sample chapter
League of Supporters How everybody can start a service business to be proud of!
One chapter. For now! Hello, my name is Tillmann Carlos Bielefeld. After failed at 2 startups I successfully launched a support business in Germany. At first I did not notice what brought this success but after building software for many other businesses it was obvious: great support! It is not hard but it takes some time to learn it. In this book I show you how you can do this, too. Without losing valuable time on the obstacles I overcame in the last 5 years. This chapter is the reading probe of the book League of Supporters. Feel free to read, print, and share it and preorder the complete book!
Chapter 1: Want it Why I do this For 2 years I was in the startup trap: I developed a social network for nightlife businesses and a project management software. Both failed without any income. After that we successfully launched a support business. At first I did not notice what brought this success but after building software for many other businesses it was obvious: great support! I can show you how to do the same: find great clients, get paid well, ship great products and learn the basics of business along the way. It is not about being in the second row. It is about fulfilling the own dreams through supporting the ideas and visions of others. Support Is Not Service Service demands a mind telling you what to do. It is part of your job as a supporter to be this brain and to actually take action to push things into this shared direction Example: Working for a startup. As a service company you’d give your activity and time to the founder. He tells you what to do, you execute. Just like in the sense of the word origin servus servus you are at the master’s command. As a company, when you begin to do service, you will not excel. You stop thinking ahead. You trade your time for money. You could do better! In contrast: Support
For support it is crucial to have one shared direction. if not, you cannot carry a vision. Support is majestic. It is an honor to be part of a process and to push it along with others As a supporter you see yourself transporting the vision of the contracting company, helping them to reach their goals. You push, shoulder to shoulder, together with the team, the idea towards market. This is a whole new point of view. It gives you a much larger radius of operation. More power. More Meaning. And if things go wrong, you are at stakes, too. You may not be directly involved in the shares of the contracting company but you are committed to the vision you support. And you would do anything to make this project stay alive. sseerrvviiccee == Contribu C ontrib uti t ion o n oof f aact ctiv ivit ityy an a nd d time time ssuuppppoorrtt == Commitme C ommitm ent n t oof f ac a ct t io ion, n, mmin ind d an a nd d resources resources
With the term Supporter we now have a clear definition of what we do and what we do not do. I want to encourage former service providers to level up and to take action on their client’s goals. I want to see more support businesses thriving to be the groundwork for flourishing ideas! In short: I want you to be a Hero!
Why joining the battle?
“The best way of learning about anything is by doing.” (Sir Richard Branson)
You only learn by doing. There is no point in thinking about things, you have to do them. And who gets the chance to support several startups in the course of a few years? To list the advantages: The experience gain is immense. With projects being developed in few months, there are several new things to learn every year. It comes down to planning, developing and shipping products and this process can be refined every time. If you are not bound to any particular area of business you’ll get insights into many other companies and domains. This is probably the most exciting thing: learning from other successful business owners, diving into their processes and understanding something completely new. With customer acquisition you’ll build a great network out of nothing. At first there are obstacles but with every customer your credibility grows and you’ll get access to bigger clients. Working as a SP is definitely giving you good money for your work. In 3D artistry, logo design, online marketing or software development, there are hourly rates that are determined by location and job type. Even small companies get paid well right from the start. Serving other business is deeply fulfilling! This is not just my personal note: You’d also experience joy when someone smiled at you and gave you appreciation for what you produced. You will experience it when the first client smiles at you and gladly pays your bill.
Starting a service provider business does not have to mean to compromise the personal growth. For me, this meant keeping up my studies and finishing it in time. With this synergy I got better grades than I could have without my business. People who don’t start Employees
“I cannot leave my day job. I need to make money!!” is a common fear that employees have. Instead of leaving their work for a business that gives them more freedom they stay this way forever. Happiness fades and they work for the weekend. But actually, starting a service provider business is easier to do than many people think. With the first contract you can make a financial plan for the next months. With the results the acquisition of the subsequent jobs is easy. Freelancers
In principle, freelancers are already providing services to other companies. However, just like employees, they sell their hours and direction to customers who tell them what to do. Those freelancers who strive for providing solutions for their clients make a great leap towards their fulfillment. The next steps in their journey is then to grow their business, maybe employ other people and grow to a company. Students
Most students think they have to pay full attention to their studies. Their free time is often spent partying or optimizing for the best grades. Most students do not understand the pareto principle.
Students who think “they don’t have the skills yet” to start a business are falling into the perfection trap as well: they overestimate business owners. Everyone puts the trousers on the same way! Wantrepreneurs
Working desperately on their “next big thing”, the Wantrepreneur does not have a clue of how to sell his idea or to find a right one. Instead of learning how to ship the right solutions they work on their idea without success. Wantrepreneurs have all the guts to start an own company but they lack experience. Starting a service provider business is sure way out. You?
