@#7 – Glad that you took the leap of faith, too! Just remember to continue to write what you’re passionate about and you won’t have regrets. (Just writers must stop agonizing over their own words and get some more confidence! We’re just a real train wreck on the inside, aren’t we?! LOL!)

Not accounting per se, but SCORE just sent this to me.

Washington, D.C.—SCORE “Counselors to America’s Small Business” and Corporate Turnaround have created a free 16-page workbook, How to Pay Business Debts You Can’t Afford. This valuable resource will help small businesses survive when facing economic and financial challenges.

The guide covers some of the most crucial parts of settling commercial debts, including:

How to determine a monthly budget to pay past due debts

How to create settlement offers with real-world information

How to write settlement letters using fill-in-the-blank templates

How to negotiate affordable settlements with the toughest creditors

How to stretch out settlements over time
How to Pay Business Debts You Can’t Afford is free and available as a PDF download on SCORE’s home page at http://www.score.org.

SCORE CEO Kan Yancey says, “SCORE mentors can help small businesses with a variety of financial issues, including loans, cash flow, accounting, taxes and cost reduction.” Yancey adds, “This new workbook will help give small business owners the tools they need to satisfy their creditors.”

“The easy-to-understand strategies in this guide have helped settle more than 25,000 business debts,” says Jerry Silberman, CEO of Corporate Turnaround and co-author of Small Business Survival Book: 12 Surefire Ways for Your Business to Survive and Thrive. Silberman adds, “SCORE clients will learn how to explain their hardship directly to their creditors and gain the best possible settlements.”

@Phil – YES! Accounting. Great tips and THANK YOU for pointing that out. I’d need a book that was for dummies though. I’m right-brained ALL THE WAY. I just want to be paid at the rate we agreed upon… beyond that, “I got nuttin’” if I have to use any complex mathematics!

Oh and I truly love Chicago – it’s one of my very favorite cities in the US. (It ties with Manhattan for me.) I’m just a city girl living in the ‘burbs right now.

Hope you enjoyed Chicago. Been in the area my whole life, though I have only one local account.

1) Take accounting classes. Knowledge of bookkeeping (basically accounting 101) and cost accounting (102) are invaluale. Even if you have an accountant, the books are still your responsibility. The basics are also important to help you determine profitability, whether you are really making money (revenues and profits are not the same), etc.

2) Read sales and success books. If you’re in a business, you’re in sales or you will fail to be profitable. Success books like 7 Habits of Highly Sucessful People, Think and Grow Rich, etc., provide invaluable tips, attitude adjustments, and basically, excellent strategies to be successful.

Good luck!

Jenna K. – nothing is wrong with you and you deserve the writing gigs that come your way!

(sigh) As if I’m not already critical enough of my own work…. LOL!

Best of luck!!
~from the not-really-all-that-lucky #13~

I think your right about perfection. If we wait around for it, we’ll never send anything out.

Regular readers of Freelance Writing Gigs will remember a paid blogging position that was advertised here three or four weeks ago. The pay was wonderful. The company even provided a phone number to call, after which they were so inundated with inquiries that they had to change their voice mail message to reject calls and move to an all-email format. They ended up receiving about 1000 applications.

I was notified recently that I made the final cut to the top 10, and it was only then that the specific nature of the work was revealed to the applicants. The final task for us 10 finalists was to come up with a hefty list of sample posts for the blog. And after banging my head against the wall for several days, I realized that I’m simply not the blogger for that position. I don’t know much about the subject, nor do I find anything personally interesting about it. In fact, it rather bores me (which says nothing bad about the subject itself, nor about the blog, which already exists and which is a high-quality product). For me to write that blog would entail many hours per week of research that I would find a boring distraction from the things that really grip me. It would just be a mechanical exercise. I am right now coming from just having sent the company an email to that effect. It was hard to do — I could really use that money, and as I was typing the email I could hardly believe that I was preemptively turning myself down for the position instead of letting them do it — but I’m convinced it was the *right* thing to do, both for me and for them.

Again, this is a great post you’ve made. Thanks for the valuable thoughts, which I wholeheartedly second.

Yep, there are a couple of sticky notes waiting for this post!!

The number one thing is to not wait for the perfect gig to fall in your lap, but to just go out and find it. Keep pounding the pavement!

(Also, I can’t address you as “13″ without thinking of the new doctor on House.)

Still, excellent article, even without the numbers.

Connie – the article was submitted with numbered sections, but it may not have copied and pasted from the Word .doc as planned.

Accepting that there’s no such thing as perfection is a good mantra for any area of business or life!

Best,
The Mysterious #13