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Many people brace themselves for the dreaded “plateau” in their fitness programs–and devote a lot of effort to jumpstarting their progress if it slows. New research suggests that solo entrepreneurs may want to think the same way about their business growth. Otherwise, their sales may flatline after their fifth year in business. Nation1099’s new Career Freelancer Status Report found that freelancers earn the income comparable to peers in traditional jobs–but once they hit five years of experience, their income growth begins to slow. Nation1099 is a site that provides career and business advice for experienced freelancers and consultants. The average income for active, full-time freelancers with 3-10 years of experience was $70,536, according to the research. Freelancers in the survey with 10 or more years of experience brought in $91,756. For context, the median U.S. household income is $59,039. Given the tendency for income to level off, perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that gaining clients is the biggest concern that freelancers voiced in the survey, followed by scaling their business to the next level. Many find information about business development for ultra-lean businesses is scant. “There is almost no literature or business advice for solopreneurs,” said Robert McGuire, founder of Nation1099.  “What is out it is very elementary.”   McGuire sees a need for courses and business advice for experienced freelancers who are looking to learn about more advanced topics such as automating ad buying on Facebook and Google Adwords and learning how to work with an outsourced salesperson. “Whoever your target client is, it would help if you had resources to market to those target clients,” says McGuire. Although many freelancers surveyed look online for information to grow their businesses, they find that online job boards and gig-matching websites lack the right opportunities for someone with their level of experience. In response to an open-ended question on freelance marketplaces, many freelancers expressed frustration because of low rates, the quality of the job inventory and a desire for job boards specialized by profession.   Among their comments: “I no longer use job boards; the work is pretty low paying.” “I got early gigs off job boards, but haven’t seen any that would pay what I need to be paid today.” “Often you can find yourself in a situation where you are fighting to get paid after completion of the job.” That could provide an opportunity for growth in the competitive world of freelance marketplaces.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a crystal ball that allows you to gaze into your firm’s future? Once you looked into it, you’d instantly know whether you’ll meet your annual revenue target. And if you don’t like what you see, you can change course and then take another look. Economic uncertainty, new regulations, and changing business models are reshaping the professional services industry. These same forces are making it harder to accurately forecast financial performance, let alone improve it. Those operating in professional services are acutely aware that so much of your firm’s earning potential is tied to your people and their ability to bill, produce deliverables, and successfully engage with clients. So, how do you plan for and predict your firm’s financial performance in the face of uncertainty? Read on for our advice. Plan Your Work, Then Work Your Plan If people are the lifeline of a successful firm, then a plan is the rope that pulls in profit or breaks under strong pressure. With client projects directly impacting revenue, adopting a regimented planning approach is a must. Finance leaders should factor in resources, revenue streams, and project work into the firm’s financial plans. “Planning for people costs at a detailed level should tie to financial plans and budgets for the overall organization. Even more importantly, in businesses where the production and customer service capacity of the business is highly dependent on people, workforce planning is essential to understand capacity constraints and enhance revenue predictability,” advises Paul D. Hamerman, former vice president, principal analyst at Forrester. The foundation of strong planning lies in the availability of key data and systems across the enterprise. By managing resources, projects, and financial data comprehensively, a firm can get context into its client projects, skills gap, and the health of various service lines with immediate insight into whether it’ll meet its financial targets. With this approach in mind, professional services firms need to have planning processes that enable: Headcount planning: Track the number of FTEs and contingent workers, as well as data on key worker attributes including industry, product, service line, key skills, and certifications. Project and opportunity planning: Determine current and future resource needs, as well as revenue potential. Capacity planning: Get an aggregated view of availability by worker attributes and schedule (so you don’t schedule someone who will be out on leave or vacation, for example). Financial planning: Obtain a full view of revenue and margin across service lines driven from both financial and project data. Plan More Strategically The right forecasting technique can make all the difference in keeping your firm on track to meet its revenue goals. However, thinking too far ahead doesn’t account for changing market conditions, customer demands, and business models. The best approach is to create an active planning process and update your forecast on a regular (at least weekly or bi-weekly) basis. Service Performance Insight’s “2018 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark” reports that “With the assistance of powerful planning and analysis tools, planning does not have to be a dreaded once-a-year, laborious process. It can become a fluid, collaborative, all-year-long process that facilitates input and cooperation across all functions and levels.” For the most accurate forecasts, it’s also critical for key project leaders to update their forecasts to account for future resource and revenue plans. Consider tools that simplify or automate forecast entry on any device, even from individual project workers. Given the impact of client projects on headcount requirements and financial performance, you want to evolve to a point where you can plan with a bottom-up approach. Collaborate Across the Firm While financial planning is driven by the finance team, it impacts the entire organization and thus needs to be a cross-functional effort. Critical data impacting company performance resides with different teams and functions—finance, HR, resource management, project leadership—and each one needs a distinct view of the planning data as well as the ability to weigh in on the unknown. To unlock actionable insights, look for a planning tool that has direct access to data on finance, HR, and client projects and provides key stakeholders with insight into key performance indicators. Tools that are secure and allow for real-time collaboration can bring together different functional areas into one view. Every successful strategy starts with planning it, so you won’t get very far if you don’t know how to plan. With the proper business processes, measures, and systems in place, you can easily forecast which clients and services lines are expected to deliver the most revenue and allocate the budget and resources to support them—no crystal ball required.

