-
Click here to sign up for the Bates Info-Entrepreneur Tip of the Month Newsletter. The Info-Entrepreneur Tip of the Month provides tips, advice, and tools for the independent information professional.
-
Click here to learn what people are saying about Mary Ellen Bates' workshops and presentations, to book a presentation, or to see when she is speaking at a venue near you.
-
Click here to listen to a recent interview. As an internationally-recognized research expert, Mary Ellen is frequently interviewed about information technologies and trends.
Mary Ellen Bates
Bates Information Services, Inc.
8494 Boulder Hills Dr.
Niwot, Colorado 80503 USA
Tel: 303.772.7095
Email: mbates@batesinfo.com
Skype: Mary.Ellen.Bates
Twitter: www.twitter.com/mebs
LinkedIn:
www.linkedin.com/in/maryellenbates
Bates Information Services, Inc.
8494 Boulder Hills Dr.
Niwot, Colorado 80503 USA
Tel: 303.772.7095
Email: mbates@batesinfo.com
Skype: Mary.Ellen.Bates
Twitter: www.twitter.com/mebs
LinkedIn:
www.linkedin.com/in/maryellenbates
Welcome to the world of running a one-person information business—or at least my corner of that world. Some folks assume that this glamorous life involves surfing the web all day; others find out what the average hourly rate is for this kind of work ($75-$200) and assume that we bill an hour or two a day and then sit around, watching TV and eating bon-bons. Sadly, neither scenario reflects my reality, or that of any of my colleagues. On the other hand, I don’t think any of us would trade our job for a steady paycheck; we’re having far too much fun running our own businesses.
So, what does an average day look like? There’s probably no such thing as a typical day, but here’s what one of my days looked like recently.
After an early morning walk with the dogs, a quick breakfast and a scan of the morning paper, I brace myself for the 5-second commute to my home office, in the extra bedroom of my house. The biggest traffic delay is if both dogs have fallen asleep in the doorway. I spend the first half-hour going through email and reading postings from the six or eight email discussion lists I subscribe to. I reply to a query from a program planner who wants to know my availability and rates to speak at a conference in six months, giving her a list of possible topics. I handle three subscription requests to my free monthly email newsletters, send a pre-written reply to someone who asks about how to start an information business from home, and delete the inevitable spam messages offering me a college diploma, porn, and a way to make $25,000 a month from home. I am also the 2004-2005 president of the Association of Independent Information Professionals, so I usually spend an hour in the morning going through board-related issues.
Then I settle down to the work of the day. I am in the middle of a project to identify the major buyers, manufacturers and uses of optical amplifiers, a job commissioned by a corporate librarian who just doesn’t have the time to do it himself. I’ve already looked through web sites of the major manufacturers, so now I head over to the professional online services to see what I can find in the industry press, technical journals and market research reports. While I often start with Factiva.com because of the favorable pricing, this project strikes me as one that requires the supermarket variety and power search tools of Dialog. I find more information than I had expected, so I refine the search to get just what I think the client will want, and send the results to my email account. (I choose to email the results rather than download them, because I find the email output simpler to post-process.).
While I’m waiting for the email to arrive, I run a quick search in the US Patent & Trademark Office database for recent patents on optical amplifiers, and write up an analysis for my client listing the number of recent patents granted to the major industry players. Then I head over to a few of the market research aggregators on the web (MindBranch, marketresearch.com, ResearchAndMarkets.com and so on) and download tables of contents for reports I think my client might want.
By now, the results of my Dialog search have hit my email account, so I download the files, run a macro that strips out the carriage returns within each paragraph, and start going through the material. I delete a few articles that aren’t as useful as they first appeared, organize the rest, and do some simple formatting to generate a table of contents and to make the material easier for my client to read. I notice that two interesting articles aren’t available in full text online; I send a fax with the bibliographic citations over to a document delivery company, which can arrange to have the articles photocopied, the royalties paid, and the material faxed to me by the end of the day. I also note several web sites mentioned in the articles, finish off the rest of the web research for the job, and write up a cover letter and summary for the client. I put the project aside for later in the day—I like to let it percolate in my head for a few hours to make sure I didn’t forget anything, and I have to wait for the fax of the two articles to arrive from the doc del company.
Since it’s the end of the month, I sit down to do my monthly invoices and to pay my bills. It’s not the most exciting part of this job, but I know how important it is to have a handle on cash flow and the bottom-line profitability of my business. I send out reminder notices to two clients who are late in paying, and send out a thank-you note to a new client. Just as I’m backing up my accounting file, I get a call from a colleague, a public records researcher out in California. After we update each other on the goings-on of our respective dogs, she tells me that she is digging up information on a scoundrel who, it seems, is bent on defrauding half of the state of Florida. She wants me to run an online search to see if he or his wife is mentioned in any Florida newspapers in the past five years. We settle on a not-to-exceed budget and deadline, and I think to myself that my clients—Fortune 100 companies, corporate librarians, consultants and speechwriters, among others—often send me interesting work, but rarely do they ask me to track down real estate crooks. One of the best parts of this job is the remarkable variety of projects that come my way.
