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I’m just looking over the contract to hire an independent consultant whose official title will be Project Manager. She’ll work remotely as a virtual overseer of the projects I’m working on and help keep track of all the moving pieces including other consultants who come onto projects on an as-needed basis.

So now instead of having to spend a good portion of my time keeping track of the details and checking the status of tasks, I can let it all go and rely on her.

There are the operative words: Let Go. One of the biggest barriers to growing my company is my tendency to hoard tasks. But I’m at the breaking point. If I don’t let go of some of this load, something else will have to give - my sanity, my quality time with my family, my high standards in the quality of my work.

By hiring this person - who I’ve known for years and am looking forward to working with - I may be spending more money than I have in the past, but with her help, I’ll be able to bring on more projects without dropping any balls at all.

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For years now, I keep thinking about the need to have recurring revenues in my business. As a service provider - a consultant - I can only make as much money as I have time to work. Unless I hire others to do additional work and increase their rates enough so that I can still make a profit, I’m totally limited by my own time and brainpower.

Recurring revenues can be fairly obtainable online. Here are some things that I’ve tried and other things that I am exploring to extend my offerings to make more “passive” income, that is, money that comes in without any bearing on my time or ongoing effort.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about business models lately. Even as a company of one, I need several business models cobbled together - diversified revenue streams - to make ends meet.

Right now, my business models are:

1. Consulting Services. The meat and potatoes of what I make comes from offering high-level strategic consulting services to companies, nonprofit organizations and individuals. I am paid either by my hourly rate or per project. Most of my consultants come from word of mouth referral from my existing clients. Some come from Twitter, Facebook and Second Life. Very few come off my web site but hoping that will change as I pump up the “business” side of my site. This accounts for about 60% of my income.
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Over the years, I seem to always be in the position of giving business advice, whether in my columns or to colleagues running their own companies. With a handful of companies under my belt, I have a lot of “life” experience with businesses. Also, I’m a proponent of being an open book so others can learn from both my successes and failures. In the same way I’m very self-revealing about my personal life in articles and blogs, I do the same on the entrepreneurship front.

So it was a major “aha” moment for me last week when I found myself turning to someone else for advice. Someone suggested that I might want to call my local Small Business Development Center (SBDC) office to get some financial advice for my corporation. SBDC’s are a program of the SBA to provide management assistant to aspiring and current entrepreneurs.

My dealings to date with the SBDC have been as a consultant or as a speaker or instructor, never as a business owner looking for help. But with some major corporate changes in the works for my company, I suddenly found myself in a deep ocean without a life vest. And of course my local SBDC was well-stocked with life preservers, life vests and even life rafts.

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A few weeks ago, I heard the phrase “working in the clouds” for the first time. The phrase refers to the way many people are starting to use online-based applications for their work processes and tasks rather than computer-based solutions. Even without thinking very much about it, I’ve been “working in the clouds” more and more often in the last six months. But after my big computer crash and near-loss of all 10-months worth of data, I’ve been thinking a lot more about “cloud computing” ever since.

There are definitely major pros but also major cons to cloud computing, and weighing them out is often too much for my overloaded brain to handle. But I thought I’d share my thoughts on the topic and then hear from you as well so we can share best practices on this revolutionary way of work.

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A client of mine teased me the other day when she saw me pull out my calendar book to write down an entry.

“I thought you were so tech, and here you are with a paper calendar,” she said by way of explanation.

“But I have a 30Boxes calendar as well!” I retorted. “And it sends me text message reminders to my cellphone!”

I don’t know why I felt that I needed to prove my tech savvy by rattling off how wired I really am and that the paper calendar is just my first line of defense against my progressively bad memory.

I just like the tangible feeling of a paper calendar. I like the feeling of pen on paper. I like seeing what I write on a page. Our words are so digitized these days with reading and writing emails, reading our news on Web sites, connecting with others through online social networks - that for me, writing things down on paper really grounds me.

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I’m starting to reconsider our 2-year-old daughter’s daycare schedule. I’m beginning to feel like 8 hours a day 5 days a week is way too much for a 2-year-old. I come to this thought not as a work-at-home mom who is feeling guilty about sending her child away to let other people take care of her while I slave away (contentedly) in front of my computer without interruption.

I don’t think my slight change of heart over daycare came from this NPR poll:

Moms Say They’d Cut Pay for Time with Kids

Frankly, I’m not sure I’m ready to cut my pay to spend more time with my daughter.

I think my new view of daycare comes from bonding more with her and becoming more sensitive to her needs. Forty hours a week of daycare is just too exhausting for her even though she loves the interaction with other kids, something she gets much less frequently with a work-at-home mom who doesn’t have many girlfriends with kids her age.

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