners.  I recognize the signs from experience alone.

Down the hill from our house, a lovely Italian restaurant went out of business but not because of financial mismanagement.  The place was wildly successful.  Instead, it closed because of what I think of as a weird Oregon Coast phenomenon.  The owners got sick of tourists.

We went to this restaurant a lot, and in hindsight, the signs of the closure were obvious.  It started when the owner decided that locals could make reservations, but tourists could not. Then it migrated to little signs on the table, telling people to control their children and not to use their cell phones.  Then the hours got strange—staying open on Monday and Tuesday (traditionally days on the Oregon Coast when business are closed because there are no tourists) and closing on Sunday.  In their last year, the owners closed for the summer (the high season) and reopened in the winter (when the town is empty).  The reopening didn’t last.  In fact, the restaurant closed for good during, of all things, spring break.  The owners loved to cook. They loved to cook for people they liked. They hated dealing with rudeness, demands, and all the other things that come with owning a restaurant.

They had owned their building, and it sat empty for two years, waiting for a buyer or for someone to rent it.

This spring, someone rented it.

Because the restaurant is so close to us, we watched the newcomers build it.  A small sign went up immediately, announcing the future home of the new restaurant.  The front door sat open during the business day, as the new owner painted and did a slight remodel. The official sign went up in late May and with it, an announcement on the changeable sign below, that the restaurant would open on June 25.

Well, I could see the interior of that place, and it was clear to me that they would have to push to hit their June 25 deadline.  On June 20, the furniture got delivered.  On June 24, the sign changed to a July 2 opening.  Fourth of July is the biggest weekend in our little tourist town, so it became clear that these new restaurateurs wanted to take advantage of that.

But both Dean and I have worked in restaurant start-ups, and a menu, a good chef, and a well-designed interior do not a restaurant make. Every single successful restaurant that we’ve worked at—and that Dean has managed—has given itself a month to work out the kinks.  Mostly, the restaurant holds practice nights with the newly hired wait staff, without opening the restaurant at all.  One restaurant in Superior, Wisconsin, when I was a teenager invited the relatives of every single person on the staff to come into the restaurant and eat free for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night.  That restaurant did so for two weeks.

By the time it opened, the staff knew the menu, knew the quirks of the kitchen, had made (and corrected) dozens of errors, learned where everything is kept, and learned how to pace themselves through a restaurant slammed with customers.

(Our local six-plex movie theater did the same thing, by the way, just to get the bugs out of their system.)

Dean worked varieties of the same practice session.  Every restaurant that does this opens to acclaim, if not for the food, at least for the service.

On July 1, the restaurant below announced a July 5 opening date.

On July 4, the opening date was gone.

On July 17, the place held a stealth opening.  They’d lost an entire month of revenue from their business plan (if indeed they had one), and they have so far gotten no word of mouth throughout the community.  The stealth opening allowed them to practice a little, but they probably lost customers who expected a more polished staff/restaurant.

I hope they’ll survive, but their cold opening probably made things harder than they needed to be. And the cold opening is a clear sign of inexperience.

So how do you make hindsight work for you?

1. Do a fearless inventory of what went wrong in your previous business(es).  Make a list and be honest.  If you’re not honest, there’s no point.  If you did something wrong, or several somethings wrong, admit them.  You need to understand where all of the mistakes are, not just some of them.

2. Evaluate whether the mistakes came from a) the economy; b) your response to the economy; c) your inexperience or d) your personality.  If the mistakes came from the economy, then you better make sure you know how to weather the same economic climate.  If they came from your response to the economy, then you better learn how to be more flexible in response to a crisis.

If the mistakes came from your inexperience, don’t get overconfident.  Just because you have experience now doesn’t mean you’re all wise.  Plan to make more errors.