Do you find yourself in this list? Then starting a service provider business can get you out of this paralysis. It is a good way to make money, learn what people really need and get satisfaction in shipping great products. People who are about to quit Did you already start your service business? Are you less successful than you planned when starting out? Are you about to quit? This list contains the common struggles every service provider has to go through. Common objections
Do you already run a service provider business? Do you encounter these objections when pitching your service offer?
“We need to calculate. Can’t you give us a fixed price?” “Can I switch the service provider later on? What if we employ an own specialist for it?” “How can we be sure that you’ll never stop serving us?” “Do you document well?” “Small changes and bugfixes are included, right?” “We hold the intellectual property of the things developed, right?”
These are common and reasonable reservations everyone has when buying services from others. If you do not have adequate answers for all of these questions you might miss out on great opportunities! There are good answer to all of them - you just have to learn the best practices, implement them and talk about them! Fighting the competittion
Services can be compared in price, time and quality. None of these are really well measurable. Thus, a competition over these factors is just dumb. But too many people do it exactly that way. If your service provider business struggles explaining why he is better than the competition, you have to learn how to position yourself better! There are some best practices that everyone can implement now and improve their financial situation sustainably. Financial struggles
Many service providers get eaten up by the salaries. For digital solutions the majority of the fix cost is spent on
employee salaries. Although this makes the business easily planable, it can eat a company up after some months without contracts. Making financial plans is crucial for the longevity of a service provider business. We do not need a business plan here. But with some simple excel sheets you will get much insight and planneability. Things that go wrong Failed projects
Especially for software this is common pattern: Software that is way over budget or that never get shipped at all. This is almost always a communication issue and a lack of expectation management. Every service provider stands for the success of their productions. Handling a project within time, budget and quality should be the main mission of every production! Lock-In effects
Economy books tell us the neat example of lock-in effects: iPhone users are unlikely to switch to Android because they cannot take all their Apps with them. This might be good for Apple and not too bad for the user if Apple continues to provide good products. This is a desaster for clients of service providers. Especially for software service providers this is a common problem: Every small company think they are wiser than everybody else. Thus they develop custom frameworks, own CMSs and compiled, proprietary packages. The way out is like a divorce: not only is the relationship broken, the shared house cannot be separated so easily. With such a client relationship noone wants to work. The key here is to circumvent the technology lock-in and go for a stable client relationship that lasts longer than technology. Insufficient or wrong documentation
For the sake of saving money documentation is often omitted. There is just no documentation shipped with the product. Or even as bad: The documentation is never updated or written in a way that no external person can ever understand it. And this is not about making the service provider interchangeable. It is also a cost factor when changing the responsible person within the team. Documentation is crucial, has to be done right and not too extensively. Too much work in the end of a project
Projects with clear deadlines almost always get stressful in the end phase. This often compromises quality and burns out teams. These things can also be prevented with clear schedules and responsibilities. Contracts can help to enforce that the right information get transfered at the right time. No maintenance budget planned
If a service provider calculates until shipping date and does not work out a maintainance plan, the project is
likely to be a failure - even after sucessful shipping. Mickey Mouse Jobs
Service providers sometimes tend to try the easy path: charge a lot for low quality service. If that happens, the missions of a service provider has failed. They should work every job with best quality - or do not take it! I want you to be better! Seeing all these things going wrong makes me angry! It is not hard to deliver great service, ship great products and leave a long-lasting positive impression at clients. We need more professional service providers. People who do it right. People who fix the impressions many bad behaving agencies leave. And if they are not from Germany, why not ask for services overseas? Untouched potential
There is so much potential in you. Especially if you are wasting your time doing the folloing: Work as an employee doing monkey work under the direction of a boss that does not know your true potential. Strive for the next vacation only to reload your batteries for the next months of hard work. Why not choose a job that you never have to recover from? Build your startup without plan and experience. Please, don’t waste years of your life building “the next big thing”. There are just too many Wantrepreneurs who need to gain experience and get contacts first! Studying to perfection. Honestly, if you want to waste your time on the last 20% to please your Professor: go for it! But if you want to learn how to maximize your impact, go should start your business now!
I want you to bring your love to the SP business. I want you to live up to your full potential. We need more SP and this book will show you how to join our leage with ease!
