Thirty ideas down, thirty days to go.

Andrew Dubber came out with the last idea in his 30 day series of ideas today, all of which he's given away on his blog for anyone to do with what they want. Fittingly, today's idea was a website where people could give their ideas away for anyone to use. It's another one of my favorites.

What's great about Andrew's ideas isn't just that he did what he said he was going to do, but the way that he wrote about them. He made a real commitment to writing thought out posts about his ideas each and every day. Hopefully you've been keeping up, but if not, you should really check all of them out.

And now, because he executed on his project, there's all this other stuff going on that I wanted to share. As you may know, I am executing on his 5th idea, the 30 day numberless calendar. It's going to be a website where people can put their calendars, and if they want, also share what they're doing.

Originally, there were twelve people that joined my project space when I opened it. The only commit people had to make was that they'd write one blog post a week about it. Other than that, they could do as much or as little as they wanted with the project. Exactly half have opted to say in, and half have opted to bow out.

To understand why I asked for that commitment, you need look no further than Joan Lee's blog post titled Diligence. Joan is one of the people that decided to stay in the project.

There are no hard feelings at all by the way with people that chose not to keep going. We all have things we need to do, priorities change, and sometimes we just lose interest. It happens.

But, I knew it was going to be important for me to know who really was in to the project and who wasn't.

Deb Walsh started a facebook page for the project for anyone that wants to join, and has put up a new website at OneBeforeMidnight.com (it's still being built) where she's publishing sound tracks with her on the piano for a 30 day project. If the first one is any indication of what's to come, we're in for a treat.

Cheryl Sterling has been writing about a 30 day project of portraits, and in our project space she mentioned she has paints ready to go. The anticipation is killing me.

Simon Fowler came up with the great little visual to explain the whole first follower thing, and has been thinking about what he's going to do. It sounds like he's decided though that any project is going to make him better at something he's doing already.

Aaron Brown has decided to do 30 days of gardening. He blogs at Moot Pt. where you can also check out some of his music.

And DJ Phillips, another musician, one of the funnier people I've met lately, is going to be doing something with his music.

I'm really happy that I'm working on this project, and having these people along side working on their own projects is really awesome. So thanks to Derek and Andrew for getting this thing started, and you should have some cool stuff to look at come May first.

We're always the hardest on ourselves

One of the many things I like about writing regularly on my blog is the feedback that I'll at times get from some people. It can really help me see how other people are interpreting what I'm writing and how I can communicate better.

Last week I wrote about my new pricing model and some of the challenges that come with it, and a few people sent me some emails and IM's. A couple folks just asked what happened, others told me they thought it was great that I was sticking to my new approach and trying to be innovative, and still others told me that basically they thought I was nuts and making a mistake.

The feedback has had me thinking a lot about how we can be really hard on ourselves, and maybe sometimes unnecessarily so.

When I first started my business I had a two month project that started and ended in about the expected timeframe. When it was over I started another, and that continued for a while. Then I worked on another, and so on.

In the three and a half years since starting Ideal Project Group I've formed great relationships with a number of companies, built a mobile application, created a new service to build websites for small businesses, started a community to test applications for the Android operating system, and began producing a monthly podcast.

My point is, my company is probably in better shape than it ever was the first year or two I was in business. And after all, part of the goal of my new approach is to get paid a smaller amount of money by a larger number of clients. So then why do I feel compelled to write something like "hanging by a thread" when I'm encountering a challenge that in many ways I expected to face at some point?

I think it's because we're always the hardest on ourselves. At least this can be true for me, and it hits me in two ways. First, I tend not to look at where my business is and where it came from, but where it is and where I'd like it to be. These are two entirely different perspectives of course and certainly impact my view of things.

Couple this with the fact that if all I'm doing is talking about the positive things happening with my business, but none of the challenges, I feel like I'm lying by omission. That would only be sharing one part of the story, and I think it would be a disservice to anyone reading this blog. So I'm regularly asking myself whether I'm sharing enough - am I being as open as I should be? Of course that's usually followed by the question - Am I being too open?

What I've realized though is that I'm probably just being hard on myself. I could just have easily changed the title of my post to "Laying the new foundation" and that would have changed the tone entirely. And maybe that would have been a better way to talk about it. I don't really know, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it.

The other thing that's become clear though is that I do need to do a much better job of explaining why I have moved to my new pricing model, and why I think it's better for everyone. I haven't done that quite as well as I should so I'll be making a point of talking a bit more about how it benefits my customers as well as my overall business strategy, and give more reasons as to why I think it's where the future lies for service companies.

In the meantime, I'll try not to be too hard on myself for not having done so already.

Learning to program

In my latest podcast I opted not to interview anyone, but instead talk about what I've learned so far from trying to learn Ruby on Rails.  I talk a bit about feeling like I'm learning how to use a computer all over again, feeling somewhat more empowered, and how different people have been willing to help me with the project.  As always you can listen right on the blog, or you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

I hope you enjoy the episode.

Hanging by a thread

A lot of people in my family have started their own businesses. My mother's father started a magazine company. My father's father started a printing company. My father started a consulting and training business. And I have a few aunts and uncles that have started other various small businesses.

Pretty much everyone I know who has started their own company has stories about the various ups and downs that inevitably come with launching something on your own. And when they talk about the challenges, looking back on them, they almost talk about overcoming these with a greater sense of pride than any specific accomplishment or success they may have had.

I'm bringing this up because I find myself and my business in a bit of a weird place lately, and I got a bit of unwelcome news this week. A project that I've been working on has been de-prioritized, and with it, my level of involvement will also decrease. I'm still working with this client on some projects, but just to a lesser extent.

