An informational interview with Paul
Lately, I’ve had the fortunate problem of having more requests for informational interviews than I have time to fulfill in any given week. At the same time, I remember how hard it can be to learn from professionals and explore career paths, so I want to be available for folks who want to learn more about me and my work. So, I’ve put together this blog post that answers many of the common informational interview questions. If you have other questions that I wasn’t able to answer, you can find time on my calendar here.
General Career Questions
Tell me about Coeffect?
I’ve been running Coeffect for the last 5 years. We work primarily with nonprofits and social enterprises to help them leverage data to make a greater impact. We’re working with organizations that need to build up their data infrastructure. They’re not at the point where they have a dedicated employee but they realize they need it to grow.
We’ll often work with organizations in one of three areas:
Impact measurement strategies: Helping organizations define what their intended outcomes are and what important learning questions they need to answer.
Data collection and analysis: Helping teams establish the habits for collecting and analyzing data in a systematic way.
Data systems: Helping organizations find the right combination of technology tools to collect, store, analyze, and report data that illustrate their results.
What path did you take to starting your own business?
I was working at a nonprofit, and that organization had been around for about 40 years. They were pretty well-resourced, yet I was their first data hire. It dawned on me that there are so many organizations that can’t even start on this work until so far into their journey because they don't have the resources to hire that full-time person yet. I’ve been really motivated to try to find a way to make some data expertise accessible to a smaller organization a bit earlier in its life cycle so it can be positioned well for success.
Prior to working at the nonprofit I mentioned, I was working in management consulting doing some data related work. A lot of other folks will enter this profession with a background in academia, having gotten a master’s degree or a PhD. I come to the work from a different vantage point, and I think this has helped me relate to my clients.
What does your typical day look like?
Every day is totally different for me. One thing that I often will tell people is that about half of my time is “billable,” working on client projects; about half of my time is not. That’s all the business development, working on my business, creating thought leadership materials, doing taxes, etc.. I work with small and mid-sized nonprofits so I have several concurrent projects. In a given month, I'll work with between 10 and 15 different organizations. On any day I might do a little bit of work for 2 or 3 different organizations and I'll have meetings with several current and potential clients. Some of the constants are that I’m working mostly out of my home office, I don't have to commute which is really nice. I’m often in regular contact via email or video calls with my clients and these folks are all over the country. There’s always a lot of variety which works well for me.
What do you like the most and least about your work?
The thing that I like most about my work is that I’m always working for mission-driven organizations. I get a lot of energy just knowing that they have passion for their missions and are trying to improve people’s lives, improve the environment, or improve our cities. I gain a lot of energy and inspiration from that. I also get to work on really interesting stuff; it can be complicated and messy but it’s a good challenge.
A challenge is that there’s a lot of switching; I work with a lot of small organizations so I’m always switching gears from doing one thing to doing another thing. Most of my projects are too small to just block off an entire day and work on only that one organization’s tasks. So there’s a lot of coordinating all the balls that are in the air.
Another thing that’s really challenging is that small organizations have limited budgets. I try to make the very most out of their budget but there are often situations where both myself and my client would want to do more, but the budget won’t allow for it. So there’s a lot of conversation around trying to make the smartest choices with minimal resources. I wish that we didn’t have to make those choices, that we could do as much as we wanted to do, but we live in the real world with constraints.
How do you continue to educate yourself about your field?
As someone who doesn’t have formal education in terms of a graduate degree or a PhD, I’ve had to be diligent about educating myself, which takes a lot of different forms.
Conferences. Attending conferences can be helpful for learning timely information. For example, the American Evaluation Association has a long-standing conference. Data Analysts for Social Good also has a really helpful conference.
Foundational books. One of the things I’ve been really invested in as of the last couple of years is trying to find the most in-depth resources that have been published - actual books. If you’ve gone through the trouble of publishing a book, there’s a certain level of depth generally. I’ve just been reading the foundational textbooks that have been recommended to me around qualitative coding, survey design, and different kinds of analysis. I think making time every week for this kind of reading is really important.
Coaches. I think one of the best ways for learning how to succeed in running your own business is to work with coaches who are familiar with how to succeed in your industry. I work with a consulting business coach who helps me learn what I need to learn about business development and other “entrepreneurship” skills that are above and beyond what I need to know to execute projects successfully. There are so many different ways of building a business; a consulting business is a particular kind of business and it’s really helpful to learn from somebody who’s done that before. While mentors have been really helpful in terms of the content of my work, consultants doing similar kinds of work are not jumping to divulge their secrets about how to run a successful consulting business. Coaches get paid to do just that. I’ve found that working with coaches and having a good support system of mentors and other professionals have been really helpful in plugging those gaps that books and existing online courses can’t fill.
What advice would you give to someone who is considering going into work similar to yours?
Know yourself. You have to start off with knowing yourself. What motivates you and how do you stay on track? You need to have a system for staying accountable to your own goals and keeping yourself organized because there’s nobody else who’s going to do that for you. You need to be able to motivate yourself and to find that sense of urgency because you never want to be in a situation where a client is hounding you, you want to be ahead of that.