How I started out empuxa In 2006 I started as a Wantrepreneur. After my apprenticeship as a software developer and four months of work at a company in Australia, I thought I knew it all. I met up with some friends and we started hacking. 2 years, 2 online platforms and 0 income later, it dawned me that something was going wrong. One platform was social network dedicated for nightlife. We interviewed a couple of club owners and features some parties, but without us pushing noone used the product. We took it offline in 2010. It all changed when we met with a university festival producer Steffen Krogmann who needed a customized ticketing solution. This was due to a cooperation with studiVZ, a german facebook clone (that was shut down this year). No other software could handle that. This guy gave us a goal, an environment and direction. Ongoing from that we founded a company, rented an office and found our next customer: the Wacken festival. With this first big customer we founded the corporation empuxa that is still serving as a business service provider with huge success. northdocks
The other approach was a project management system like basecamp, called Quassum. We talked to some customers but we did not overcome the threshold needed for a really striving community. We did not niche it down enough to attract one certain kind of customer. The company we founded was called northdocks, founded in 2009 as one of the first German form of the english limited. Aside Quassum the company started building custom solutions for 3D modelling. In late 2009 this company went into working as a business service provider for the most time, having Quassum as a side business. I sold my shares to focus on empuxa while northdocks strived as a service provider until today. Although I felt like having failed at product development two times, I gained something much more precious: The ability to help others. Personal Growth When I started in 2006 I also enrolled at the Kiel University. I did not think that I could handle business and uni at the same time but it turned out to have quite the contrary effect. In the 5 years of studying I started the companies empuxa and northdocks, lived a semester abroad in Valencia, Spain, traveled to Africa, South America and learned kite surfing. Many fellow students of mine started companies, compromised their studies and eventually dropped out. Many people warned me on that but I finished my studies with an A grade while writing my Diploma Thesis at one of the most inspiring companies in my area: XING.com. Apart from the business and university career I learned how to live a kick-ass life. When I lived in Spain in 2009, I started documenting my life in my personal blog Snaptury where I post one picture every day. I attribute most of my happiness to helping others.
My mission is to help people succeed in business without compromising happiness!
Key Moments On my way I had several moments where I learned crucial lessons. These learnings helped me take the next step becoming the business owner I envisioned from the start. I am always wrong. The customer is always right. Working on jobs for others does not compromise my freedom. When I got accepted for writing my Diploma Thesis at XING.com it dawned me that something great was happening and that all this work was not holding me back from finishing my studies. The competition is not smarter! When we working together with a much larger SP we saw how bad their programmers were. Their software was all about the looks but they acquired the client. I do not need to have Diploma for credibility. After having received my degree on paper I never needed it for customer acquisition. All the years before graduation I could attract great clients without this paper. Working closely with clients is deeply fulfilling. This came when we implemented a custom ERP solution at a printing factory. After training the employees to work with it, I saw a happy customer who saved a lot of time. Opening a business is easy. When we founded our corporation, built up business cards and paid us the first
salaries I saw how easy it actually was. It was basically only hard work, no rocket science involved. There are other things more fulfilling than attending parties. During the work with our client Steffen Krogmann in 2009 we often sat in the office until late, then joined a currently going carnival much too late. I still remember other people already leaving and feeling deep satisfaction on the work we did that night.
Throughout this book I will describe these lessons in detail and show you how you get to the results yourself without falling flat on your face.
The Industry Let’s look at the industry, see the opportunities and learn from other successful businesses. Rob Fitzpatrick advises us to explain our business to our mothers. Let’s give it a try! Problem Solvers
Remember the old TV series “The A-Team”: The owner of a farm runs into trouble that he cannot solve himself. He calls in the A-Team, a team of outlaws; specialists in their field. They appear on the spot, analyze the problem and then work together to solve the case. The farmer booked the team for a short time and got a solution directed to his own needs. This pattern continues throughout 98 episodes and is the best analogy for a business that is as old as the human evolution. Business Problems
Service providers (SP) are teams that produce digital solutions for business problems. A business problem can be an annoyance in processes of work or a need for innovation to go into new markets. Examples for service businesses are: Software dev shops Graphic design agencies 3D modelling agencies IT infrastructure builders Marketing and social media firms … anyone who produces customized digital solutions for business customers.
Customers of SPs are usually corporations that deal with one of these issues. When the customer sees the need for a digital product if he cannot solve it with these approaches: Directing / educating own employees to building digital products. The more distant the business is from the digital world, the harder it gets. Hire new employees able to digitally produce a solution. This does only work if the company can afford it and the problem is relatively easy to solve. Since employees are long-term bonds they cannot be fired after the solution is shipped (at least not morally) Buy a solution off the shelf. This works for many cases but not for innovation or custom problem settings. Most of the time, these products have to be customized at least a bit. That brought up a whole industry and created tech villages like Walldorf.
These aproaches are often not acceptable and are more insecure and more expensive than to hire an tech ATeam. In any industry there are many smaller and larger teams that are dedicated to solving problems for other businesses. Great Examples
In every city there are many TSPs. There are also rather unknown examples of great innovation driven by large corporations but actually produces by contracted service providers. Some exiting examples are as following: Viral Campaign of Old Spice fragrance: “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” done by Wieden + Kennedy. It helped the brand to get a new image and to sell their products to a complete new customer group. nxtbgthng builds the iOS applications for soundcloud, the worldwide used software made in Berlin. Bosch delivers parts to the most important car manufacturers.
