Photo by Wander Fleur on Unsplash
As a contractor, do you have work ambitions bigger than just maximising profit and reducing tax? Running a B-corp, making corporate donations and offering charity discounts are all good, but I’m talking about something bigger. The kind of thing that gets you through bad days or that you’d do for free, if you could.
For many years, I didn’t. I was simply driven by an overriding need to be in control of my work and not feeling trapped in an enterprise I either didn’t relate to, or didn’t really believe in. My limited company helped me ignore some very uncomfortable feelings about work, allowing me to make a living and pay the bills.
Fear and painful situations are incredibly powerful motivators, but hiding behind the facade of a limited company ultimately became tiring and no longer effective. The desire to ‘reset’ my work life resulted in setting up a new consultancy this year, one last attempt to make an impact and find work satisfaction. Something the naysayers tell me isn’t possible.
I reflect on all this after asking a friend to help me with a work situation I was finding incredibly difficult to navigate. The details aren’t important; suffice to say I had reached a crossroads as to whether to persevere with self-employment or to roll over and admit defeat.
This friend sold his house and stopped working to dedicate himself towards studying for an MBA. Upon graduating, he set up his consultancy, unlike every other classmate who went on to work in Fortune 500 and FTSE 200 firms. His mission was to ‘transform UK public sector services’ (for the better), a truly massive ambition that is perhaps not even achievable in a single lifetime. Yet, it runs through everything he does, and he’s the most principled consultant I’ve ever met.
In our conversation last night, he helped me see that my difficulties came from losing sight of the bigger picture, forgetting my reasons for creating the consultancy, and unhelpfully reverting to an earlier ‘contracting mindset’, which no longer served me well.
Years and years of day rate contracting means I’m really good at making sense of organisational chaos, traversing the many different levels this occurs at, working out what the real ‘ask’ is, before getting on with the job of building software and continuously de-risking the critical path for delivery. I bring an outsider’s perspective, work fairly independently and use my need for control to iron out the fine detail.
None of this is compelling enough to be my Simon Sinek ‘why’, but sitting in a development team and ensuring they can do their job well, without undue stress and anxiety, most definitely is. Fronting product demos, having navigated organisational complexity to deliver something excellent, is as well. Closing down my fledgling consultancy would deprive the world of my help. Thank you friend, for helping me remember this and widening my perspective.
Better Software UK specialises in software requirements for Legacy System Replacement 🔥; particularly for remote, outsourced and offshore development teams working in financial services.