“la parole exportée”

Issuing several bills/invoices in one go today. Best time ever, and dearly needed.

These last 4 months of the year are the worst in terms of finance, because however cautious you were in the previous two-thirds of the year, making your regular monthly payments, saving all you could, every incarnation of taxes and rates, social security contributions, and what not, converge upon you for final settlements. One exception, VAT is in April. I’m not even mentioning utilities. That will be in January, a loooooong time from now.

And have you heard of taxes going down? I haven’t. So there’s always a remainder to pay. Sometimes it is hefty, but they don’t tell you until the last minute or so. Nice.

The obvious solution is to get more clients, more business, more money. But it doesn’t work that way here. There is an exponential growth of the amounts you pay out. It’s a real problem, not just for show business celebrities who are more vocal than microbusinesses.

So this is a time when you need your clients to be true to their promises and pay on time. To their credit, my clients are really good, even though I had to ‘fight’ with some of them to get there.

Does this ring a bell? I can’t be the only one here…

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Yesterday and the day before, I interpreted at a conference in the software industry. Of course, I’ll get a check at the end of the day, or rather at the end of a few weeks, but there’s another priceless advantage that one can derive from this job, where we are, basically, observers.

Forget about insider knowledge. This was a public conference, so no confidential data was exchanged. And anyway, we work on a contract.

The interesting point is that at conferences, you don’t see the lame ducks of an industry. (Or if you do, you see how they are going to fix that). The companies that get showcased are those that are putting all their energy into building successful businesses, and those that have indeed succeeded and are striving to stay on top.

So you get to see the best. It’s not a seminar, but you get lessons live on how to succeed, how to market yourself, you get a view from the perspective of some of the most influencial players in a market. Of course we don’t see what goes on behind the scenes, so I’m not talking about taking everything at face value. But success doesn’t just happen. You have to put a lot of work and energy into achieving it.

So although using insider knowledge is forbidden, there’s no law to stop you from feeling energized, even as a tiny business, after an event like that, and lessons to be drawn.

And just think that I’m paid to get that education…

It’s not back to work, because I was never really idle, I’ve had a string of projects, some small, some large, this summer. It’s more like back on line.

For this kind of business, offline is where things really happen. I answer the phone and e-mails (to me, a mere substitute to paper mail). Get translation jobs. Do them. Redecorate my office, a fairly small room, so doing anything to it means taking everything out (a good opportunity to throw away all those old piles of paper), and letting everything stand in everyone’s way, while the job is waiting to be completed. This time it was just the floor, and some paint here and there. Plus, shifting every piece of furniture around. I’ve been talking about it for weeks, but I got interrupted so many times! As I write, I still have some shelves to which I need to apply paint.

The interesting part of this small vacation offline is that it’s helped me reflect upon the last 12 months, about what my experience online has taught me so far.

That has been a very positive experience: Just ‘listening’ to a variety of business coaches has helped me begin to re-define my sense of my business in ways that I’d never thought possible before. Just as I’m re-organizing my office, I’m also re-organizing my processes. This means, in a way, going back to basics. And it works.

More on that in the coming weeks. So how was your summer?

I recently received a PO for a project from a multinational company with which I have a long-standing relation. In short, they respond to Request For Proposals that go through an extremely lengthy examination process, and if they are successful, the order for the translation is sent out, usually months after I’ve done the estimate.

The fact that the PO specified an unrealistic deadline was a sure sign that no deadline had been specified by the client, or the Indian BPO wouldn’t have entered something like tomorrow for a translation of 9,000 words… That didn’t sound like my client at all. Either they need it by a certain date, and they kindly ask me if I think I can do it by then, and of course I say Yes, or I have about 4 weeks to do it.

So I set off in order to get it out of the way. What experience has taught me, is to NEVER procrastinate on a project with an unspecified deadline, because you end up being… in a rush.

photo credit: gruntzooki

Then I realized that I needed some input from the client, so I sent out an e-mail and instantly received an automatic ‘Away on vacation’ response. I must admit that the temptation was sooooo great to drop the whole thing until closer to the date when my client would be back, even though the sensible half of me was telling me to just get on with it, as the required info could be taken care of at any time. I really toyed with the idea of shelving it, but about 6 hours later, the reply arrived around midnight. (Contrary to popular and unjustified belief, French employees can be officially on vacation AND work. Most of them don’t really have a choice.)

So, back to square one. No excuse to procrastinate, I must do this project now, not later…