Trends Market size
Examples like Old Spice, nxtbgthng and Bosch are not rare. This type of company is quite prominent and fills up huge parts of the value chains of many digital products. Only it is hard to see the real actors behind marketing campains, great logos of sophisticated software. Since early days of the digital information age products are being developed not only by the vendors themselves but by a multitude of suppliers. Over the years, including happenings like the dot com boom or the financial crisis starting 2010, the digital industry has never shrunk. Current numbers are promising opportunity and growth. However, the numbers of skilled employees has never matched that demand! Many companies are bound in growth just because they can’t find more skilled talent. Education has adjusted to that but the effects are delayed for the next years. The effect of the huge demand and the scarcity lead to high prices. Nowadays, an hour of skilled agency work in Munich cost around 90 EUR. Since the salaries for professionals are so high as well there is huge opportunity for SPs to sell their work for a fair price. Employees
Anyone employing professional digital workers will have a hard time employing them. This is due to scarcity and also because of the high standards of office work nowadays. - Perks like coffee machine, MacBook Pro and Smartphone are normal. Companies in tech hubs are even raising the stakes with free BBQs and laundry services. - The salaries are rising steadily. Depending on the region the salaries are raising every year. Understanding hackers is hard. You need to treat them right or they just find a job around the corner. Technology
Half-life periods decrease, meaning that any knowledge gained in the digital space is likely to get obsolete after a short time. Every year there are several new programming languages introduced. Learning Java alone is not a job guarantee any more. The specialization of digital work leads to the formation of small peer groups. There are keywords, habits and own styles established that are sometimes hard to learn from the outside. If innovation in a corporate environment is not encouraged and built into the processes, any company will have a hard time keeping up the technology race.
Are you ready?
Disclaimers and common questions When telling my story to fellow students, competitors or our customers I often heard some of the following reservations. This list give the interesing ones and the respective response.
“You’re still studying, how can you know what you do?”
Because we are studying we know the latest technology, learn deep algorithms and Furthermore we know how to deal with deadlines. We ship no matter what!
“How could you ever got this done? The study exercises just eat me up”
I formed a great team and learned how to delegate many tasks. I learned how to say no to customer as well as study topics. I learned the study regulations really well and optimized it for time efficiency.
“This may be you, but my life is different”
This book is not a DIY for the Tillmann Carlos Bielefeld lifestyle. It is the collected wisdom of my past years with lessons and tipps. Choose the ones that fit for you. You will also uncover many things on your way that this book will help you with.
“These are not your thoughts!”
Yes, they are! I wrote down the whole book before looking to the sides. While writing it, I encountered many things that were already written down by other people. In that case, I leave it up to you what exactly to take away. Some thoughts are common sense, but if you haven’t implemented them yet it might be a sign that this book will help you to a great extend! A short notion of myself: In this book I will point to the client in the masculin form. Of course we are not excluding women here; this is just to simplify it. I believe in simple solutions and assume you are with me. Furthermore, I will talk about the production often. By that I mean the solution we, as support providers, are building. This can be a CI, a web page, a custom software solution, a social media strategy, you name it. What you will learn This book is about giving you the tools to become a great service provider! I will show you how to Plan it Get the right setup before paying your first offices or employees Start it: Make your brand, find a co-founder and eventually get the first jobs. Set yourself goals, a mission statement and implement a vision in your team. Work it: Focus on quality and customer experience. Make proper invoicing, hire employees ship the best you can! Grow it: Increase your hourly rates, get into bigger and greater jobs, hold your employees and grow your company.
Leave it: Exiting a service provider is hard. I will list the options and how to make the best choice.
Habits you will develop While working through this book you will develop the following habits. Be wise with money. Save it for the hard times, calculate well and know what your time is worth! Say no. Many job offers you’ll get are not worth the effort and from clients who cannot pay you well. Saying no to the right things is essential! Become a problem solver! You will bring the best service to your clients. SPs adapt to new problems quicker and are open-minded in general. Love people. Your clients won’t be robots and you need to discuss a lot to understand them properly. If you don’t love your clients you won’t be able to help them well. CANI: Constant and never ending improvement. Part of your job as a service provider is to stay at the edge of technology. Even if you’re not paid for it you need to learn the latest and greatest.
Skills you will learn Delegate jobs to other companies or employees. Build trustful relationships. Set an reach your goals smarter. Customer acquisition: Find the customers you always wanted to have. Build a brand you can be proud of. Form a team, Attract great talent, retain it Choose your customers, learn to network and make deep relationships Never compromise on your happiness, studies or personal growth Bootstrap the business without going into debt. Staying away from activity and start taking action.
Crush it! And get better results faster! To implement a service provider business you don’t have to be studied or need great references. You really do not need any special skill! But the steps have to be wisely taken. Most entrepreneurs start using trial and error, just like we did. You can save this time! With the right instructions you will get great results quicker. Starting a service business is not hard, but there are fallacies. I help you prevent them. Read this book to develop all these habits and become the business owner you always wanted! This book contains everything I learned in the last 5 years of running support businesses. Learn how we employed a graphic designer who is a famous DJ, learn how to to attract great customers in San Francisco and make supporting others the best time you can imagine!
Go to the order page and buy the complete book now! Before the release date you will save 10 € on by preordering it! Thanks for reading! Tillmann Carlos Bielefeld Attributions Thanks to Antonio “Mabs” Rodruigez for the great superhero art!
