Aug. 7: Letters to the editor
Today’s topics: a free ride on the census, saving plankton, same-sex marriage … and more
Read more on The Globe and Mail
Aug. 7: Letters to the editor
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Transcription vs. Data Entry, Which Pays Best?
The two jobs that come to mind first when people think of telecommuting quite often are transcription and data entry. There are a few similarities between the jobs:
• Good typing speed (60 WPM or better)
• Accurate typing
• Reliable computer
• Reliable internet connection (probably high speed)
Despite the similarities, the jobs themselves are quite different.
Transcription jobs require a bit more training, especially if transcribing from a recording. Medical and legal transcriptions are much more specialized. It may also require the purchase of a 4-track transcriber. A good vocabulary and grammar skills are also important. The pay rates for transcription are usually based on a per-line rate, ranging from $ 0.06 to $ 0.12.
Transcriptionists quite often get regular work with more than one company, on a freelance basis. But, there are times when people can get a full-time position, with benefits with one company. If you already have a position doing transcription in-office, it might be worth asking your employer to consider telecommuting.
Data entry jobs are less specialized, but can be equally challenging. You need to be very accurate in your typing, not only with the standard keyboard, but also with the ten key. Data entry jobs may pay an average of $8 an hour, to start. There is quite a bit of competition for the data entry.
After you decide which job is right for you, you need to decide if you want to approach it as a job, or as a business owner, offering your services to companies on a freelance basis. Both approaches have their pros and cons.
If you run your own business, you have the freedom to pick and chose your jobs, set your own schedule and vacation times. But, you also have to keep track of your income and expenditures for taxes. If you work as an employee, it saves you doing all the extra paperwork involved in running your own business.
Either way, you need to act as professionally as possible, to keep a good working relationship with the companies you deal with on a daily basis.
Nell Taliercio, the Telecommuting Answer Lady, owns http://www.telecommutingmoms.com where you can locate legitimate work at home jobs and practical advice to start your work at home career tomorrow!
The Actor’s Tax Guide
A friendly and useful guide for actors as they prepare to do their income taxes. Zeroes in on the unique needs of actors & provides a simple, guided process to calculate & report business expenses. Three printable worksheets included.
The Actor’s Tax Guide
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Freelance Translation: Agencies Vs Direct Clients
One of the main challenges for freelance translators is to find suitable clients, and once they have found them, one of their main concerns is how to retain them. As a freelancer you may well find that working for translation agencies rather than for private clients offers both peace of mind and a more reliable flow of orders.
As a professional freelancer you are doubtlessly well aware of the many benefits of freelance work. Most of these will be associated with themes such as independence, freedom and – if you are lucky – considerable revenues. However, you may also have discovered a number of serious downsides to this kind of work. The one cited perhaps the most frequently is the ongoing pressure to attract clients. Although we know of no research to verify it, there is a law in the translation business which states that a freelance translator who has no work, is not a good translator. The opposite is also true: a good translator will never be at a loss for work. Even so, your order portfolio as a freelancer will also depend, at least in part, on your commercial skills in attracting clients, offering your services to potential clients, and building up networks. Once you have found enough clients for a sustainable business, moreover, you may find it difficult to balance your capacity with their needs.
In view of these considerations, it might be a good idea to offer your services to translation agencies as well. The rates they offer may not be as high as those of private clients (understandably, as the agency will need to safeguard its own profit margin and deduct a suitable amount from the client’s payment before passing it on to you), but once you are well established in their files you may find their constant flow of orders a great relief compared with the situation in which you have to attract business yourself.
In fact, working for a translation agency offers a range of significant advantages. One has to do with capacity. When you work directly for a large private client, capacity is clearly a limiting factor, as you will not be able to take up all their translation requests – especially as you have other clients to tend to as well. Of course you would not have any more capacity when working for an agency, but the agency itself would. By spreading translation work over different translators, agencies can obviously absorb far more work from individual clients, which makes it possible to develop a more or less exclusive relationship with them and for you to gain specific experience of their organization and terminology without necessarily having to do all their translations. This suggests that, overall, not only your capacity but also your professionalism will benefit from working for agencies. Freelancers will usually not be able to benefit from the type of feedback supplied by colleagues and quality supervisors at an agency. There are also advantages for the client, as companies that hand out translation orders to different freelancers will not benefit from any coordinated effort to safeguard consistency in style and terminology that an agency can offer.
Another true advantage of translation agencies is that they will enable you to specialize in particular areas of preference. With private clients this is far more difficult to achieve, as the pool of clients to pick from would obviously be much smaller compared with those in a larger agency’s files. For example, a successful translation agency that specializes in tax law will probably have all the major tax firms on its files, which means that by working for that agency you would be introduced to a broad spectrum of practitioners in your field of specialization.
If there is one disadvantage to working for translation agencies it must be the word rates that they offer, which are usually lower, considerably lower even, than those a trusted freelancer would receive in a direct relationship with a private client. This is obviously not unreasonable, as the agency has its own overhead, provides added value services that both the client and the freelancer will benefit from (terminology management, layout and editing tasks) and, most importantly, provides you with work without any need on your part to attract clients. And don’t forget that while the rate per word may be lower, the constant flow of orders that reliable freelances tend to receive from the agencies they work for should more than make up for that in terms of sustained and sometimes even more or less predictable income levels.
One further drawback of working for an agency is that it will not be considered ethical for you to establish direct contact with their clients with the purpose of working for them directly. To the more entrepreneurial of freelancers, this means that the more they work for agencies, the smaller the number of interesting companies they would still be able to work for independently.
