The Worst Bits of Self-Employment
Having given you my top Best Bit of Self Employment, it's time for one of the Worst Bits.
The BIG BOYS!!!!
Yep, you know it, the big companies and names that know to pray on the new, naive and happy to talk to anyone who notices them because they haven't seen it coming yet.
For me there have been a couple of particularly bad experiences and I will tell you about them to save you the same pain.
Yell - Oh my goodness, possibly the worst of my decisions to date. They fooled me into thinking that everyone needed to be on Yell to lift them in the google rankings, for receiving positive feedback and that very specific searches could really bring in the enquiries.
They spoke about key words and tags, postcodes and areas, that there were thousands of searches for my type of business within certain timescales, blah blah blah.
What they really meant was, hey why don't you give us £45 a month for a year and we'll do absolutely nothing for you. And then when you try to talk to us about it, after that we'll do a little more of nothing and after that when you try and complain we'll encourage you to run round the houses, waste 16 hours of your time and then totally ignore you telling you there is no way out of your contract.
Silly me, if only I had done a search on using yell I would see a fair few hundred complaints and zero ratings.
But they are yell, yellow pages, known them for years, grew up with the book as an iconic item.
Not to worry - the year is up and trading standards are on to them now.
Vodafone - well here is another one for you. I thought seeing as I was a business owner now it would make sense to swap my mobile over from personal use to business use.
I think I lost count at about 15 different staff members and over 8 hours of trying.
Do you know, not one person in that business seems to know what they are doing and how that fits into what the overall business is doing.
I'm still on a personal contract and gave up when yet again I was told that there was no complaints department.
Clearly the BIG BOYS don't receive any complaints.
For someone who is supporting other businesses and offers thoughts on how to offer better service and clearer processes and how to be more efficient, I have a lot to share with the BIG BOYS. If only you could access anyone who cares.
So my tip to you would be, avoid them like the plague and don't buy into anything that you don't research well yourself. Or better yet, be a part of a group like Freelance Heroes on Facebook and ask the advice of those who went before you. They are a great resource and always happy to share experiences so you have better.
