• Before your trip, give yourself a few weeks or a month in which you don’t take on any new work. This will give you the time to appropriately wind down existing work, even if it was supposed to be finished earlier (there’s always last minute requests). I only took on two new projects at the beginning of May, although they were pretty large ones. Even though I could have squeezed in a few smaller projects, I didn’t want to push it. My last week of work was hard, working from 8am-10pm finishing up the projects (Dans Hamptons and Eat Life Whole), but they came out great and I didn’t have to work on them while traveling.
• Use a CRM (TwentyTen CRM or Salesforce) and have your contact form connect to it. You should be doing this already, but coming back to 50 emails from prospective clients is unmanageable. Get everything in your CRM so you can work your way through it when you get back. I’ll be posting a tutorial soon on having a contact form update TwentyTen CRM, but here’s a quick summary.
• Make sure your contact form mentions that you’re on vacation, so they don’t expect an immediate response. Also update your voicemail. In my voicemail I said I’d be out of the country and wouldn’t be back until the end of June, and asked them to please use the contact form on my site or email me. When I got back I only had 2 voicemails that weren’t already in my CRM.
• Check in periodically to filter your email. I did about every 5 days. For projects that weren’t a good fit I sent a list of recommended developers, and those that were I reiterated that I’ll be back at the end of June and will get back to them as soon as possible. In my CRM I closed the ones I forwarded away and marked the ones I didn’t as “after trip followup”. I also added prospects that just emailed me to the CMS (30% of my inquiries come from email, 60% from email form, and 10% from phone).
• Give people a fuzzy date of when you’ll be back. I said “end of June” instead of June 21 so that I’m in control of my schedule when I get back. If everyone knows the date you’ll get back, you’ll get flooded with emails and phone calls that day.
• When you do get back, give yourself a few days to a week to catch up. I landed on a Tuesday but my first official day back in the office was the following Monday. During those extra days I went through my CRM and followed up with everyone, scheduling phone calls throughout the following week.
• Only let meetings and phone calls take up half your day when you get back. I scheduled phone calls from 8am to noon for the first few days I’m back. I was then able to work during the afternoon. During my “extra” days before I got back to work I was able to land a few small projects to do this week. This will keep me feeling productive because after a full day of phone calls I feel drained and unaccomplished. I love working, not talking about working, so I’m organizing my calendar accordingly.

And because of TwentyTen CRM I was able to keep it all organized and (relatively) stress-free.

Here’s some excerpts and thoughts:

Causation v. Effectuation

• Causal logic is based on the premise: “To the extent we can predict the future, we can control it.”
• Effectual logic is based on the premise: “To the extent we can control the future, we do not need to predict it.”
• Causal problems are problems of decision; effectual problems are problems of design. Causal logic helps us choose; effectual logic helps us construct. Causal strategies are useful when the future is predictable, goals are clear, and the environment is independent of our actions; effectual strategies are useful when the future is unpredictable, goals are unclear, and the environment is driven by human action.
• Causal question: What should I do to achieve this effect?
• Effectual question: What can I do with these means?
• Surprises are usually relegated to error terms in formal models. Effectual logic sees them as source of opportunities for value creation.
• Contractual claims are causal claims on the predictable future; equity provides effectual claims on the unpredictable future.
• The paths to entrepreneurial success expand in the future rather than converge (one-to-many, in contrast to causation’s many-to-one approach towards ‘the goal’)

On the Entrepreneur

• Expert entrepreneurs distrust market research; distrust attempt at predicting the future
• “In commercializing new technologies, entrepreneurs often find that formal market research and expert forecasts, however sophisticated in methods and impeccable in their analyses, fail to predict where the markets will turn out to be or what new markets will come into existence.” Christensen (1997) and Mintzberg (1994)
• Expert entrepreneurs start with three categories of means: their identity, their knowledge base, and their social network.
• Theme of converting initial customers to partners
• Entrepreneurs perceive the world around them as human-made
• “Serial entrepreneurship is a temporal portfolio” – diversified over time rather than concurrently like a traditional investment portfolio

Decision Making

• Pragmatism does not assert a singular truth and declare all else false; rather, it compares truths and tests for differences. If no difference in the consequences of the two truths, they are the same pragmatically.
• What does this truth tell us that we don’t already know?
• Risk involves known distribution of options (1 in 5 chance of winning). Uncertainty involves unknown distribution of options
• “Rational choice involves two guesses, a guess about uncertain future consequences, and a guess about uncertain future preferences.” March (1978) in RAND Journal of Economics
• Human rationality is bounded by cognitive limitations such as physiological constraints on computational capacity, and psychological limitations like biases & fallacies

Principles of Entrepreneurial Expertise:

• Bird-in-hand principle: create something with existing means rather than discovering new ways to achieve goals (“What do I have?” vs “What do I need?”)
• Affordable loss principle: Committing what you’re willing to lose rather than investing based on expected returns
• Crazy quilt principle: Negotiate with all stakeholders willing to commit to a project without worrying about the opportunity costs. The venture (or “quilt”) evolves over time based on interactions of all stakeholders (investors, customers, employees, suppliers…).
• Lemonade principle: Leverage surprises rather than avoiding them
• Pilot in the plane principle: Rely on human agency as prime driver of opportunity rather than technical/economic trends. (Comes from SpaceShipOne putting a pilot in charge of the spaceship instead of a computer. The pilot can think on his feet, while a computer would need every possible contingency pre-programmed.)

I’m not sure where I found this book, but it was most likely a blog post or tweet by Ben Casnocha or Paul Kedrosky. Whoever suggested it, thanks.

More information:
Effectuation: How Entrepreneurs Think

Jason Fried @ Big Omaha 2009 from Big Omaha on Vimeo. Many of his thoughts on starting a business are aligned with the idea of Effectuation. “We don’t have a plan.” “We don’t set sales targets. They’re numbers you pick out of the air and make you do things you don’t want to do”

I read a great post about how in this economy, we’re all entrepreneurs. Our educational system is built to print out mass quantities of specific “student templates,” like Accounting major, Finance major… and restock the large institutions.  While this works in a growing economy, when the Big 4 just hire all the Accounting majors, it doesn’t prepare them for a competitive job market. For the most part, graduating students have been commoditized. How do they compete with all the other Accounting majors when they are exactly the same in all relevant respects?

What our educational process needs is a dose of entrepreneurship. It needs to teach students to sell themselves, find a unique niche in the organization to serve (NOT a mass-produced, interchangeable cog), and establish a personal brand (or unique identity if you think the phrase “personal brand” belongs to those with scents). But most of all, students need to pursue something in which they’re interested. Too many have gone the Accounting/Finance track because it’s well defined  and makes good money (see Brittany’s post).

Those who followed the easy path straight into a career they didn’t really enjoy will most likely be the first to get cut. They aren’t passionate about their work, and don’t provide more value than they cost to the firm in the downturn.

Those who follow what they love make a job for themselves, either by working for themselves (startup, freelancing or consulting) or by convincing others to create a job at a company for them. When a company creates a job for you, you get to do exactly what you’re passionate about (by design), and there’s no competition for that position – who is more qualified at being you than you?

While the financial organizations might be “too big to fail,” the individuals at those organizations aren’t. When you work for someone else, there’s not much you can do to prevent yourself from getting fired – it’s mostly out of your hands.

Howard Lindzon came up with the term “too small to fail.” When you’re self-employed, you can’t fire yourself. If you need more money, you work harder or find different things to work on.

This is the entrepreneurial spirit, and a lot more people are going to need to find it if they want to succeed in this environment.