How I became a freelance professional manager

During the second half of 2004 I made the decision to work much more as a freelance professional manager. Prior to that I had been involved in entrepreneurial ventures, which were not successful for a number of good and bad reasons. I will most likely post content on my lessons from these endeavours in the future; in the mean time, please feel free to check my bio for info on the projects I was involved in and if you have questions, by all means drop me a line.

Anyway, I thought hard about how I would go about offering my services to the economy as an independent professional, able to join projects for as long as my contribution would be valuable and then move on the the next thing. So clearly, there were several issues: (1) who do I want to be?, (2) what projects do I want to become involved in?, (3) how do I sell my services?, (4) how do I secure outstanding delivery and (5) how do I exit properly.

To answer the first of my questions I was lucky to "discover" a book that a friend of mine had left in one of the failed companies I co-founded in the past: Tom Peters' Brand You 50...  A great call for action, an inspiration to reinvent work and a very positive approach because it states plainly that the future is mostly in our hands. At least, we have to do whatever is in our hands and as a matter of fact, the rest kind of always falls into place... oddly enough. Full of excellent advice and a source of action items that will probably keep me busy for the coming five years! One of the things Tom is saying is that when one decides to work as an independent service provider, they need to think of themselves as a unique brand that must deliver superbly to delight customers and make good profit from the activity. Tom describes very vividly the white collar revolution that is currently taking place and I think he is right on most of the stuff he writes. The book got me thinking and then I decided to start exploiting The Project 50 book (you don't really read Tom's books, you use them for driving action in your professional life: you exploit them). And I paid almost daily visits to Tom's blog... I was WOWed! Love it bceause I can feel genuine passion in what he does.

So, I decided to use his advice, and this is how I started working as an independent professional manager seeking to make a damn difference by superbly executing exciting projects that make a lasting impact.

And in fact, since I started thinking as an independent professional connected to the rest of the world thanks to the might of modern infotech (I cannot possibly be thankful enough for the time I was born to live!), everything is "miraculously" falling into place. Which does not mean that I have no problems to solve or no massive workload to cope with, but rather that it all flows with considerably more Harmony (I will write something about the reasons why Harmony is important in business). And yes infotech does make a bloody big difference in the way the world works no matter what the brilliant lawyer says. The simple fact that you are reading this proves it amply... But getting back to the issue of how attitude affects everything in our lives, I come to think of something Mahatma Gandhi once said, and this is the thought I will leave you with:

"A man is but the product of his thoughts: what he thinks he becomes." - Mahatma Gandhi