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If you are a passionate but risk-taking entrepreneur you need an income from day one and for that consulting is the best source of revenue. The reason for that is that you get well paid in a short time while you can find out what you do best, learn to be effective and to estimate your time. Among other things.

I have made many mistakes and learned a lot from my seven years of consulting. Lessons I now can benefit from as an entrepreneur in my new startup.

In short: you’ll learn how to keep a job (or get shit done).

I’m going to tell you what an entrepreneur can learn from a consultant. My lessons learned from being a consultant for seven years that you may find useful as an entrepreneur.

10 lessons learned from being a consultant

Lesson #1: Estimate your work

To become a profitable and smart consultant, you must be great at estimating your time. Especially if you are a freelancer. I have estimated all I’ve done the last seven years, which has made ​​me very good at putting the right time on the right things and know roughly how long it takes.

Lesson #2: Solve problems

As a consultant you will learn to solve problems. You are often alone about the problem and have to solve it. It may be to register for tax, accounting, finding the solution to a function you’ve never developed, make a call, convert a file… In short, you don’t know the solution but you have to solve it somehow. For the simple reason that you have to.

Lesson #3: Streamline your time

You will get good at streamlining your work. Especially if you run your own business. Every half hour on a workday count. You can’t afford to be inefficient.

Lesson #4: Money management

I encourage everyone to become familiar with how the economy accounting works. In my first year I bookkept everything myself (with the the support of an economist) to teach myself what it costs to run a business. If you work in a small consulting company, it is common that you will report the time your work and often get an insight into how the budget forecast looks like for now.

Lesson #5: Focus

You will learn to focus. You are compared based on performance and delivery. If you don’t deliver, you will quickly disapear. A secret, split your week into different blocks, it will change the way you work forever.

Lesson #6: C-level experience

As a consultant you will be in contact with people in high positions and learn how to handle it. They are those who are your buyers and they are the ones you’re negotiating with, the ones that pay your bill. You must learn how to sell yourself as a person and your skills. It is a very valuable experience. An excellent way to get good at selling to C-level executives.

Lesson #7: See opportunities in everything

Tell everyone what you’re best at, what you do, you never know what contacts the people you meet may have. During my two years as a self-employed, I only had contact details on my site. I got all my assignments through personal recommendations. If you always do a great job, people will recommend you.

Lesson #8: Liability

You will learn early to take responsibility for your actions. Which will benefit you the rest of your life. Bonus for freelancers: it’s very satisfying (for me) to know that everything you own, you earned yourself, on your terms, your own responsibility.

Lesson #9: Learn to take criticism

You will learn not to take criticism personally but rather see criticism as something constructive for your business. You are often in a vulnerable position as a consultant and will get used to the high demands.

Lesson #10: Deal with deadlines

You will learn to deal with deadlines. As a consultant your job is to deliver on time. You learn to ask questions and make sure you know exactly what and when the results is expected of you. You will learn the hard way to ensure that the deadline is realistic and ensure that you understand the true scope of the assignment.

Conclusion

Consulting taught me all the things above plus a lot more. I would say that it is the fastest and hardest way to learn how to do things and how not to do things.

If you stand at a crossroad and are considering trying consulting, I highly recommend it, you will learn a lot.

Vacation, time for reflection.

Time off.

Since I started running my own business it hasn’t been many days I’ve had time off. Last two years I have taken the time to a few weeks of vacation. It’s healthy.

It’s been shown in retrospect that it has given me new ideas. New ways to solve problems. New features. Given me answers to questions and time to rest.

Time off is important and releasing. But I wouldn’t call it time off. Rather change of thoughts.

Last night I took a few beers and some food with my co-founder Arnklint. It is surprisingly rarely we do so nowadays. At the moment we meet 2-3 times a week and when we do, we are often too busy and eager to get things done that we don’t talk much to each other. But it’s nice and important to take the time to aimlessly chattering.

We got on to the subjects vacation and well-being.

Right now it’s holiday period in Stockholm. In Sweden we have the right by law to five weeks vacation, which means that most people takes a week around Christmas and New Year, and the remaining four weeks in July or August, when we have the warmest weather here.

This year, it crossed my mind how much people stress before their holiday. Many are desperate to get at least three weeks continuous vacation. People are working to the limit and is completely exhausted just when the holiday period begins.

Why is it so?

I think it’s a hysteria. What is it that makes us so desperately toiling to get an long continuous vacation? Is it because of the Swedish society? Is it because we as children had summer vacation for two months? Or is it because we at last can spend time with our children when they still have summer break?

I have no answer to that.

What I do know is that for me it has nothing to do with how long continuous vacation I have.

It has to do with well-being.

I’ve tried both long and short holidays. At different times of the year. Some year only long weekends, another year two weeks of vacation and a long time ago, I had four weeks continuous vacation.

For me it’s not the duration that is important. Those times I’ve felt the need of a long vacation, it has usually been something that has been bad in my life. Unsustainable situation at work, problems in my personal life, too much work, unhappy at my workplace etc.

