I currently use Microsoft Outlook as my mail app. I know, everyone says that I should use something else. But Outlook works fine for me.
I create a separate folder for each client that I am currently working on and that keeps everything organised.
At the moment I am juggling five clients.
One is a relative and I am upgrading an application.
Another is an old client and, again, I am upgrading an application.
But the other three are different. One is an old client, the other two are new. But each of these is new work. And each of these clients is called Peter. This, I think, is a bad omen. Let me explain.
I have done some rough, back of an envelope calculations, and come up with this. There are roughly 20 million people living in Australia. Say half of these are either too young, that is at school, or too old, that is retired, to want me to do work for them.
There are 10 million left.
Our current workforce stats show that about 7 million people are in paid employment. I do work for small businesses, that is, self-employed people. So this group don’t want to know me. I am down to 3 million.
Now we get to Peters. They are all men. I know there are women but they are called Peta, and I don’t have any of them as clients. 1.5 million people.
When I think back at all the people I have known there must be heaps of them. How many? At least 1,000. But I am sure that figure is conservative. And how many Peters have I known. I can’t think of 10.
So, I am pretty sure that no more than 1% of the population is called Peter. That gives me 15,000 potential clients. That’s not bad.
Except that I do all my work for businesses in the Shoalhaven. There are about 100,000 people living in the Shoalhaven, or 0.5% of the Australian population.
So there can be no more, and I suspect a lot less, than 75 Peters in the Shoalhaven who may want my services. And I already do work for three of them. I need to find the other 72 before someone else signs them up.
If your name is not Peter, I am prepared to consider doing work for you, or perhaps you would like to change your name.