Tag: Self-Employment (Page 2 of 3)

An Interview with iThemes on Self-Employment

November 20, 2015 / Tom

iThemes is a WordPress-centric company that focuses on providing a suite of tools and themes for bloggers.

Some of these tools include things like BackupBuddy, Exchange, and Sync. From their site:

Since 2008, we’ve been creating WordPress plugins, themes and training for freelancers, marketers, entrepreneurs, designers and developers. We want to take the hassle out of running WordPress websites.

At the beginning of 2015, iThemes launched an effort called WProsper. The goal of of the effort is to help others “do well, do better with WordPress and iThemes.”

Acquisitions

October 30, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

For the past few weeks (years, even), it’s so easy to find articles that read something like this:

Today, I am incredibly proud and excited to share that VMware has announced plans to acquire Boxer. The Boxer team will be joining the industry leader in
enterprise mobility as a part of the AirWatch® team within the VMware End-User Computing business unit.

Case in point: This is an excerpt of an article that I read just recently. And when I read that, it stirs a mix of emotions.

How Not To Upsell Your Product

October 26, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’m usually not into the whole “call out other applications when they do something I dislike.” That is, unless it’s something that I think is unethical or straight up dangerous or stupid.

We all have our boundaries.

To that end, I won’t be mentioning a specific application in this post. But I’m going to be using one as an example of how not to upsell your product.

When Clients Disappear Without Paying

October 21, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

When starting a business, there’s a lot of things to think about. For example:

The idea of working for yourself is exciting
The challenges of managing your own retirement can be tough
Navigating the tax code can be tougher (get a CPA!)
Keeping your own books can be tedious
Working with clients can be a lot of fun, but also tough
…and so on.

A lot of it is exciting, some of it is scary, and some of the it you might expect but don’t really know how to handle until it actually happens.

Case in point:

When working with a client, what do you do when you’ve completed a project, they disappear, and they don’t pay the final invoice?

This is when self-employment gets a little tougher.

When Things Go South (With a Company, Clients, and More)

September 29, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Occasionally, I’m asked how I handle the situation when things go south with company, clients, people with whom I’m working, and so on. This is one of those things that if you were to ask a handful of different people ranging from freelancers to C-level executives, you’d probably get different answers from each of them.

And rightly so.

After all, we’re all working for and/or with people at different places in the industry, so how we handle this situation is going to be unique to our particular position. So this isn’t one of those types of questions that has a universal answer.

I can only answer it with respect to the type of business I’ve done over the past few years. If you’re a single person or a small team, then maybe this will be helpful.