One chapter. For now! Hello, my name is Tillmann Carlos Bielefeld. After failed at 2 startups I successfully launched a support business in Germany. At first I did not notice what brought this success but after building software for many other businesses it was obvious: great support! It is not hard but it takes some time to learn it. In this book I show you how you can do this, too. Without losing valuable time on the obstacles I overcame in the last 5 years. This chapter is the reading probe of the book League of Supporters. Feel free to read, print, and share it and preorder the complete book!
Chapter 1: Want it Why I do this For 2 years I was in the startup trap: I developed a social network for nightlife businesses and a project management software. Both failed without any income. After that we successfully launched a support business. At first I did not notice what brought this success but after building software for many other businesses it was obvious: great support! I can show you how to do the same: find great clients, get paid well, ship great products and learn the basics of business along the way. It is not about being in the second row. It is about fulfilling the own dreams through supporting the ideas and visions of others. Support Is Not Service Service demands a mind telling you what to do. It is part of your job as a supporter to be this brain and to actually take action to push things into this shared direction Example: Working for a startup. As a service company you’d give your activity and time to the founder. He tells you what to do, you execute. Just like in the sense of the word origin servus servus you are at the master’s command. As a company, when you begin to do service, you will not excel. You stop thinking ahead. You trade your time for money. You could do better! In contrast: Support
For support it is crucial to have one shared direction. if not, you cannot carry a vision. Support is majestic. It is an honor to be part of a process and to push it along with others As a supporter you see yourself transporting the vision of the contracting company, helping them to reach their goals. You push, shoulder to shoulder, together with the team, the idea towards market. This is a whole new point of view. It gives you a much larger radius of operation. More power. More Meaning. And if things go wrong, you are at stakes, too. You may not be directly involved in the shares of the contracting company but you are committed to the vision you support. And you would do anything to make this project stay alive. sseerrvviiccee == Contribu C ontrib uti t ion o n oof f aact ctiv ivit ityy an a nd d time time ssuuppppoorrtt == Commitme C ommitm ent n t oof f ac a ct t io ion, n, mmin ind d an a nd d resources resources
With the term Supporter we now have a clear definition of what we do and what we do not do. I want to encourage former service providers to level up and to take action on their client’s goals. I want to see more support businesses thriving to be the groundwork for flourishing ideas! In short: I want you to be a Hero!
Why joining the battle?
“The best way of learning about anything is by doing.” (Sir Richard Branson)
You only learn by doing. There is no point in thinking about things, you have to do them. And who gets the chance to support several startups in the course of a few years? To list the advantages: The experience gain is immense. With projects being developed in few months, there are several new things to learn every year. It comes down to planning, developing and shipping products and this process can be refined every time. If you are not bound to any particular area of business you’ll get insights into many other companies and domains. This is probably the most exciting thing: learning from other successful business owners, diving into their processes and understanding something completely new. With customer acquisition you’ll build a great network out of nothing. At first there are obstacles but with every customer your credibility grows and you’ll get access to bigger clients. Working as a SP is definitely giving you good money for your work. In 3D artistry, logo design, online marketing or software development, there are hourly rates that are determined by location and job type. Even small companies get paid well right from the start. Serving other business is deeply fulfilling! This is not just my personal note: You’d also experience joy when someone smiled at you and gave you appreciation for what you produced. You will experience it when the first client smiles at you and gladly pays your bill.
Starting a service provider business does not have to mean to compromise the personal growth. For me, this meant keeping up my studies and finishing it in time. With this synergy I got better grades than I could have without my business. People who don’t start Employees
“I cannot leave my day job. I need to make money!!” is a common fear that employees have. Instead of leaving their work for a business that gives them more freedom they stay this way forever. Happiness fades and they work for the weekend. But actually, starting a service provider business is easier to do than many people think. With the first contract you can make a financial plan for the next months. With the results the acquisition of the subsequent jobs is easy. Freelancers
In principle, freelancers are already providing services to other companies. However, just like employees, they sell their hours and direction to customers who tell them what to do. Those freelancers who strive for providing solutions for their clients make a great leap towards their fulfillment. The next steps in their journey is then to grow their business, maybe employ other people and grow to a company. Students
Most students think they have to pay full attention to their studies. Their free time is often spent partying or optimizing for the best grades. Most students do not understand the pareto principle.
Students who think “they don’t have the skills yet” to start a business are falling into the perfection trap as well: they overestimate business owners. Everyone puts the trousers on the same way! Wantrepreneurs
Working desperately on their “next big thing”, the Wantrepreneur does not have a clue of how to sell his idea or to find a right one. Instead of learning how to ship the right solutions they work on their idea without success. Wantrepreneurs have all the guts to start an own company but they lack experience. Starting a service provider business is sure way out. You?
