At the end of November 2022, I will have been running my own business for six years.
When I started at the beginning of December in 2016, I had some idea of what I was doing – I had been a freelancer years before. So I made my plans and set forth.
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I was recently asked to write a series of articles about the metaverse for a client. I didn’t know much about the metaverse when I started out, but a bunch of research soon fixed that.
As I was doing that research (which looked at the role of the metaverse in a particular industry) I found myself wondering how this Shiny New Thing applied to my own world of work. Were there trends that I needed to know about? What skillsets might I need to get? This article is the result of my own research into the issue.
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A friend who lives in Melbourne, Australia complained on Facebook that he had been without electricity for several hours, in a curfew. His laptop died on him, and there he was in the dark with only his thoughts for company.
I smiled slightly but did not comment.
And recent news from Sydney that residents had been asked to conserve power in the evening as much as possible to avert blackouts prompted the same wry smile.
After all, there is no real joy in claiming the high ground on the question of being without power. All the tips I could give Australians are not really needed: sitting in the dark probably won’t happen to them again for months or even years.
Here in South Africa of course we all know what it is to be without power – that state of being for which we all grudgingly use the Eskom term: load shedding. Continue reading
Big businesses do rebranding exercises; small businesses can too…
When I first started freelancing in December 2016, I described myself as just that: a freelancer.
But I soon learned that saying I was a freelancer was either not understandable, or made me sound like someone who “just worked from home”.
So I started saying I run a small business, or sometimes “I am a journalist”.
And when in November 2018 I made enough money in one month to cover all my expenses I thought: okay, now this is serious. This really is a business, and that’s not just something I say because that’s the general advice on all the entrepreneurial websites.
At about the same time, I was due to get new business cards printed. I looked at my existing cards and thought they looked a little tired. When I first started my business (see what I did there) I went on to Fiverr, found a designer, told him I wanted something minimalist and then used what he did for two years.
