From my recent posts, you have probably got the picture by now that my background is automation. I used to work for a very large corporation on the project side, my job was to look at gaps in our processes and boy were there gaps!! and come up with automation solutions for the manual processes. Although this job was probably one of the best schools in the world to learn all about automation, my passion was and still is the small businesses the people who took the initiative, cut the corporate cord and went out on their own. I have come to know many ex-colleagues who left the corporate life and became freelancers, some went to become freelancer IT consultants, some went to become marketing freelancers, some went to become freelancer project managers . As you probably get the drift, they all took their corporate experience and started working for themselves. The one thing in common was No one has ever looked back…
Now, here we come to the inspiration part, these ex-colleagues of mine, i.e. the new to the market freelancers, were all great friends, we used to go out for a drink occasionally, but since they became freelancers, the ALL started complaining constantly, and they all had the exact same complain! WE DON’T HAVE TIME! I was really puzzled, some of them had only a few clients, so I really couldn’t get why was that, that they didn’t have the time? As one of them put it, we have to take care of everything now, the clients, the tasks, the phone calls, the invoicing, we basically do several departments used to do for us in the company. and BINGO! having done this automation thing during all my corporate career, I suddenly realised, there wasn’t any reason why we couldn’t do the same for freelancers? Literally build a software from scratch, to automate all the daily to-Dos a freelancer needs to do? And this is what we did. I wouldn’t lie, it took us months to get to the perfect software that answers to what a freelancer needed to do, we went back and forth to the drawing board again and again, added and deleted modules until we felt it was now ready for it’s first test drive..
We gave it to the biggest complainer! Just to stop hearing him constantly moan about his difficult life as a freelancer. Now, don’t get me wrong, this person hated changes and even more hated technology more than anything..so we naturally figured it would be the best test drive we could ever have on the software.
We gave it to him, no charge no obligation, just his honest opinion..and we waited and waited for his comments..but nothing..waited a few more days that turned into weeks and then we called him..Martin? how are you? we asked, I am very very busy he said..Damn..we thought, he obviously hasn’t been using the software at all and we wasted all this time on him..so..we said..you haven’t been using it at all? What do you mean? Martin asked, of course I have, but since I started using it, I got so much work coming I don’t have time to chat or have a drink..
So, we sorted out his work problems..but we still haven’t sorted us his complaints, or managed to go out for a drink!!
Tomorrow, I want to show you the true powers of iQ Desk, and how it actually transformed the life of a customer of ours, who happens to be a freelancer life coach!.