But the length of my vacation has not played any role when I been doing well. Been satisfied.

Do we really need a long continuous vacation? Is it worth it to plan and rush to the point of absurdity for at least three weeks continuous holiday? Not for me.

Have an long continuous vacation if you enjoy it. But feel free to try alternatives. Working to burnout and then get long continuous vacation is not worth it.

If you thrive, you do everything so much better and more efficient, whether it is holiday or work.

Do you need a change? Here you have 19 simple suggestions.

• Take the bus to work instead of the subway, or vice versa. Or walk the last bit.

• Eat breakfast in a coffee shop near you.

• Buy a newspaper.

• Let your TV be turned off for an evening and go through your holiday photos instead.

• Meditate for 2 minutes.

• Take a swim.

• Change the desktop background on your computer and/or your phone.

• Discover new music with Soundcloud or Spotify.

• Watch a TED talk.

• Go for a run.

• Take a walk without earphones.

• Go to the cinema alone.

• Read a book.

• Listen to a podcast.

• Watch a documentary.

• Visit a museum.

• Take the stairs and stand up in the subway for one day.

• If you have a bike, use it.

• Eat lunch in a new block.

It can be that simple.

Rewind the time about four years. Sweden had at this time about 75,000 Twitter users (source: Media Culpa), 2 million Facebook users (source: Mindpark{.broken_link}) and Spotify had recently been launched in invite-only.

The year was 2009. This was the year I quit my job.

The main reason that I quit my job was that four months earlier, I participated in 24 hour Business Camp. A hackathon where 90 internet entrepreneurs met to launch 52 start-ups in 24 hours.

We got great response on our idea and ended up in fifth place, which meant we won office seats in an incubator _R.I.P. IQUBE.

I was very excited. We wanted to do this! There was no other option. We wanted to breathe life into a conservative industry. The book industry.

The idea

Our idea, FörstaKapitlet (the first chapter in Swedish), was about books. We wanted to make it possible for everyone to listen to a chapter of a book before you buy it. At this time, social media was something new for us swedes. People had barely heard of Twitter (or Facebook) and streaming services such as Spotify and SoundCloud was something new.

My feeling back then was that the book industry was terrified of the internet. They understood that they probably somewhere sometime has to be there but how and now (?!)… well, rather not.

We decided to see Sweden as a test market. We wanted to develop a prototype that we could pitch to our swedish book publishers.

In a team of three we got started! We were one developer (me), a marketer and a video- and audio producer. We booked meetings with all publishers we could find in Stockholm. Both traditional publishers and audiobook publishers.

In parallel with the the meetings, I started as a single developer to hack like never before.

10 weeks

One of the most important and most instructive decisions we took those days was that we would give this a chance for a limited time. We would give everything, really _everything_ during a hectic, intense but limited time.

We decided that we would work hard for 10 weeks and after that have a ready prototype and evaluate how things had gone.

Agile development and transparency

In addition to the project period of 10 weeks, we wanted to be transparent and let the users take part in our development. On our website, anyone could follow our progress. Honest and open meetings were broadcasted daily for everyone to take part of. Every week we had a new release (which of course was named after a famous author) and a video summation where we talked about what we had done during the past week.

After six weeks

It had been an extremely busy period. I sat in front of the computer day and night. We had met so many publishers we could and everyone on the team had given everything. Yet there was something that didn’t felt good.

Firstly, we disagree about the strategy and the approach in the team. Secondly, it was hard to keep it up with me as the only developer.

After six intense weeks we blew everything off. I had a bad gut feeling. I dropped out.

What I learned by failing fast

Besides requiring extremely hard work to become established in such a traditional industry as the book industry, this is the biggest lessons I’ve learned.

Get to know your team. We as a team were not quite in sync. We had talked a lot about the idea, but not so much about strategy or marketing and how we would work with the product next 6-12 months. Neither had we worked together before. The lesson here is to talk together thoroughly as a team, discuss workload, strategy/marketing, business and how to take the idea further as a product once you have one.

Develop a simple prototype. Develop a prototype so you can get feedback on the features of the product/service as soon as possible. If you can simplify advanced features, do it. Show wireframes before you do design, all feedback is good feedback, especially in the beginning. Make sure to get the idea validated properly before you start to build something more substantial. Your first product should at its best be a minimum viable product (MVP).

Limit the time. Definitely the best decision we made was that we decided to invest everything in an agreed time period. We didn’t decide much more than that. We wanted to go all in, for a limited time. And did it.

In retrospect

In retrospect I see this time as a very instructive period. We did SCRUM, Lean and agile development in practice. An iterative work process, fast forward, build, measure, learn. Our six weeks contained it all.

Today I’m glad I got to experience all of this so early in my life as an entrepreneur.

It’s really fun to throw yourself into the world of a entrepreneur. The roller coaster ride and everything you learn along the way is priceless.

Thanks for reading.