Psychologists and teachers understand how the power of high expectations leads to extraordinary achievements, as well as the reverse, in which low expectations are fulfilled with failure. Is this the case with digital transformation as well? Is it doomed by low expectations? Fear pervades digital transformation efforts, a new survey shows. Ninety-five percent of IT leaders or CIOs in a recent survey say they view digital transformation as “an insurmountable task,” and 92 percent of IT leaders or CIOs believe they will get fired if their digital transformation fails. The survey of 450 executives, published by Couchbase, estimates organizations risk wasting millions of dollars in the next 12 months as they rush into flawed digital projects — an average spend of $28 million. A majority, 52 percent, said a fixation on digital transformation had raised the risk of rushing into ill-thought-out projects, meaning a lot of that could be wasted. Industry executives speculate that a fear of failure is part of the reason many companies avoid digitally transforming in the first place. That’s the view of Justin Rodenbostel, who points out that digital transformation is a big-budget initiative, and therefore has a large target painted on it. Unlike typical technology initiatives that can be, and often are rolled back if things don’t work, digital failure may set an organization hopelessly backward. Rodenbostel, who is vice president, open source application development at SPR, suggests organizations need to carefully prepare for the changes that digital transformation could potentially deliver. All too often, enterprises don’t move fast enough. “The biggest risk is missing the opportunity — being beat to market by an outsider or a competitor, letting perceived constraints prevent innovation, failing to seize opportunities to pivot, and going into an initiative without an adequately prepared and capable team,” he said. Digital transformation is many things to many people in different departments, so it’s important to decide what the end result of digital transformation should be. What do executives in the Couchbase survey think their digital transformation should look like? The researchers observe that “we are entering the era of the ‘massively interactive enterprise,’ where digital experiences can transform every part of a business – from customer experience to business functions such as sales and marketing, HR, and finance, and even logistics and manufacturing. Currently, respondents are focusing their digital transformation efforts on customer-facing experiences (66 percent) and business processes such as logistics (62 percent). There is less attention paid to areas that also benefit the massively interactive enterprise, such as worker-facing experiences (47 percent) and machine-to-machine services (37 percent). “A successful digital transformation ends with market-leading products and services offered by an organization,” Rodenbostel says. “The organization has seized previously unclaimed differentiation by bridging the gap between their products and services and what has become possible through advancements in technology and the way we conduct business. ” For example, he illustrates, Netflix “cannibalized their existing offerings when they moved from a distribution and logistics company to an industry-leading tech company with the capabilities it has today. That is a lot of risks to take on, but their future depended on it.” To succeed with digital, Rodenbostel has one important piece of advice: just get started, just do it. “I would consider failed initiatives being the ones that never got off the ground,” he says. The following actions may help alleviate fears and pave the way to digital transformation: Plan for innovation: “Start with research and brainstorming,” Rodenbostel advises. “Look to the ever-growing list of companies that have disrupted a market or are on their own digital transformation journey – what innovations contributed to their success and where did they maybe go wrong?” Remember — it’s always about the business. “The greatest risk in digital transformation is that organizations develop a fixation on digital transformation for its own sake, deciding that in an environment of accelerating disruption, any transformation is better than no transformation,” the Couchbase researchers relate. Review your alternatives: “Narrow down your list of potential initiatives based on the initial thinking of potential value from an idea vs. the potential effort expended and potential exposure of risk to the company,” says Rodenbostel. “After you have a list of those initiatives, it’s worthwhile to take a step back and gauge your organizational readiness to take one or more of them on.” Form a team: “Assemble a cross-section of your organization, ask them how they do their job, how they think it could be done more efficiently, and what would make their lives easier.” Ask the right questions: “Find out what questions you’re asking yourself about your organization that you consistently have difficulty answering.”

