On Friday I had an opportunity to co-work at the Melbourne Hub through a new Meetup I had joined called Jelly. Jelly organises monthly co-working events are various places around Melbourne and the reason I joined was to experience this new co-working space but also meet others who were outside my field of learning and development.
I arrived to the beautiful heritage listed building at 673 Bourke Street and rather than taking the old fashioned elevator up three flights of stairs, I decided to walk up and admire the ironwork of the stair bannister and the stain glassed windows. They don’t make buildings like this anymore…
After signing in and an introduction to the organisers, I settled onto one of the desks and chatted with my fellow colleagues. In front of me was a freelance graphic designer who was designing her own new website and beside me was a programmer who was working on bits of code (it looked like gobbledygook to me)! I spoke with the programmer at length because he gave me some ideas for how to quote and invoice clients using a new app that he was using called ServiceM8. I shared my frustration that this part of my new job was taking too much time and I needed a simpler and easier way to generate proposals and invoices but also have a snapshot of what’s been paid, what’s in progress and what needs to be chased up. The excel spreadsheet was too fiddly for me but at the same time, as I’m just starting out, I didn’t want it to be expensive.
I also had an opportunity to meet Jane Deany who is one of the organisers of the Jelly group. Jane comes from an educational background and has been co-working for a while. She showed me her website www.coworkingiscool.com where she reviews various co-working spaces. If you’re interested in learning more about co-working spaces (especially around Melbourne and surrounds), Jane’s a great person to chat to.
So what did I do during the day?
I had planned to do two main things on the day. The first was to finalise a questionnaire for a client that I was going to use for some on-the-job interviews as part of an analysis phase of a consulting job and the second was to write some scenarios for some training that another client wants developed for their client support staff. I completed both and was satisfied of my progress. However the main win was the new networks into different areas of graphic design and coding!
If you want to read more about my ‘ Third Places’ experiences check out my posts at:
- Where are all the Third Places in the ‘Burbs?
- Docklands Library as My Third Place
- Where’s Your Third Place?
- Where are the Cubicles? Our First Co-Working Event at Third Place
- Are You Looking for Experts? They’re in Third Place
- Our First Meetup with Third Place
- About Third Place
Co-Working at the Melbourne Hub http://t.co/rVUgcZ2sgF via @ActivateLearn
I’m a big fan of coworking as well. I use it alot while travelling. It’s a nice way to break the monotony of working and get good tech resources. Although usually I favor places offered in companies to places specially setup like this. Still in the event I travel to Melbourne I know I can find a place to work, who knows.
Sure programmers are cool people, specially those found in coworking. sad you didn’t get him to provide a link, I’m always curious to know.
None of my business but I’m surprised you already spend time on billing unless you bill per hour. Quotes are mostly a matter of having done some and then you reuse paragraphs, computations from one to the other. Major problem is to remember to remove references to the previous customer, we’ve all be bitten by it.
Why not arranging paiement by CC for small amounts ? Arrangement on paiement means and terms are a major point of a quote.
Hello Bruno, thanks for your comment! Yes, you have a whole selection of places to come to if you come to Melbourne but it begs the question, why would you be working when you can be taking time out to enjoy the scenery and act as a tourist (ha ha!!). Yes, I’ve started billing but it’s not per hour. All of the work I’ve done to date is as a fixed project except for some consulting jobs which are per hour. I’ve also got some coaching packages that I sell mainly to small business to show them how to use Twitter and LinkedIn for building and creating their own external networks and they too, are fixed price. I have been told of other packages to use but for now, a simple Excel spreadsheet and a Paypal link and invoice template seems to do the trick. For bigger jobs, it’s 50% deposit and rest on completion but I’m finding that corporates have a 30 day payment – so even my deposit I have to wait 30 days! Hence I’m questioning whether it’s worth my while to compete for corporate work with so many others in my field or work for the smaller and medium size businesses (of which there are many more) who have quicker response times and seem much more agile and proactive to solve business problems quickly.
It’s more than 10 years now that I combine travel for pleasure and travel for business. With the time I have now customers who became friends and in my former business in CAD I had customers almost everywhere. It happens that knowing people where you travel helps to get a deeper understanding of the culture you wouldn’t have as a simple tourist. I must find a customer in Australia 🙂
Depending on countries, rules change. France use to be terrible with up to 120 days for paiments. The larger the company the more abusive it was (The state was 180+ days). 30 days is decent. What you need is an initial cash flow allocated to that. 30 days means 1/12th of your yearly turnout, say 10% to cover collection delays. I agree it’s strange to allocate your own money to cover cash flow to your customers instead of using it for hardware or setup but it has been a constant in business for centuries. It’s also a barrier to new entrants as you discover. Once you have this reserve of money it’s being reused from months to months and you will forget about the 30 days. At that point you will appreciate the fact large companies are repeating businesses. They scale. They have also costs attached to each deals and when they know you, they will appreciate to engage on deals of x packages to be used over y years either on different package on one person or same package on different people. Small businesses are good to start, to learn experiment and grow but at the end you keep being obliged to look for yet another small customer. Large Co are good for the stability, the possibility to have long term plans. You need both.
Thanks Bruno, in all honesty I hadn’t thought about what you wrote about big companies. You’re totally correct. I was focussing only on the 30 day payment limitation but not realising the opportunity to work again in the same company. Having worked as an employee for over 24 years now, I’ve never had reason to learn what’s “on the other side” and the stark realisation that there’s no consistent pay packet coming in every fortnight is nail biting. It’s still early days yet and I’m beginning to realise the effort it takes to get some income in (whether you consult or whether you make your services into a product for ongoing sales). It’s a real learning curve and I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t constantly think about this and where my value lies. I keep going back to the fact that I’d like to help people to build and create their own networks using social tools but with a collaborative, equal, trusting and respectful relationship. Still, I’ve given this freelancing gig 18 months trial out. If it doesn’t work out, I can always go back to being a paid employee….thanks for making me look at it from a different perspective!
MT Co-Working @HubMelbourne http://t.co/JQQa9QqDLy via @ActivateLearn Thanks Helen Blunden #coworking @coworkingiscool
Thanks Helen Blunden for spreading the word about my blog coworkingiscool dot com, and of course providing some publicity about the Jelly Meetup and the Hub. Great to meet you at the Jelly last week. Enjoyed your article. Cheers, Jane Deany
No worries at all Jane, it was a pleasure to meet you and chat about a mutual interest of co-working!