A Cautionary Tale About the Value of Prospecting

Let me tell you a cautionary tale about the value of prospecting.

My partner and I are very lucky to make decent money and live in a smaller town where the cost of living is lower, so in 2020 and 2021, I worked three short days a week. Only 18 hours or so. This freed me up to take care of our son and the various home admin tasks (making dinner, daycare pickups and dropoffs, etc., etc.) that come up.

I was constantly behind schedule. 18 hours is not much! Pretty easy to fill, and overfill.

It was pretty stressful and I worked a lot of evenings to catch up.

August 2021 rolls around, and we have another baby. Beautiful boy named Reuben. My partner and I decide to switch places - she's going to take the year off, and I'm going to scale up to 40 hours a week. Too easy.

(You can probably see where this is going)

I sit down for my first full-time week, and sketch out how much confirmed work I have on, mapping that against my income targets. I do this all the time to make sure I'm busy enough, and I was used to being way way over capacity.

But newsflash: 40 hours is a lot more than 18. Like, more than twice as much. I hadn't really been paying attention (I had other stuff going on!), but if I had, I would have realised ahead of time that my current pipeline of work was going to be bone-dry in about two weeks.

Here's what I learned, too late: I should have seen this coming. Since 40 hours is so much more than 18, I should have been prospecting to fill the extra time.

What's more, I should have been doing this in June - cos as everyone in here knows, it takes awhile to turn a call into confirmed, paid work.

I started frantically shaking the tree to drum up some work, and got things up and running after a bit, but had a pretty light few weeks in the meantime! Stressful at a time in your life when you really don't want financial stress.

What's more, you know what they say about beggars being choosers - I started saying yes to every project that came in, even if it wasn't a great fit.

This bit me in December, when my capacity was full to the brim with poor-fit, low-margin stuff, and I had to then turn away good fit, higher-margin stuff that came to fruition from my September prospecting.

(I'll talk about the poor fit stuff in another thread).

So, the lesson here: never stop prospecting. This is true all of the time, but it's particularly true if you know your capacity is going to expand in the future.

Even if you feel like you're so run off your feet that there's no point, do it anyway! The worst case scenario is you get more work requests than you can handle, so you can raise your prices and/or choose the most exciting stuff.

Don't do what I did: assume you'll always be busy by default, and simply fail to think about it at all. It's a recipe for stress and consternation.