Antonio Lucio, global chief marketing, and communications officer at HP Inc., is joining Facebook as global CMO. Lucio, one of the Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs and one of the most revered executives in the advertising and marketing industry, will bring to Facebook a wealth of experience, expertise, and global perspective rooted in stints at PepsiCo, Visa and most recently HP Inc. Lucio replaces Gary Briggs, who announced his plans to leave in January, and will report to Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, overseeing global marketing strategy for the social-media company, which faces myriad brand and business challenges including reported abuse and misuse of the platform and questions around Facebook’s security, safety, and societal impact. In appointing Lucio, Facebook gains classic, global marketing leadership and culture-building that has been a hallmark of Lucio’s reputation and success—and that could bolster Facebook’s brand and growth. According to a statement from HP, Vikrant Batra, currently global head of marketing for the company’s print business, is being promoted to CMO, and Karen Kahn, chief communications officer, is being promoted to the executive leadership team. The functions, now separated, both report directly to President and CEO Dion Weisler.   Lucio has been at HP Inc., the PC and printer business that split from HP, since 2014. His marching orders upon joining HP Inc. were to take the 76-year-old brand and grow it, reframing what it would mean in the context of the new separate product portfolio. That opportunity attracted him to the new role. “I’ve been a global marketer all my life and have had the privilege to work with world’s best brands— PepsiCo, Visa,” Lucio told me at the time. “Having the opportunity to reframe and reignite an iconic brand like HP was an opportunity I saw as a once-in-a-lifetime moment. It was a brand at a historic moment; this was the opportunity to position it for the future. That was incredibly appealing.” At Visa, he served as that company’s first global CMO, overseeing it’s iconic “Everywhere you want to be” campaign, as well as sponsorships of the Olympics, FIFA World Cup, and NFL, and he helped the company transition from financial-services player to a technology business. Meanwhile, he served as chief innovation and health and wellness officer at PepsiCo.

The slowdown of the Chinese economy is not a cyclical downturn. It is part of a deep and complicated transition the outcome of which will shape the future of China, and, with it the rest of the world. The reality of China’s economic slowdown, stripped to the bare essentials, has to do with the diminishing effectiveness of several key contributors to the productivity growth that fueled the country’s spectacular economic expansion in the previous three decades. These include the rising quality and quantity of the labor force, the more efficient allocation of resources and investment capital, the rapid upgrading of technology, as well as sustained high export growth. When economic reform started in the late 1970s, the vast majority of China’s labor force toiled in agriculture, using tools and methods not much different from many centuries back. Even though basic literacy and education was vigorously promoted under socialism, only 2% of young adults had any post-secondary education. In the subsequent three decades, hundreds of millions of farm workers moved from villages to factories and urban construction sites, trained to use modern equipment and machinery. By 2016, about two-thirds of the population is urban, and over 30% of young adults are university educated. Over the same time period, the One Child policy also produced a massive demographic dividend with a rising ratio of working age to total population, according to data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics. The net effect was a growing and increasingly productive labor force. But the demographic dividend ended in 2012, when the ratio of working age to total population peaked, ironically caused by the very same One Child policy that produced the demographic dividend, amplified by the rising longevity of the population. The pace of improvement in the labor force’s education and skill level has also slowed. While the better skilled and more mobile labor force will continue to contribute to productivity growth, it is impossible to maintain the pace of the past. A second major contributor to productivity was the transition from a top down system of resource allocation to a price-based market economy. This was crucially important in enabling the emergence and expansion of a private sector, which could be guided by changing price signals in seeking out new market and investment opportunities. In recent years, investment by the private sector grew to account for two-thirds of the total.

The rise of the robots–they’ve taken over the exhibition halls of education conferences these days. Robots and games that teach coding and STEM skills are a big back to school trend. Tynker. “We have been hard at work this summer to revamp the Tynker Educator experience to be super friendly regarding workflow, content, metrics, and privacy (less assigning and more intelligent feedback),” said Tynker co-founder and CEO Krishna Vedati. Tynker is the leading game-based coding platform that has helped more than 60 million students start coding. The Mountain View-based company, which has raised $10.4 million in 3 rounds, acquired LMS Pythonroom in May. Tynker’s platform now includes a new range of courses that serve high-school students, building on its strong coursework foundation for P-8 learners. New age content includes advanced python, augmented reality courses and enhanced STEM lessons that use coding. With Mattel, Tynker released a Barbie-themed Robotics course to encourage girls to pursue STEM. With granular assessment behind the scenes, Tynker is able to provide students and teachers real-time information. Tynker doesn’t sell robots, but Vedati argues that their coding games integrate better with other subjects. Read more