Cost of opportunities

I hold another gig as a consultant to a local IT company apart from my usual gig as a freelancer for foreign clients. I took up this gig as it gives me an opportunity to get out of the house once in a while and interact with local colleagues and business people. I didn’t want to alienate myself completely from the local IT industry. Let’s call this company LIT.

I am working for them as a project consultant for LIT. When I signed up, my estimate was that I would put in about 5 hours of work for this company for a week, and in return I didn’t ask for a regular pay, but negotiated a percentage of the profit form each project that I worked on.

Some opportunities are opening up for LIT. With each new opportunity, requires someone to work on them, create proposals, forge partnerships, do a bit of pre-sales. As things stand now, I am the one who has to do all that work. All these opportunities come to me as project consultant and it is my job to bring them to the stage where the deal is inked.

I AM exited about these opportunities. For starters it gives me a chance to interact with some of the top people in the industry and in business and public sectors. I am the deal maker and the negotiator. The financial prospects of these opportunities are also pretty good. In the event of them working out, LIT stands to make millions. And and per my agreement, I also tend to benefit.

But this money will realize for me only when LIT makes money, which is sometime down the line. I was not planning on making expense money with LIT. The money I make from LIT was going to be my bonus money. And I was planning on only putting around 5 hours of work into it.

Taking up any additional work would throw some spanners into the work that I do for my regular, expense earning clients’ schedules. I don't want to antagonize them too much as without the income earned from them, I would be in a major fix, without the means to meet my monthly financial commitments.

This made me realize that I am more of a freelance employee, who depends on a monthly paycheck, rather than the entrepreneur who works on building a business so he can move away from the daily grind of the business operation and look for more investment and business opportunities. That is where I want to be, and for that I need to work on a strategy to create multiple, recurring income streams that are not directly dependant on the time that I spend on them.

Getting back to the LIT opportunities, they are high value projects and as such, tend to drag over for sometime. Specially the projects involving the public sector are not swift. I have been working on a couple of projects for the past ten months and as we are about to close it, something happens that will drag the project for another month. There were two elections alone that resulted in a delay of 6 months. Also, there is a degree of uncertainty and an element of risk associated with these opportunities. Sometimes they may never work out, the government may cancel the project or they might run out of funding or there maybe a change in the government and the projects may take a completely different direction.

If I wasn’t dependant on the number of hours that I put in for my foreign clients to cover my monthly expenses, I would work on these opportunities without any hesitation or a wink of an eye. I would rather spend my time on opportunities that have the potential of giving me a higher return, rather than putting in hour after hour for an income that has a ceiling. But right now I can’t afford to do that.

The key to me breaking the cycle of dependency will also come from these opportunities currently at LIT’s door and from the other application ideas that I am toying with. These are the opportunities which has the potential to earn lump sums or earn an income which is not going to have a direct link to the number of hours.

Right now I am weighing the cost of all the opportunities on the table. While I am not free to choose the opportunity with the greatest return I am trying to engage all these opportunities as much as possible, at the expense of all the time I have, day and night. My hope is that I would be able to break free from the employee pattern and move to an entrepreneurial pattern.