But, rather than simply bowing out of a job when something better comes along, it can be more rewarding and satisfying — and better for your reputation and future prospects — to design your own exit from the company.

When Your Exit Matters

It’s exciting to be part of the upswing — to become part of a burgeoning company and help to make it great. Whether you get in on the ground floor, or come along later to join an established business, many web jobs provide real opportunities to make a difference.

The web jobs I’ve worked in have ranged from those that were largely unspecified, shapeless and frequently changing, to established roles with detailed job descriptions, set responsibilities and benefits provided in accordance with company policy. But most of my web jobs have shared these characteristics.

Autonomy

No matter how seemingly small your sphere of influence may be, if you operate independently of others, with little oversight from superiors, you have responsibility. Walk out the door tomorrow, and your teammates may have trouble picking up the pieces.

In the weeks after I was laid off without warning one Friday afternoon during the dot-com crash, I received numerous calls from my old colleagues, asking where I’d kept certain documents, where they could find projects in progress, and so on. As an autonomous operator who hadn’t even foreseen her exit from the company, let alone planned for it, I’d put no systems or plans in place to help my teammates once I left.

Pet Projects

Many of the roles I’ve had have allowed for creative thinking and initiative. For me, a degree of freedom usually translates to the development of my own pet projects — things that I believe will improve the output of my role, team, or the organization. If you want your pet projects to continue once you leave your web job, you need to plan your exit accordingly.

After I lost my job at that web company, the pet projects I was working on fell in a heap. A direct mail piece I’d been developing with a favored contractor and friend simply slipped into the ether, so I never got to see if it would achieve the results I’d been aiming for, and my team never benefited from all that work. I didn’t even get samples of the finished piece for my folio.

Mutual Concern

I don’t know about you, but I’ve respected the work and staff of most of the companies I’ve worked for. So, whether it was the organization’s philosophy that hooked me, or the awesome capabilities of my colleagues, when I left most roles, I wanted to make sure everything was motoring along nicely for my teammates.

In short: if the company had respected me, I wanted to show my respect for the company by making things as easy and successful for its staff as possible.

Design Your Own Exit

The tasks and strategies you use to design your exit from an organization you love will depend on the company, your role in it and yourself.

I’ve left jobs under all circumstances: Showered with gifts, unceremoniously laid off, with successors chosen and primed, and without any clue as to who will pick up my tasks on Monday. The circumstances of your departure and replacement can have a significant impact on the amount of preparation you need to do.

Also remember that, for financial reasons, many companies prefer to have as concise a handover period as possible between a given role’s incumbents. Of course, long handover periods usually aren’t possible for the incumbents themselves.

When you think about the degree of autonomy you have, how much you want to support the company and your colleagues, and all those pet projects you want to continue after you leave, obvious exit-planning steps will present themselves:

• Prepare external parties like contractors for the change, for example, by helping them to establish other contacts within the organization and giving them the information they need to ask smart questions that will build a strong relationship with your successor.
• Identify precisely what your colleagues need from your role in order to do their jobs, and integrate the processes that achieve those aims into your role.
• Leverage the enthusiasm and support of like-minded teammates to develop and build on pet projects that support the company’s aims.
• Set expectations among appropriate colleagues to create demand for those pet projects.
• Create handover documentation that clearly guides your successor to complete the tasks associated with the role, and provide it to your teammates for feedback, as well as their own information.
• Document the underlying processes, outsourced talent, and functional information associated with your role or projects on the company wiki or intranet.
• Make sure the computer you hand over to your successor has all the technology you believe they’ll need already installed, and that any documents you leave on it are logically organized and clearly arranged; do the same with physical files and resources.
• Ensure your team members have your contact details in case they have any questions following your departure.

As you can see, designing your exit isn’t simply a matter of saving a process flow to the shared drive: it’s about inculcating appropriate expectations, promoting a philosophy, and supporting the team culture that you’ve appreciated during your stint with the company. Ultimately, it’s about trying to leave your team and your role in a better state that you found them.

Have you ever designed your own exit from a company? What steps did you take to make it as seamless as possible?

Image by stock.xchng user alexbruda.

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But as Paisano wrote recently, current conditions won’t last forever. Many sites will eventually become fee-based; others will shut down when their funding runs out, or when their owners decide to move in a different direction.