In a weird way, this is actually a bit of a success. At the beginning of the year, I wrote about how I was no longer going to charge hourly for my services. Instead, I have different tiers of engagement on a project. I wanted companies to be able to use my services as easily as I'm able to use Software as a Service tools. So,

So now, when I'm on a project, it's at a tier of either:

• "Monitoring and Maintaining" where I provide a little help to good teams that just need assistance keeping things coordinated
• "Lead and Manage" where I run a project, lead sprints, and all the normal things you'd expect, or
• "Repair and Relaunch" - where a project that's all messed up needs a massive overhaul.

So just like I may sometimes downgrade a Software account for a few months, and then upgrade during others, my clients can now do the same. I think this model is the future of not just project management, but all types of services.

I'm really grateful that this client came on board with me with this new approach, and the fact that they could easily change my level of involvement with their company for a little while, in many ways, validates my idea.

And, I have no doubt there will be a time in the future that they want to bring my company back up a tier when they have another important project they need help with. Everyone who owns a small business should be as lucky as I've been to have a client like this one.

The challenge is, in the grand scheme of things, I'm still just getting started with this approach. One client I had wanted to keep me on a project I was working on for another month or two after a contract ended, but was unwilling to go with this new approach. I've also had a number of people call me about opportunities where the discussions ended almost immediately just because they couldn't, or wouldn't, wrap their heads around the fact that I wasn't charging hourly. I'm fine with this, because I truly believe it's the right thing to do, and the right way to set the proper course for my company.

Now, there's a valid argument that could be made that would basically say something like "just go after business that pays hourly, what's the big deal?" It's true after all, if you don't survive this month, who cares what your course might be in a year. I've struggled with this because the logic is sound. The problem is that all it does is perpetuate the status quo with my business. It does absolutely nothing to advance my company, or position me for the future.

There's a business quote I read once that went something like "You need to determine how you're willing to fail, not how you want to succeed." The point wasn't that you should want to fail, or even take lessons from failure, but that you should ask yourself this question to act as a barometer for whether you believe in what you're doing. I think there are a lot of "successful" people who are less proud of the paths they took than they might otherwise be.

Where I'm at right now is that I'd rather fail at this approach than succeed by taking another hourly paid gig. I don't believe in that model, I think the incentives are misaligned with the customer's, and I think it puts the value of a service in the entirely wrong place.

Most people are unwilling to absorb a little pain and discomfort in the present in order to be better positioned for the future. It's why trillions of dollars have been given to banks, why the US government now owns car companies, and why we are still entirely dependent on foreign oil, and protecting our access to it with the largest military the world has ever seen.

I will not go down that path with my business.

I'll wrap up shop and work for someone else's company that I believe in before I go down a path I think is wrong just to keep my business alive for another year.

I hope this post didn't come off like a complete downer, because I don't mean for it to. It's just that I've been pretty open with my beliefs, how things are going with my business, and my general opinions on things. I just didn't think it would have been right to omit the fact that, financially speaking, my business is going to sort of hanging by a thread for a bit.

The irony is that with some of the side projects I've been working on, and my new endeavor to learn Ruby on Rails, I'm more excited about the future than I have been in a long time.

So, if any of you out there are looking for someone to help you get your important stuff done, I hope you'll consider shooting me an email. Just like software companies, I even offer a 3o day trial period. If you're not happy with what you see after a month, you don't have to pay me a nickel. That's what I mean when I say I want my service to be like software: Flat fees, no long term contracts, and 30 day trial periods. Can you see why I think this is the future of service companies?

Who knows, you may be the topic of conversation a decade or so from now when I'm talking with pride about some of the challenges my little business had to overcome.

Self Censorship

As I'm sure you're aware, there has been a lot of discussion about Google's decision to stop censoring search results in China. I'm not really going to opine much on the decision, but will basically leave it at this: With all the financial madness going on, two wars still happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who knows what else is being dealt with that we don't know about, it's fair to say I believe there is a larger context that we should be aware of when having the discussion.

This has had be thinking about the ways in which we censor ourselves.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about how awesome I thought Google translate was, and played around with it a little bit since then. I realized that in order to really get results in a different language I had to take a few steps. I first searched for 'Financial Corruption' and translated it into Chinese. I put that into Google, and a bunch of US sites came up. I realized, I probably had to go turn some setting on. Indeed, you go to Settings -> Search Settings and the default is English. Once I selected Chinese and searched again I was on my way.

Even if you go to Google.cn, and input english, you are of course more likely to get an American site - but certainly an English speaking one. Google "Financial Corruption" in English on Google.cn, and you get pretty much the same search results as if you search for it on Google.com in English. But, if you go to Google.cn (or Google.com with your language setting properly turned on) and search for 金融腐败, the Chinese translation for "Financial Corruption", and then take that url string and put it into Google Translate, you get an entirely different set of results. There are more efficient ways, but I wanted to link everything assuming that most readers had english turned on as their only language.

My point here is that while, yes, it is very bad that the Chinese government censors the internet, it would do us well to, for a moment, take a look in the mirror.

I don't regularly search for news about the Greek soverign debt crisis in any European languages, though surely there's a valuable and worthwhile perspective written by someone who speaks a language other than English. Nor have I read the take that the French or the Germans have on the new healthcare legislation that was just passed.

As powerful and far reaching as the internet is, almost all of us are looking at just one tiny slice of it. It's great that we're talking about the internet, and freedom, and censorship, and the impact that it's having, and will continue to have, on governments. These are important conversations.

What we should also be talking about though, is how we're censoring ourselves.