Also what are your systems for renewal? You can't just be plugging away at your business 60 hours a week for infinity, that leads to a burnout situation. How do you manage your workload and plan for your work so you avoid burnout and you get to recharge. There’s a lot of self-management, because it’s just going to be yourself for at least some amount of time before you start growing your team.
Be comfortable with sales. You also have to become comfortable with sales and working on the business. A lot of folks become freelancers or independent consultants because they are experts in the content of their work and that is a necessary foundation but that is not sufficient for you to succeed in this. You also need to be aware of how sales works and be comfortable with it in a style that works for you.
Work on the business, not just in it. You need to carve out the time to be working on your business. This includes things like creating your branding, creating thought leadership content, figuring out how to best position yourself, crafting the offers that you make, creating systems and process documents. Nobody's paying you to do these things, but if you don’t, you’ll experience more pain in the long run. I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t always do those things as much as I should have early on, so my advice to people thinking about going into this business is to start taking consistent action. That way your business will be sustainable for the long term.
Questions about running a business
How do you get new business?
Referrals. Every organization is a little bit different. Working in the nonprofit sector a lot of new business is relational; I've found most of my business is from repeat clients and referrals from existing clients. Not all of my clients refer me. That’s not because they don't enjoy my work, it’s because some people are just naturally more predisposed to connecting with other people. You’ll find that not everyone refers you but some people who are active in their community do and those folks can be really helpful partners.
Stay in touch. I try hard to stay in touch with folks who are in my network. I send out a newsletter once a month. It includes things that are helpful to my audience, so it's not just self-promotion. It helps people remember I’m still doing the work, and that I’m here as a resource if you need me. I know some of my projects have come from the continuous but gentle reminders that my newsletter gives.
Your effort will pay off. I’ve found that new business will come in proportionally to how much energy you're giving to developing new business, but it doesn’t often come back through the same channel. For example, I might spend a lot of time in a given month developing free trainings that are offered through the Colorado Nonprofit Association, and I will often find during those months that I’m getting new business, but not from the people who attended that training. There seems to be a law that energy out equals results in but it is very rarely linear. So I have a certain set of habits around keeping in touch with folks and doing outreach that I try and stay up with every month but I’ve recognized that business development won’t always come directly from those efforts.
How do you keep yourself organized?
Set goals and manage tasks. Each year I set personal and professional goals and then each quarter I revisit them and tweak them. Every time I get a new project, I build out the component tasks of that project in Asana, which is my task management tool. So let’s imagine I have 15 ongoing projects. At the start of every week, I will look through each of those 15 projects and I'll literally write down on a piece of paper what are the key things that we need to do for each of these projects this week. On Monday, I'm creating my weekly game plan with the tasks I need to do for all my projects and the tasks I need to do for business development. I keep a journal and every day I write down what are the tasks that are critical to accomplish for today. When I’m doing my weekly plan, I will prioritize the top 5 most critical things across all projects and then when I'm working with my daily plan, I try to prioritize those most critical things early in the week.
Forecasting. I also forecast out how much time I need for each client. I use a tool called Forecast for this - it essentially allows you to allocate 5 hours a week for this client, 2 hours a week for that client, etc. I also have all my business development time there. It lets me know things like, “6 weeks from now I’m 100% booked up, 8 weeks from now I’m 90% booked, 12 weeks from now I’m at 60%.” That helps me plan for when I have the capacity to take on new business. It's never perfect, but even just having a rough estimate of time per week helps me to know if I take on a new project and how much help I need.
What does work/life balance look like when you’re running a business?
It's gotten better over time. Originally it was a bit tough - I was working 50-60 hours a week for the first couple of years, and I had to make a concerted effort towards working less because my business was monopolizing my time. This is where prioritization comes into it. When you are running your own business there are always more things you could be doing every single day. You need to be really good about identifying the most critical things, the most impactful things for my clients and for myself that I could be doing at any given time. And finding a way to feel comfortable with yourself at the end of the day when things went sideways and you didn’t accomplish as much as you intended to. I started out the first couple of years working a lot, I didn't plan for vacations very well, and I found myself working a bunch of nights and weekends. Over time realized I need to literally plan out vacations in Forecast, where I plan my projects. This way I block vacation time so I don’t forget about it, and I don’t schedule projects over it.
Working for yourself there are going to be slower times and busier times, and you need to be okay with that. I’ve had enough cycles where I may have to work 60 hours per week for a month or two to tackle and finish a couple of big projects; so, I’ve learned to be comfortable with having some months where it’s 32 hours a week or less. I’ve been trying not to worry or stress over lack of business when it’s quieter because there have been many of these cycles and business will come.
How do you begin working with subcontractors?