Do you find yourself in this list? Then starting a service provider business can get you out of this paralysis. It is a good way to make money, learn what people really need and get satisfaction in shipping great products. People who are about to quit Did you already start your service business? Are you less successful than you planned when starting out? Are you about to quit? This list contains the common struggles every service provider has to go through. Common objections
Do you already run a service provider business? Do you encounter these objections when pitching your service offer?
“We need to calculate. Can’t you give us a fixed price?” “Can I switch the service provider later on? What if we employ an own specialist for it?” “How can we be sure that you’ll never stop serving us?” “Do you document well?” “Small changes and bugfixes are included, right?” “We hold the intellectual property of the things developed, right?”
These are common and reasonable reservations everyone has when buying services from others. If you do not have adequate answers for all of these questions you might miss out on great opportunities! There are good answer to all of them - you just have to learn the best practices, implement them and talk about them! Fighting the competittion
Services can be compared in price, time and quality. None of these are really well measurable. Thus, a competition over these factors is just dumb. But too many people do it exactly that way. If your service provider business struggles explaining why he is better than the competition, you have to learn how to position yourself better! There are some best practices that everyone can implement now and improve their financial situation sustainably. Financial struggles
Many service providers get eaten up by the salaries. For digital solutions the majority of the fix cost is spent on
employee salaries. Although this makes the business easily planable, it can eat a company up after some months without contracts. Making financial plans is crucial for the longevity of a service provider business. We do not need a business plan here. But with some simple excel sheets you will get much insight and planneability. Things that go wrong Failed projects
Especially for software this is common pattern: Software that is way over budget or that never get shipped at all. This is almost always a communication issue and a lack of expectation management. Every service provider stands for the success of their productions. Handling a project within time, budget and quality should be the main mission of every production! Lock-In effects
Economy books tell us the neat example of lock-in effects: iPhone users are unlikely to switch to Android because they cannot take all their Apps with them. This might be good for Apple and not too bad for the user if Apple continues to provide good products. This is a desaster for clients of service providers. Especially for software service providers this is a common problem: Every small company think they are wiser than everybody else. Thus they develop custom frameworks, own CMSs and compiled, proprietary packages. The way out is like a divorce: not only is the relationship broken, the shared house cannot be separated so easily. With such a client relationship noone wants to work. The key here is to circumvent the technology lock-in and go for a stable client relationship that lasts longer than technology. Insufficient or wrong documentation
For the sake of saving money documentation is often omitted. There is just no documentation shipped with the product. Or even as bad: The documentation is never updated or written in a way that no external person can ever understand it. And this is not about making the service provider interchangeable. It is also a cost factor when changing the responsible person within the team. Documentation is crucial, has to be done right and not too extensively. Too much work in the end of a project
Projects with clear deadlines almost always get stressful in the end phase. This often compromises quality and burns out teams. These things can also be prevented with clear schedules and responsibilities. Contracts can help to enforce that the right information get transfered at the right time. No maintenance budget planned
If a service provider calculates until shipping date and does not work out a maintainance plan, the project is
likely to be a failure - even after sucessful shipping. Mickey Mouse Jobs
Service providers sometimes tend to try the easy path: charge a lot for low quality service. If that happens, the missions of a service provider has failed. They should work every job with best quality - or do not take it! I want you to be better! Seeing all these things going wrong makes me angry! It is not hard to deliver great service, ship great products and leave a long-lasting positive impression at clients. We need more professional service providers. People who do it right. People who fix the impressions many bad behaving agencies leave. And if they are not from Germany, why not ask for services overseas? Untouched potential
There is so much potential in you. Especially if you are wasting your time doing the folloing: Work as an employee doing monkey work under the direction of a boss that does not know your true potential. Strive for the next vacation only to reload your batteries for the next months of hard work. Why not choose a job that you never have to recover from? Build your startup without plan and experience. Please, don’t waste years of your life building “the next big thing”. There are just too many Wantrepreneurs who need to gain experience and get contacts first! Studying to perfection. Honestly, if you want to waste your time on the last 20% to please your Professor: go for it! But if you want to learn how to maximize your impact, go should start your business now!
I want you to bring your love to the SP business. I want you to live up to your full potential. We need more SP and this book will show you how to join our leage with ease!