If the mistakes came from your personality, you better find a way to negate that part of you that has the tendency to do things wrong for the type of business you’re opening.  I’m great at publishing and editing, but I’ll never edit again.  I’m good at it, but not suited to it.  No amount of “change” will make me and editing suit.  I might be able to do a small project or two, but I won’t make a career out of it—not without a personality transplant.  Been there, done that, spent enough to buy a factory’s worth of t-shirts.

If the mistakes came from your personality, you might need to hire someone to take that part of your personality out of play.  I could own a publishing company (in partnership with Dean) again, if I don’t edit.  But I would have to remain hands-off with the new editor.  I would have to trust that person—which is a tall order. As I said, I’m very good at editing, and I’d see mistakes right off.  I’d probably drive that person out of the business if I wasn’t careful.

Hiring a person to do the part of the job you’re not suited for has all the pitfalls of hiring an employee for other aspects of your life.  See the employee sections of the guide.

If your previous business failed due to your personality, then you might want to reconsider stepping back into that same kind of business at all.  Sometimes it’s better to say that you don’t suit than it is to keep pounding your head against the same brick wall.

3.  Use other people’s hindsight.  Ask them about the mistakes they made in the same type of business.  Do this even if you’ve owned a business before.  You’ll learn something, guaranteed.

However, make sure you listen to their advice.  At least three start-up publishers interviewed me and Dean about what went wrong at Pulphouse Publishing.  We were very honest with them, told them about various warning signs, and told them to call us if things got dicey.

All three of those start-ups failed, one spectacularly.  All three of them followed the exact same path that Pulphouse followed, and all three responded to the problems the same way we did—which is to say, the wrong way.

They were forewarned.  Of course, they took no notes during our meeting, never contacted us when things got dicey, and only one remembered our advice at all.  He later admitted to us that he was in the hospital (the failure caused a physical collapse that put him in the hospital for weeks) and he kept hearing our voices, telling him what exactly would go wrong if he didn’t take our advice.  He says we haunted him, and he apologized for not listening.

He didn’t owe us an apology.  He owed himself one.

5. Let hindsight help you in all aspects of your business.  Because I know how a failing business behaves, I often will not work with a business that is exhibiting the symptoms of a business on the edge.  Because we had a publishing house collapse, I particularly know the signs of that, so I won’t approach a company that even whispers of trouble.  The trouble is often obvious to those of us who have been through something similar years in advance.

In fact, when Dean and I talked with one of those start-ups all those years ago, the owner told us in the middle of the meal he was buying us that he “would never ever make such dumb mistakes.”  We immediately decided never to work with him—not because he insulted us, but because his ego was so large that he believed he was immune to our stupidity.

He compounded our stupidity, and his failure was so spectacular that people within publishing still discuss it as an example of what not to do when running a business.

6.  Remember the most important lesson of hindsight: You are fallible. Sorry, kiddo.  You’ll make mistakes just like the rest of us.  In fact, you’ll  make mistakes every single time you start a new business.  You’ll make mistakes after owning that business for ten years, fifteen, twenty.   Face it: You’ll make mistakes.

Now longtime readers will understand where I get my mantra.  The key is to avoid making the same mistake twice.  You’ll always make new mistakes.  Be creative about them.  Make new mistakes in the pursuit of the perfect, mistake-free business.  Then learn from those new mistakes.

That’s what hindsight is for.  Toss out the regrets and the “I wish I hads.”  Stop fantasizing about going back in time and fixing things.

Move forward with the right attitude—after you’ve fearlessly looked backwards, of course.

One more topic! Seriously, I’m down to one more topic!!!!!  Not that I’m thrilled about this or anything, but one more topic!!!!  I’ve already put two small sections of the Guide on Kindle and Smashwords.  I’ll have more up by next week.

If you want the whole Guide—and you want to set your own price, not pay mine—hit the donate button now.  I’ll be sending a free e-book of the finished Guide to everyone who donated about three weeks after I declare the Guide done on my website.  (That might be as soon as next week because there’s one more topic!)

So thanks again to all of you who have already donated, participated, and sent letters or comments.  See you next week!

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: “Hindsight” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.