Working with subcontractors has been really valuable and it’s also been challenging. You need to bring people in at the right time and with the right background and the right skill set. An important difference between an employee and a subcontractor is that generally, you're not allowed to provide a lot of training and coaching to a subcontractor. You can set a quality standard, you can ask for revisions if something doesn't meet a quality standard, but you need to be careful around how much coaching and professional development you provide otherwise they could argue they’re being treated as an employee and tie you up in a legal dispute. While that hasn’t happened to me personally, I know the risk is there and I need to manage that.
You want to try to recruit from a fairly wide pool if you can. I’ll go to listservs of folks that I know do independent consulting work and I’ll reach out to my network with a brief description of the kind of person I’m looking for in terms of availability and skill set. Then you start reviewing resumes and conducting some interviews. It’s important to invest enough time to learn a person’s skill set but if you’re looking for a rather small, part-time subcontractor, don’t treat it as a full-fledged interview process because you’re taking up a lot of people’s time. Keep the process the right size for the role. You’ll find there are a lot of really great people looking for part-time flexible working arrangements.
When you find the right person, establish a subcontractor agreement that outlines confidentiality, their hourly rate, and the roughly expected level of effort. I pay subcontractors on an hourly basis for their time, and ask them to invoice me at the end of each month (nobody likes to wait too long to get paid). I like to have the subcontractor start working on one project at a time so I get a sense of their working style and we can feel each other out. If that project works well and we’ve enjoyed working with each other, then I’ll look to expand the projects that we work on together to whatever level of availability that person has. It really ranges; some of my subcontractors only have a few hours per week, some have more time than that.
Be prepared to review your subcontractors' work. As the person who is running your business, you are ultimately accountable for the quality of all work. Once you have more experience with a subcontractor, your trust can grow and you can review less and less over time. I’ve learned you need to go in assuming a thorough review, at least at first, because you never know where something you shared could be misinterpreted. That helps you get better at defining expectations and providing the right level of details at the start every time.
What tools or software do you rely on?
Asana - task management
Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) - email, calendar, collaborative documents
Harvest - time tracking and invoicing
Forecast - time forecasting - to plan out how much time I think I'll be spending on each project on a weekly basis, connects with Harvest.
Quickbooks Online - accounting.
SalesForce - CRM. Contains all my client contacts and helps me figure out when I last talked with folks who are in my network, which really helps in terms of business development.
MailChimp - newsletter.
Alchemer (formerly SurveyGizmo) - surveys.
Calendly - appointment scheduling.
Squarespace - website.
What other professionals do you engage to help you with your business?
Subcontractors - generally more specialized in certain areas than I am.
Virtual assistant - administrative projects.
CPA - quarterly estimated taxes and year-end taxes (I do my own bookkeeping).
Marketing agency - create my brand.
Consulting coach - learn business development strategies.
Lawyers - specifically for making sure my branding didn’t infringe on existing trademarks.
I typically find these through referrals and through asking my network who they’ve used and liked.
How do you find and join professional networks?
In Denver we have a few networks I’ve found particularly valuable. Some I've found by accident and some by referral.
There’s a Consultants for Good network that is a group of Denver-area independent professionals that work with nonprofits or social enterprises of all various skill sets. That network has been great for finding folks that are interested in helping support my projects.
The Colorado Evaluation Network is Colorado’s chapter of the American Evaluation Association, other folks who do impact measurement work for nonprofits.
I run a meetup group called Denver Data Storytellers, consisting of other data communication professionals. That network has been really helpful in answering questions about data communication and data visualization.
What does competition among consultants look like?
There is a decent amount of competition among consultants because the barrier to entry is low. It doesn't take much to call yourself a consultant. People propose different ways of trying to credential consultants but the reality is that anybody that has an innovative approach can try their hand at consulting. Ultimately the successful consultants are those who can stand the test of time, develop a sustainable business, and make a meaningful impact.
What do you do about this competition? You want to be very clear about your niche within this sector. I don't work with nonprofits in general; I work with nonprofits of a particular size, and I work with direct service providers much more than I work with funders. Defining your values and the approach you bring to your work is also important. One of the things that I emphasize is being really collaborative with my clients. I don't approach relationships from an expert standpoint; I approach them from a standpoint of co-creation. My ultimate goal is to help my clients have the skills and confidence so they can do many of the things that I'm helping them do themselves. Different organizations will position themselves differently. There’s room for everybody, and if you’re really clear in your niche, values, and approach the organizations that value similar things will find you more easily.
Are there any issues where your clients are competitors?
You may find yourself working with organizations that are considered competitors (e.g., organizations solving similar problems or fighting for the same funding). Be clear with your clients that you’re working with an organization that’s similar to theirs. Never divulge a work product that you’ve made for one with the other. But you can say, based on experience in this field, here’s what people are often doing. Within the nonprofit sector, I find two organizations that seem very similar will have different strategies and approaches. Ultimately if you feel like you’re getting into a place of sharing something that feels proprietary, you need to be sure to ask your other client. I haven’t run into this situation (yet), and I think my clients are sensitive to not pushing me to share too much. One strategy to navigate a conflict could be to ask if you could make a connection between the organizations so they can share the level of detail that they feel comfortable sharing so that you’re not trying to mediate.