How I started out empuxa In 2006 I started as a Wantrepreneur. After my apprenticeship as a software developer and four months of work at a company in Australia, I thought I knew it all. I met up with some friends and we started hacking. 2 years, 2 online platforms and 0 income later, it dawned me that something was going wrong. One platform was social network dedicated for nightlife. We interviewed a couple of club owners and features some parties, but without us pushing noone used the product. We took it offline in 2010. It all changed when we met with a university festival producer Steffen Krogmann who needed a customized ticketing solution. This was due to a cooperation with studiVZ, a german facebook clone (that was shut down this year). No other software could handle that. This guy gave us a goal, an environment and direction. Ongoing from that we founded a company, rented an office and found our next customer: the Wacken festival. With this first big customer we founded the corporation empuxa that is still serving as a business service provider with huge success. northdocks
The other approach was a project management system like basecamp, called Quassum. We talked to some customers but we did not overcome the threshold needed for a really striving community. We did not niche it down enough to attract one certain kind of customer. The company we founded was called northdocks, founded in 2009 as one of the first German form of the english limited. Aside Quassum the company started building custom solutions for 3D modelling. In late 2009 this company went into working as a business service provider for the most time, having Quassum as a side business. I sold my shares to focus on empuxa while northdocks strived as a service provider until today. Although I felt like having failed at product development two times, I gained something much more precious: The ability to help others. Personal Growth When I started in 2006 I also enrolled at the Kiel University. I did not think that I could handle business and uni at the same time but it turned out to have quite the contrary effect. In the 5 years of studying I started the companies empuxa and northdocks, lived a semester abroad in Valencia, Spain, traveled to Africa, South America and learned kite surfing. Many fellow students of mine started companies, compromised their studies and eventually dropped out. Many people warned me on that but I finished my studies with an A grade while writing my Diploma Thesis at one of the most inspiring companies in my area: XING.com. Apart from the business and university career I learned how to live a kick-ass life. When I lived in Spain in 2009, I started documenting my life in my personal blog Snaptury where I post one picture every day. I attribute most of my happiness to helping others.
My mission is to help people succeed in business without compromising happiness!
Key Moments On my way I had several moments where I learned crucial lessons. These learnings helped me take the next step becoming the business owner I envisioned from the start. I am always wrong. The customer is always right. Working on jobs for others does not compromise my freedom. When I got accepted for writing my Diploma Thesis at XING.com it dawned me that something great was happening and that all this work was not holding me back from finishing my studies. The competition is not smarter! When we working together with a much larger SP we saw how bad their programmers were. Their software was all about the looks but they acquired the client. I do not need to have Diploma for credibility. After having received my degree on paper I never needed it for customer acquisition. All the years before graduation I could attract great clients without this paper. Working closely with clients is deeply fulfilling. This came when we implemented a custom ERP solution at a printing factory. After training the employees to work with it, I saw a happy customer who saved a lot of time. Opening a business is easy. When we founded our corporation, built up business cards and paid us the first
salaries I saw how easy it actually was. It was basically only hard work, no rocket science involved. There are other things more fulfilling than attending parties. During the work with our client Steffen Krogmann in 2009 we often sat in the office until late, then joined a currently going carnival much too late. I still remember other people already leaving and feeling deep satisfaction on the work we did that night.
Throughout this book I will describe these lessons in detail and show you how you get to the results yourself without falling flat on your face.
The Industry Let’s look at the industry, see the opportunities and learn from other successful businesses. Rob Fitzpatrick advises us to explain our business to our mothers. Let’s give it a try! Problem Solvers
Remember the old TV series “The A-Team”: The owner of a farm runs into trouble that he cannot solve himself. He calls in the A-Team, a team of outlaws; specialists in their field. They appear on the spot, analyze the problem and then work together to solve the case. The farmer booked the team for a short time and got a solution directed to his own needs. This pattern continues throughout 98 episodes and is the best analogy for a business that is as old as the human evolution. Business Problems
Service providers (SP) are teams that produce digital solutions for business problems. A business problem can be an annoyance in processes of work or a need for innovation to go into new markets. Examples for service businesses are: Software dev shops Graphic design agencies 3D modelling agencies IT infrastructure builders Marketing and social media firms … anyone who produces customized digital solutions for business customers.
Customers of SPs are usually corporations that deal with one of these issues. When the customer sees the need for a digital product if he cannot solve it with these approaches: Directing / educating own employees to building digital products. The more distant the business is from the digital world, the harder it gets. Hire new employees able to digitally produce a solution. This does only work if the company can afford it and the problem is relatively easy to solve. Since employees are long-term bonds they cannot be fired after the solution is shipped (at least not morally) Buy a solution off the shelf. This works for many cases but not for innovation or custom problem settings. Most of the time, these products have to be customized at least a bit. That brought up a whole industry and created tech villages like Walldorf.
These aproaches are often not acceptable and are more insecure and more expensive than to hire an tech ATeam. In any industry there are many smaller and larger teams that are dedicated to solving problems for other businesses. Great Examples
In every city there are many TSPs. There are also rather unknown examples of great innovation driven by large corporations but actually produces by contracted service providers. Some exiting examples are as following: Viral Campaign of Old Spice fragrance: “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” done by Wieden + Kennedy. It helped the brand to get a new image and to sell their products to a complete new customer group. nxtbgthng builds the iOS applications for soundcloud, the worldwide used software made in Berlin. Bosch delivers parts to the most important car manufacturers.