By this point, the dogs have gotten restless, so I take them on a quick walk up to Chautauqua Park, at the foot of the Flatirons and marvel again at how beautiful it is here.
Now that the dogs are quiet and my brain is refreshed, I put in a couple of hours on a consulting project. A corporate librarian has been told that she needs to cut $1 million from the information expenditures within her company, and she has asked me to review the company’s current purchases. My job is to recommend ways to aggregate their information sources, eliminate duplication, and fill any information gaps they may have. I have already gone through the accounting files showing what purchases the company has made, and I spend some time reviewing the overlap in coverage among several aggregators, and make a few calls to product specialists within some of the major online vendors to get additional information.
I glance at the clock and realize that it’s almost the end of the day on the East Coast, so I call a telephone researcher in Boston who is working on a phone project for one of my clients—getting standards for electrical power systems on ships—to check to see how the work is going and to find out if she needs any additional information from the client. As I expected, she has this project completely under control. She tells me that she will have a report for me, written up on my memo format and ready for me to send along to the client, by the end of the day tomorrow.
I’ll be traveling to California next week to give a couple of talks on trends in the information industry. I’ve already sketched out my talks, and I’ve set up file folders where I toss any interesting articles that might be useful for the talks . Now I pull out the folders, open up PowerPoint, and polish up the talks. And while it’s fresh in my mind, I call the editor of one of the information industry magazines and ask her if she’d be interested in having me rework one of the presentations into an article. We agree on a deadline, word count and price, and I note the assignment on the Writing Deadline list that hangs on the wall next to the computer. I won’t start the article until after I give the talk; I know that I’ll get feedback and ideas from the conference, and will want to incorporate those into the article.
I check my email and get a message from the document delivery company to whom I sent the request for the two articles on optical amplifiers. It turns out that they were able to get PDF copies of the articles through a special arrangement with the publisher—ah, the value of knowing who has the right connections—and the two articles are attached to the email. I look over the articles, add a comment in the executive summary that I’m sending to the client, insert the articles in the report, save the entire document in PDF and send it on to the client. Why in PDF? Because I want to make sure that the entire report is preserved in one piece, and this is the cleanest way of combining a Word file, several web pages, a PDF report I found on the Web, and the two scanned articles into a single document.
It’s getting close to the end of the day, so I pick up the phone and call a new independent info pro who I’m informally mentoring. We spend half an hour talking about her marketing strategy, how she’s going to handle a difficult client situation, and a seminar she’s planning on teaching in a few months. I always feel charged up after talking with her—it’s so exciting to watch someone build a new business, and it’s gratifying to be able to share some of the lessons I’ve learned from colleagues over the years.
Now the dogs have started nudging my elbow—it’s time for their evening walk, and they’re getting impatient. I breathe a sigh of relief that they have managed to refrain from howling during any of my calls during the day; they aren’t always this well-mannered.
I start my backup program, which saves all new files onto a CD, pack up some professional reading that I might or might not get to this evening, and steel myself for the commute out of the office and back to the living room, as another day at the global headquarters of Bates Information Services comes to a close.
So, what does an average day look like? There’s probably no such thing as a typical day, but here’s what one of my days looked like recently.
After an early morning walk with the dogs, a quick breakfast and a scan of the morning paper, I brace myself for the 5-second commute to my home office, in the extra bedroom of my house. The biggest traffic delay is if both dogs have fallen asleep in the doorway. I spend the first half-hour going through email and reading postings from the six or eight email discussion lists I subscribe to. I reply to a query from a program planner who wants to know my availability and rates to speak at a conference in six months, giving her a list of possible topics. I handle three subscription requests to my free monthly email newsletters, send a pre-written reply to someone who asks about how to start an information business from home, and delete the inevitable spam messages offering me a college diploma, porn, and a way to make $25,000 a month from home. I am also the 2004-2005 president of the Association of Independent Information Professionals, so I usually spend an hour in the morning going through board-related issues.
Then I settle down to the work of the day. I am in the middle of a project to identify the major buyers, manufacturers and uses of optical amplifiers, a job commissioned by a corporate librarian who just doesn’t have the time to do it himself. I’ve already looked through web sites of the major manufacturers, so now I head over to the professional online services to see what I can find in the industry press, technical journals and market research reports. While I often start with Factiva.com because of the favorable pricing, this project strikes me as one that requires the supermarket variety and power search tools of Dialog. I find more information than I had expected, so I refine the search to get just what I think the client will want, and send the results to my email account. (I choose to email the results rather than download them, because I find the email output simpler to post-process.).
