It’s almost the end of the year so, as is now traditional for a “web-worker”, here are my goals for 2008.
Personal Goals
Sorting out my money. For some reason money just flows out of my account; I have looked at where it goes and everything seems to be “essential”. So time to stick a cork in it and get my incomings to be greater than my outgoings every month.
Reduce the amount of time I spend in the car each day. Not actually much I can do about this - I have to take the smaller child to the childminder’s and back and she is over on the other side of town. It’s a pain - between two and four hours a day depending upon the traffic (it’s only 7 miles - 28 per day). But in September she starts school and all three of our choices are nearby. In the meantime I have bought a small car to save on petrol.
Get rid of things. I love Freecycle. You may think it’s some sort of altruistic joy at taking something that is useless to me and giving it to someone for whom it is useful. I wish. It’s actually the joy at seeing some empty space in my garage or on my floor or in the cupboard. Yet I still have tons to get rid of.
Cook more. One of the unexpected results of working for myself is finding the time to cook (well mainly stuff I can prepare and then leave it cooking as I get back to work). And it is suprisingly good.
Business Goals
My ultimate business goal is to generate enough money automatically that I can pick and choose when and for whom I work.
To do this I need to increase my revenue; 10% per month would be a good start. Also implying I will be taking in over twice as much by my first year anniversary - which would be nice.
Ideally I would like to do this without (often) working over 40 hours per week. I don’t want my kids or wife missing me. So this revenue increase needs to be automated - either other people doing the work for me, or some sort of product that can generate revenue while I am asleep (or at least doing more interesting things).
Marketing wise I need to build a consistent message. And I’m not sure what that is yet. I guess this one ought to be top of the list.
And I would quite like my technical excellence to be well known amongst the UK Rails community (”you worked with Baz? I’ve heard he’s pretty good“). Everyone’s got an ego.
Getting things done
I have ideas for each of the personal goals - a debt snowball, using a smaller car for everyday and short journeys (although I can’t bring myself to get rid of my big car), put stuff on Freecycle (or eBay if it’s worth something) and get into the kitchen.
On the business side - I will be getting some outside help with the marketing stuff, and will home in on one of the many potential directions I have in mind. Once that is done, I can start building the revenue generators - a couple of product ideas or expanding the work-force to free up my time on business development (yeah, sales, marketing and management). And getting my name known? Well that comes through meeting people.
Overall, these are pretty modest goals. So, I have no excuse for failure. And then, next year, I can think really big.
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