Video transcript
Hi everybody, this is a video based on a webinar that I did with Lisa Baker back in December 2023 on business planning for freelancers, so if you were there, the content might seem familiar but hopefully it’s still going to be useful.
I’m Eleanor Steele and I’m the MedComms Mentor. I think that business planning shouldn’t be overwhelming.
And there are lots of different processes that you could follow and things that you “should” do that we hear about on LinkedIn, on webinars, in books, all sorts of things. There are trackers and forms that people say you should use. There are expectations and comparisons with other businesses. I think if it feels overwhelming, then that’s a good sign that it’s not right for you, and it’s not right for your business.
I think it’s also hard when we’re working as MedComms freelancers to focus on the right things when we’re doing business planning. Medical writing projects take a lot of focus and brain power. Doing the work is complex, it’s absorbing, and it takes a lot of very special skills.
Business planning is a totally separate set of skills, and it can be really hard to change how we’re thinking. to get into the right frame of mind.
Deadlines are another problem. Medical writing is full of deadlines and when we’re freelance we sometimes have very little control over when those deadlines are set, so it can be hard to justify any time for planning. We just need to get the next task done and I, I’m as guilty at this as anybody else.
So today, we’re going to take some time to step back and change our focus, and hopefully watching this video is going to help you justify that.
Take a moment, clear your mind, and then we’re going to get into it.
1. Look back at last year
The first thing we’re going to do is look back at last year. A lot happened in 2023 – in the world, in MedComms, and in each of our lives. Some of it’s been good, some of it bad, some surprising, some exciting. I don’t know about you, but things haven’t turned out exactly how I imagined them this time last year.
It’s really hard to capture all the things that have happened and hold them in my head and then figure out what they mean for how I should plan next year. So I’m not even going to try. I’m going to zoom out so far that I can sum up 2023 in one single word, and I’d like you to try and do the same.
Thinking about 2023, it’s hard not to picture a rollercoaster. Anyone else feel like that?
My first idea for a word of the year was rollercoaster, but I realised that’s too simplistic. We’ve all been on a rollercoaster, but how we’ve experienced that has been deeply individual. For some people, it might have been a thrilling ride where they enjoyed every second. For other people, it’s been more of a vomit comet where they couldn’t wait to get off and into the next year.
How we experience it, and how we react to those experiences, how we feel about those experiences, all of those things together sum up our Word of the Year.
My Word of 2023 is Adaptable.
Unexpected things happened. Clients disappeared, but then opportunities I hadn’t anticipated showed up. I started a YouTube channel, which I’d been thinking about for a while, but I had no idea how that was going to go, or what I was going to learn from the experience.
I worked in new ways with new people and have done training and mentoring on topics that I hadn’t even thought of. So when things went wrong, or didn’t turn out as I was expecting, I had to adapt. And it wasn’t always easy, it wasn’t always quick or seamless, but I did adapt. I did make those changes and things haven’t been a disaster. It’s just been different.
So what’s your word of the year? If you have one that just springs to mind immediately, that is great. Maybe share it in the comments below. I’d love to hear what your word of 2023 is, but don’t worry if you can’t boil it down to one word instantly. Our brains process things in different ways and at different speeds.
It might be useful to talk about this with a friend, particularly someone who works in MedComms as a freelancer as well, because they’re going to understand what you’re talking about. But I also have another method. Use AI.
Free write about what happened last year, how you felt, how you responded. Think about what worked well, and also how 2024 could be even better if something else happened or you worked on something different.
This is part of a feedback framework that I came across when I was a Squiggly Careers advocate, and I have put a link to more information about that in the video description below, because it’s a really great way of getting fast feedback. But you can use it when you’re reflecting on what happened last year.
When you’re free writing, maybe do that into a Word document, or you could go straight into AI. I would suggest using Bing Chat in creative mode, because I found that this gives you a really nice, unexpected result. I was expecting to get a one word answer because I basically said, “Please, can you suggest some single words that could be used to sum up my year?” when I put in my free written text and it came up with surprisingly touching responses and it wasn’t just one word, it was words with descriptions of why that word was something that summed up my year for me and it was really really useful.
So I would recommend doing this and saving any responses that you get, or you could just free write yourself and see what kind of themes come up. Either way, find that one word of the year that sums up everything that happened for you.
2. Check your basic requirements
Going through that process and finding your word of the year can mean that you come up with lots of ideas. That’s certainly what happened with me. But I think it’s really important to look before we leap and commit to new things or big changes.
Because baby steps are more sustainable. Someone I spoke to last year summed it up really, really nicely. Do you want to do one thing? Or none of the things? Because if we try to do too much, then there’s a risk that everything will fall by the wayside and we won’t actually make any changes.
Any plans also need to be made in the context of reality, so we need to check our numbers. First of all, financial requirements. We need to know how much money we need to bring in each month to pay ourselves and cover tax and things like that.
But also, what are the other financial requirements of our business? Things like subscriptions for software or organisations that we belong to, maybe business tax, equipment, overheads. Everybody’s business is a little bit different so you’re going to have different requirements and that might also change over time.
You might also want to make changes yourself. So look at those subscriptions. Is it something that you still use, or can you bin it off and save a bit of money. Maybe you need to put up your rates so that you can cover everything because things are getting more expensive at the moment. You need to know the numbers before you can make those decisions though.
You also need to know the hours that you have available for billable work. Not all time at our desks, after all, is actually billable. We need to include some time in our planning for, well, planning, and business development, training, finances, admin, IT downtime. That’s a bit of a sticky one sometimes, and having a bit of buffer time that’s built into our working days that we can use to take care of those things is so useful.
It doesn’t mean that we have to use that half hour or so, whatever it is that you decide, on those things. If we’ve got a big deadline, then sure, don’t do that training module.