While I’m waiting for the email to arrive, I run a quick search in the US Patent & Trademark Office database for recent patents on optical amplifiers, and write up an analysis for my client listing the number of recent patents granted to the major industry players. Then I head over to a few of the market research aggregators on the web (MindBranch, marketresearch.com, ResearchAndMarkets.com and so on) and download tables of contents for reports I think my client might want.
By now, the results of my Dialog search have hit my email account, so I download the files, run a macro that strips out the carriage returns within each paragraph, and start going through the material. I delete a few articles that aren’t as useful as they first appeared, organize the rest, and do some simple formatting to generate a table of contents and to make the material easier for my client to read. I notice that two interesting articles aren’t available in full text online; I send a fax with the bibliographic citations over to a document delivery company, which can arrange to have the articles photocopied, the royalties paid, and the material faxed to me by the end of the day. I also note several web sites mentioned in the articles, finish off the rest of the web research for the job, and write up a cover letter and summary for the client. I put the project aside for later in the day—I like to let it percolate in my head for a few hours to make sure I didn’t forget anything, and I have to wait for the fax of the two articles to arrive from the doc del company.
Since it’s the end of the month, I sit down to do my monthly invoices and to pay my bills. It’s not the most exciting part of this job, but I know how important it is to have a handle on cash flow and the bottom-line profitability of my business. I send out reminder notices to two clients who are late in paying, and send out a thank-you note to a new client. Just as I’m backing up my accounting file, I get a call from a colleague, a public records researcher out in California. After we update each other on the goings-on of our respective dogs, she tells me that she is digging up information on a scoundrel who, it seems, is bent on defrauding half of the state of Florida. She wants me to run an online search to see if he or his wife is mentioned in any Florida newspapers in the past five years. We settle on a not-to-exceed budget and deadline, and I think to myself that my clients—Fortune 100 companies, corporate librarians, consultants and speechwriters, among others—often send me interesting work, but rarely do they ask me to track down real estate crooks. One of the best parts of this job is the remarkable variety of projects that come my way.
By this point, the dogs have gotten restless, so I take them on a quick walk up to Chautauqua Park, at the foot of the Flatirons and marvel again at how beautiful it is here.
Now that the dogs are quiet and my brain is refreshed, I put in a couple of hours on a consulting project. A corporate librarian has been told that she needs to cut $1 million from the information expenditures within her company, and she has asked me to review the company’s current purchases. My job is to recommend ways to aggregate their information sources, eliminate duplication, and fill any information gaps they may have. I have already gone through the accounting files showing what purchases the company has made, and I spend some time reviewing the overlap in coverage among several aggregators, and make a few calls to product specialists within some of the major online vendors to get additional information.
I glance at the clock and realize that it’s almost the end of the day on the East Coast, so I call a telephone researcher in Boston who is working on a phone project for one of my clients—getting standards for electrical power systems on ships—to check to see how the work is going and to find out if she needs any additional information from the client. As I expected, she has this project completely under control. She tells me that she will have a report for me, written up on my memo format and ready for me to send along to the client, by the end of the day tomorrow.
I’ll be traveling to California next week to give a couple of talks on trends in the information industry. I’ve already sketched out my talks, and I’ve set up file folders where I toss any interesting articles that might be useful for the talks . Now I pull out the folders, open up PowerPoint, and polish up the talks. And while it’s fresh in my mind, I call the editor of one of the information industry magazines and ask her if she’d be interested in having me rework one of the presentations into an article. We agree on a deadline, word count and price, and I note the assignment on the Writing Deadline list that hangs on the wall next to the computer. I won’t start the article until after I give the talk; I know that I’ll get feedback and ideas from the conference, and will want to incorporate those into the article.
I check my email and get a message from the document delivery company to whom I sent the request for the two articles on optical amplifiers. It turns out that they were able to get PDF copies of the articles through a special arrangement with the publisher—ah, the value of knowing who has the right connections—and the two articles are attached to the email. I look over the articles, add a comment in the executive summary that I’m sending to the client, insert the articles in the report, save the entire document in PDF and send it on to the client. Why in PDF? Because I want to make sure that the entire report is preserved in one piece, and this is the cleanest way of combining a Word file, several web pages, a PDF report I found on the Web, and the two scanned articles into a single document.
It’s getting close to the end of the day, so I pick up the phone and call a new independent info pro who I’m informally mentoring. We spend half an hour talking about her marketing strategy, how she’s going to handle a difficult client situation, and a seminar she’s planning on teaching in a few months. I always feel charged up after talking with her—it’s so exciting to watch someone build a new business, and it’s gratifying to be able to share some of the lessons I’ve learned from colleagues over the years.
Now the dogs have started nudging my elbow—it’s time for their evening walk, and they’re getting impatient. I breathe a sigh of relief that they have managed to refrain from howling during any of my calls during the day; they aren’t always this well-mannered.
I start my backup program, which saves all new files onto a CD, pack up some professional reading that I might or might not get to this evening, and steel myself for the commute out of the office and back to the living room, as another day at the global headquarters of Bates Information Services comes to a close.