Trends Market size
Examples like Old Spice, nxtbgthng and Bosch are not rare. This type of company is quite prominent and fills up huge parts of the value chains of many digital products. Only it is hard to see the real actors behind marketing campains, great logos of sophisticated software. Since early days of the digital information age products are being developed not only by the vendors themselves but by a multitude of suppliers. Over the years, including happenings like the dot com boom or the financial crisis starting 2010, the digital industry has never shrunk. Current numbers are promising opportunity and growth. However, the numbers of skilled employees has never matched that demand! Many companies are bound in growth just because they can’t find more skilled talent. Education has adjusted to that but the effects are delayed for the next years. The effect of the huge demand and the scarcity lead to high prices. Nowadays, an hour of skilled agency work in Munich cost around 90 EUR. Since the salaries for professionals are so high as well there is huge opportunity for SPs to sell their work for a fair price. Employees
Anyone employing professional digital workers will have a hard time employing them. This is due to scarcity and also because of the high standards of office work nowadays. - Perks like coffee machine, MacBook Pro and Smartphone are normal. Companies in tech hubs are even raising the stakes with free BBQs and laundry services. - The salaries are rising steadily. Depending on the region the salaries are raising every year. Understanding hackers is hard. You need to treat them right or they just find a job around the corner. Technology
Half-life periods decrease, meaning that any knowledge gained in the digital space is likely to get obsolete after a short time. Every year there are several new programming languages introduced. Learning Java alone is not a job guarantee any more. The specialization of digital work leads to the formation of small peer groups. There are keywords, habits and own styles established that are sometimes hard to learn from the outside. If innovation in a corporate environment is not encouraged and built into the processes, any company will have a hard time keeping up the technology race.
Are you ready?
Disclaimers and common questions When telling my story to fellow students, competitors or our customers I often heard some of the following reservations. This list give the interesing ones and the respective response.
“You’re still studying, how can you know what you do?”
Because we are studying we know the latest technology, learn deep algorithms and Furthermore we know how to deal with deadlines. We ship no matter what!
“How could you ever got this done? The study exercises just eat me up”
I formed a great team and learned how to delegate many tasks. I learned how to say no to customer as well as study topics. I learned the study regulations really well and optimized it for time efficiency.
“This may be you, but my life is different”
This book is not a DIY for the Tillmann Carlos Bielefeld lifestyle. It is the collected wisdom of my past years with lessons and tipps. Choose the ones that fit for you. You will also uncover many things on your way that this book will help you with.
“These are not your thoughts!”
Yes, they are! I wrote down the whole book before looking to the sides. While writing it, I encountered many things that were already written down by other people. In that case, I leave it up to you what exactly to take away. Some thoughts are common sense, but if you haven’t implemented them yet it might be a sign that this book will help you to a great extend! A short notion of myself: In this book I will point to the client in the masculin form. Of course we are not excluding women here; this is just to simplify it. I believe in simple solutions and assume you are with me. Furthermore, I will talk about the production often. By that I mean the solution we, as support providers, are building. This can be a CI, a web page, a custom software solution, a social media strategy, you name it. What you will learn This book is about giving you the tools to become a great service provider! I will show you how to Plan it Get the right setup before paying your first offices or employees Start it: Make your brand, find a co-founder and eventually get the first jobs. Set yourself goals, a mission statement and implement a vision in your team. Work it: Focus on quality and customer experience. Make proper invoicing, hire employees ship the best you can! Grow it: Increase your hourly rates, get into bigger and greater jobs, hold your employees and grow your company.
Leave it: Exiting a service provider is hard. I will list the options and how to make the best choice.
Habits you will develop While working through this book you will develop the following habits. Be wise with money. Save it for the hard times, calculate well and know what your time is worth! Say no. Many job offers you’ll get are not worth the effort and from clients who cannot pay you well. Saying no to the right things is essential! Become a problem solver! You will bring the best service to your clients. SPs adapt to new problems quicker and are open-minded in general. Love people. Your clients won’t be robots and you need to discuss a lot to understand them properly. If you don’t love your clients you won’t be able to help them well. CANI: Constant and never ending improvement. Part of your job as a service provider is to stay at the edge of technology. Even if you’re not paid for it you need to learn the latest and greatest.
Skills you will learn Delegate jobs to other companies or employees. Build trustful relationships. Set an reach your goals smarter. Customer acquisition: Find the customers you always wanted to have. Build a brand you can be proud of. Form a team, Attract great talent, retain it Choose your customers, learn to network and make deep relationships Never compromise on your happiness, studies or personal growth Bootstrap the business without going into debt. Staying away from activity and start taking action.
Crush it! And get better results faster! To implement a service provider business you don’t have to be studied or need great references. You really do not need any special skill! But the steps have to be wisely taken. Most entrepreneurs start using trial and error, just like we did. You can save this time! With the right instructions you will get great results quicker. Starting a service business is not hard, but there are fallacies. I help you prevent them. Read this book to develop all these habits and become the business owner you always wanted! This book contains everything I learned in the last 5 years of running support businesses. Learn how we employed a graphic designer who is a famous DJ, learn how to to attract great customers in San Francisco and make supporting others the best time you can imagine!
Go to the order page and buy the complete book now! Before the release date you will save 10 € on by preordering it! Thanks for reading! Tillmann Carlos Bielefeld Attributions Thanks to Antonio “Mabs” Rodruigez for the great superhero art!