So when I evaluate a product that I’d like to incorporate into my company’s workflow — especially a product that will be visible to clients — I try to consider the product’s feature set, along with the issues raised in Judi’s 2007 WWD post. I also ask the following questions:

• Is the product open? Like a lot of people, I prefer open source projects. But I will consider proprietary systems if I am comfortable with how my data is stored and backed up, and whether the product allows me to do my own backups.
• Does it use standard formats that are easy to import and export? If the product will interface with my existing data, I need to evaluate how much work it will be to prepare the data for use by the new product.
• Can I host the product or software myself? Because my company does web hosting, we have easy access to web servers, bandwidth and backup systems. Therefore, I tend to prefer software that we can host ourselves. Maintaining a web server isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, although most of the major hosting companies make it really easy, as long as you’re willing to keep up with security patches and so on.
• If I can’t host the software myself, how reliable and robust are the product’s servers? Of course, even major services (like Gmail) have occasional outages. Here in Seattle, a fire caused a significant outage for many web sites just a couple of weeks ago. So I need to decide how my company will deal with such outages if we adopt the software.
• How will using this product affect my bottom line? Managing any new product requires investing time and resources to install, set up, maintain and troubleshoot. Proprietary services are priced many different ways, and may require an up-front cost, plus continued license fees or service contracts. And while open source products don’t require license fees, many open source software companies offer service contracts. I need to decide whether I want to invest in such a contract, or whether I think I can rely on the user community. Whether open source or not, it’s always a good idea to look at the complexity and maturity of the product, how likely it is to need support, and how active the user base is.
• What is my exit strategy should the product no longer be available? I need to decide how I will get my data, and plan for alternatives, if the product goes away.
• How likely is it that the service provider will be available in the long run? This one’s tricky, since as a small businessperson, I’m hardly in a position to see, much less analyze, the business plans and financial statements of every producer I consider. But there is a fair amount of public information available, so I need to do what due diligence I can.

It’s never possible to plan for every contingency. I had to scramble to replace my Sunrocket VoIP service when that company ceased operation, and I still have some SyQuest backup disk cartridges somewhere for which no players are now available. But with a little common sense, it’s possible to avoid putting all of our technological eggs in one basket and becoming too dependent on any one service.

How do you evaluate what new services to include in your workflow?

Image by stock.xchng user CraigPJ

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I’m not the only freelancer who faces this kind of situation.  Freelancers are used to wearing different hats and providing a variety of services.  Odds are, you needed to do a bit of SEO on your own site.  Or you had to design your own site early in your career when you were low on capital.  The diverse tasks we need to accomplish often lead us to learning new skills which may be applied professionally.

But if you’ve designed a website that converts well, or started an SEO campaign that makes your site the first in a long line of search engine results, does that mean you should be a professional web designer or an SEO consultant?  To answer this big question, you need to ask yourself five simpler questions first.

What’s the point? In other words, “Why do you want to start this?”  The reason you have must be compelling enough to devote hours of your life into this new endeavor.  Is it something you’ve always wanted to try?  Is it your dream venture?  While this is often an awkward question, especially for creative types, you’ll need to identify the force that is driving you to do this type of work.  The answer to this question is what will drive you to keep going when times are tough.

How passionate are you? This is related to the previous question, except this is more about your degree of passion, rather than what’s fueling it.  How much do you want this new venture to succeed?  How serious are you about this particular field?  Before taking this on, you need to want it badly enough to invest your time and money in it.

Do you have the necessary skills? It’s one thing to see and appreciate a website’s design, but it’s a completely different matter to design one yourself.  The same could be said for practically any creative field.

This is why developing a sound portfolio is essential.  Potential clients want to know if you’ll be able to deliver the kind of services they need.  The act of putting together a portfolio, whether it’s for illustration, design, or writing, is a test to see if you’re ready to do professional work.

Even if you’re starting a venture where you’ll just be the manager and you’re going to hire others to do the work, you’ll need to educate yourself about the process and standards needed to produce quality work.  It’s not just about what looks good to you.  What’s more important is that you and your team can identify your clients’ needs and what you have to do to fulfill them.

If you absolutely want to take on this new venture, then go ahead and acquire the skills you need.  Of course, getting professional working knowledge takes a bit of time. It might even cost money if you want to purchase books, learning materials, or attend formal classes.  Just remember that you should never start something unless you’re sure you have the skills to accomplish it well.

How many hours will this add to your workweek? With every new client and business venture comes more working hours.  Before you add a new service or title under your name, you need to know that you’ll have time for it.  Do you have time to spare on new projects?  Do you have a system in place in case you receive an overwhelming amount of requests?

If you find that you’ll be short on work hours, either find a way to increase your productivity or delegate the less important tasks to others.

What’s your exit strategy? If your new venture doesn’t fare as well as you hoped, how will you get out of it?  Will you be able to sell it?  Or will you simply change your strategy?  Also, how do you quantify if it’s a success or not?

Although I’m glad that I was never in the position to opt for an exit strategy, it’s always an important part of my initial planning.  It allows me to have a Plan B if the venture doesn’t turn out to be as profitable or as worthwhile as I thought it would be.

How many freelancing ventures have you started?  What issues did you deal with and how did you deal with them?

Image by Adam Ciesielski from sxc.hu

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