Do you suspect that you are head-over-heels in love with “free”?

Now, mind you, free is my favorite price.

But when is free truly free? After all there’s no such thing as a free lunch is an old chestnut because it is true.

Here’s the symptoms that you are unwisely enamored of “free”:

You spend time on the free thing, rather than on the thing which will get you where you want to be…just because, after all, it’s free. You forget the saying A poor man asks How much will it COST me? A rich man asks How much will it MAKE me?

You aren’t so fussy about the outcome because, after all, it was free…thus the amazing amounts of less-than-optimal fixturing in shops, the look-like-everyone-else’s ads, the web sites which scream to potential clients “Good enough and anyway, we’re not successful enough to have it done right.”

You realize that you are undervaluing your own time just because it’s free. Spending an hour looking for copyright-free clip art to use in your bag stuffer instead of paying a buck or so to download something more attractive and more pertinent. You just paid yourself $1/hour…and lost, forever, that hour where you could have done something more productive of your time, whether it’s waxing the rods or playing with your child, grandchild, or dog.

My free advice to you? Be sure you can afford it before you spend your professional goal, your business image and your working time on it.