To sum up, as a freelancer you basically have two options when it comes to attracting orders: working for private companies directly and working for them indirectly through translation agencies. Either option brings benefits and disadvantages, especially as regards pay and professional development. Private clients tend to be more lucrative, but you will have to attract them, convince them of your qualities, and retain them while the chances are that your capacity will not be sufficient to fill all their orders. On the other hand, translation agencies usually offer lower rates, but they take all the marketing off your hands and will offer you as much work as you want once you have established yourself as a reliable supplier. In addition, you will be able to benefit from coordinated feedback from the client, the agency’s experts and fellow freelancers alike. The preference for either option depends on your commercial appetite, and your need for security and feedback from peers.
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Working on your business vs working in your business
In Australia over 97% businesses are small to medium businesses. Roughly half go out of business in the first five years!
There is little reason to expect the world wide trends to be any different.
Its easy to start a business. All it takes is an idea, something to annoy you in your existing job, a market downturn, a moment of entrepreneurial valour, a touch of envy when you see someone making a killing at something.
Why dont most businesses make it?
One reason is that business owners lose sight of the importance of working ON your business and not in it.
Working on your business, means just that, spending time working on developing your staff, systems, business plan, budget, products, doing your own accounts, sorting out legal issues, vision casting, developing a marketing plan, and so on. It is strengthening the foundation upon which your business will sit.
Working in your business means doing work for your clients that generates income. It means attending to short term and urgent matters.
Its easy to talk about working on your business rather than in it. A lot easier than actually doing it!
Imagine you start a business as a lawyer, and you have experience. Since you know what you are doing, you can service clients and provide excellent services without much thought. Now imagine you are so busy you need to hire your first employee – a junior since that’s all you can afford. How do you ensure that the work they provide to your clients is up to your standard? What systems and procedures for work have you implemented? What about review procedures? It is at this point that many business owners, have an entrepreneurial seizure. They decide that every employee is an idiot, that they are the only person who knows how to do anything, and many decide to get small again, to have no more staff than required, and to do it all themselves.
That my friends, is what you call a job, and is very different from what I would call a business. After all, the risk of starting your own business is that you might find yourself working for an even bigger idiot than the one you thought you were working for before! and this time your stuck together!
When starting a business you should be honest with yourself about whether you are starting a business or simply starting a job where you are self employed but have no intention of building an organisation that will service customers and generate income primarily through employees and a system of doing business that you oversee.
The fact is that the fruits of business for people who have a self employed job are small. You will most likely find someone out there who also wants to buy a job if you want to sell, but the second you stop working you stop earning, and rather than increasing your freedom, you will probably end up increasing your working hours.
The fruits for people who build a successful business are abundant.
1) Selling the business
If you can build a business that profitably employs a number of people, you will most likely be able to fetch a very attractive sale price for the business.
At the moment in Australia, if you meet certain criteria, you can potentially sell your business and receive 75% of the sale amount tax free.
2) Freedom from the business
If you can implement systems and procedures for your employees to follow you will move towards a position where the business can run with out you and you will be able to enjoy moments of freedom from the business – such as taking a holiday and not having to sort out problems while you are away.
3) Income
Its better to make 15% of the income of 10 staff, than 100% of the income of yourself. Further, once the business is setup, you should earn income even if you decide not to do any client work yourself.
4) Influence and a chance to do good
There is a fantastic opportunity for business owners to improve the world. They can create workplaces which have sustainable work/life balance and allow people to raise their families and have a life outside of work. They can share their profits with their employees. They can be generous with charities and causes they are passionate about. They can wield influence and apply their skills to governments, schools, churches, media outlets etc. They can improve the lives of their customers and shareholders.
What you need to do to work on your business
1) Time
Ensure that you take time out specifically to work on your business. If you paid yourself $300 per hour for working on your business, and only $10 per hour for working in your business, how would that work out for you compared to your current drawings?
2) Systems
You need to understand clearly how your business makes money. Once you know this, you need to systemise your processes. Your business will only be as good as your systems. Do you go back and eat again at a cafe that continually produces inconsistent food? I don’t.
3) Money
This is where most people make a fundamental mistake. Most business owners are completely ripping their company off when you compare what they actually do in their business to their salary. You are going to need to keep your hands out of the till and invest in your business, and this will require a sacrifice.
4) People
People can be difficult. There are some keys you must understand for working on people in your business. Firstly, some people will not be right for your business no matter what you do. Secondly, when you hire someone, it is going to cost you money before they make you money. Third, people make mistakes. The better the systems and procedures you surround them with the higher quality the outcome you should expect.
You need to spend time developing, managing and motivating your people, as part of working on your business.
There is an important distinction between delegating work to employees and abdicating. The difference is selective supervision. In the early stages of employment employees should be carefully supervised, with their freedom being extended over time as you are confident that they know what they are doing and can follow your procedures.
5) Advisers
Even advisers need advisers. I am not aware of successful entrepreneurs who have built huge successful businesses without a good team of advisers behind them. In my own experience, I get some of my best ideas for the business when paying an advisor to sit opposite to me. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that at that point of time, by having them there, I am being forced to work on my business, and not in it.
Its time to start working on your business, not working in your business.
Adrian Pinkewich is CEO of Now Accounting and Tax Express www.nowaccounting.com.au www.taxexpress.com.au
Review: Once a Jolly Hangman – Singapore Justice in the Dock
Review: Once a Jolly Hangman – Singapore Justice in the Dock
Over the past few decades, investigative journalism has come to mean the kind of brave reporting that exposes injustice, wrongdoing and, above all, the abuse of power. Alan Shadrake’s hard-hitting new book cuts through the façade of official silence to reveal disturbing truths about Singapore’s use of the death penalty. From in-depth interviews with Darshan Singh, […]
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