Having a bit of buffer time means that we’re much more likely to be able to make realistic decisions about how much work we can take on and how we can schedule that into our working days.
We also need to work out how many days we have available for those billable hours during the week, during the month, during the whole calendar year.
We need to take time for going on holiday and recharging but we’re likely to need a bit of sick time at some point during the year and, again, a buffer for unexpected things that crop up.
We can also factor in what we know is going to be going on outside of work, in our personal lives, with our families, things like that. And all of those things together mean that we can check whether our basic requirements are actually realistic. Are the billable hours that you’ve got going to mean that you have enough time to meet your financial requirements? Are you really going to be able to work that number of hours for that many days?
Making plans based on a realistic schedule with built in buffers is much more likely to work than trying to cram everything in and hoping for the best.
But there’s something else that we should consider when we’re choosing what we want to spend our time on too.
3. What’s your long-term vision?
What’s your long term vision? This doesn’t have to be concrete or focus on specific results. I’m not talking about 10k months or getting six new clients this quarter. If those kind of goals are motivating for you, then fine. But for most people, they can be quite anxiety inducing and demotivating if you don’t tick them off.
We can’t do everything all at once either. So having a long term vision is more about how you want things to be in 5, 10, maybe 20 years, and this can change along the way.
It’s a good idea to reflect on your long term vision when you’re making plans, to check you’re going in the right direction. Thinking about things like how you want to be working in the future, what your career priorities are, how you want your working life to fit in with the rest of your life, and whether there are other priorities outside of work that are going to have an impact on your capacity or what you want to be doing day to day.
Those kind of things add up to give you a long term vision that you can use as a touchstone whenever you’re making plans, because you can think, “Does this help me move towards my long term vision?” if the answer is no, then is it really something that you want to be doing?
Now we’re ready to start making specific plans for this year, and we’re going to start off by figuring out our word of the year for this year. It’s the same process. We freewrite and use an AI tool, potentially, to pull out those themes from what we’re writing about.
So the things that we’re hoping to do, the things that we think will help us move towards our long term vision, the things that we don’t want to do as well. I did this process and came up with the word “balance” for 2024, and this is something that I feel gives a nice progression from last year’s “adaptable”.
In 2023 I was being adaptable and that meant that I felt like I was being pulled in multiple different directions and having to adapt to those changing pressures and the evolving landscape that I was faced with. This year I want a more balanced approach. I want to take into account my basic requirements and the long term vision of how I want my career to work, and how that vision fits in with my career priorities and the rest of my life.
I’ve reflected on the things that worked well last year, but also the things that this year could be even better if this is the case, and that means it’s much easier to look at my career and the options I have available to me at the moment and define the things that I want to stop, start, and continue.
Any project or opportunity that I’m faced with, I think, will this thing help me meet my basic requirements? And will it help me move towards my long term vision? If the answer is yes to both of those questions, then it’s a no brainer. I’m probably going to do that. If the answer is no to either of those questions, I have to seriously consider why I would want to say yes to it.
There are sometimes reasons why we want to do that kind of thing, potentially if it’s going to help us meet our basic requirements, but it’s not necessarily a great fit for our long term vision, it might be something that we want to do because we need to earn some money. Fair enough. But it’s still a good process to check in with that to see what our rationale is so that we understand why we’re making the decision that we are and it can also be a great way of understanding why dealing with feedback from other people.
If they say, “You should be doing this!” we can explain, even if it’s only to ourselves, why it’s not a good idea for us to go down this path. Because it’s not going to help us meet our basic requirements, or it’s not going to help us move towards our long term vision.
Obviously, YouTube is something that I want to continue with, although I’ve got some plans about how I want to adapt what I’ve been doing and hopefully make it more useful and if you have any thoughts on that then please do let me know either in the comments or send me a DM on LinkedIn or via my website. I would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.
One of the other things that I’m starting is collaborating with Peter Llewellyn to support subscribers of the MedComms Workbook.
So this is a service specifically for MedComms freelancers, which gives work opportunities, but I’ll now also be there to provide training and mentoring specifically targeted to MedComms freelancers, exclusively for workbook subscribers. Click on the link in the video description for more information, and it would be great to see you in the community.
Download the PDF summary
It can be so hard to make time for business planning, but in these uncertain times, it is so useful to have specific plans and ways of making decisions. It helps you know whether you’re on track or not, but it also helps you weigh up opportunities and projects as they come in to know whether they’re right for you, or whether you should give a polite, “No thank you, maybe next time.”
You can download a PDF summary of everything that I’ve covered in this video from a link in the description below, and it will help you work through the process that I have illustrated in your own time, because I realise you may not have been able to do all of the steps while I was talking.
But, in summary, I found reflecting on 2023 was much easier when I filtered all of my experiences into my word of the year, and I really hope you find this helpful too.
As freelancers, we all need to know our basic requirements. So that’s our personal and business financial requirements, the hours we have available for billable work per day, and the days available for billable work per month and per year. We also need to sense check these numbers to make sure they’re realistic and add in some buffer time so that we can cope with the unexpected.
Having a long term vision around how you want to work, your guiding priorities and how you want work to fit in with the rest of your life will also help you sense check your plans.
Considering these things will help you define the things you want to stop, start and continue. But remember, it’s OK to change direction. Reflect on these things on a regular basis so that you can tweak your plans when life changes, because it will.
And if you need help with this process, let me know, because this is absolutely something we could work together on in one to one mentoring.
And again, there’s more information on that in a link in the video description below. So, do add your words of the year in the comments below, because I would really love to hear. What you’re thinking and how you’re experiencing things. And let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for future videos, because again, I’d really love to hear your feedback.