creative briefing

Hey, it’s been a while. How are the kids?

Yes, I’ve been absent for some time. But for those of you who have been paying attention (all 3 of you), you’ll know that if I’m absent here it usually means I’m drowning in work elsewhere. But have no fear, I’m alive (for the time being) and am just making a much needed visit to the surface for some air.

What have I been up to? A crap load. Remember what I said about the up-and-down nature of the freelancer lifestyle? Yea, it’s definitely an up time. In fact, it’s getting up-er as we speak.

But I thought I’d leave you all a quick update on a few items so that you don’t feel neglected and start to hate me. So here goes (in no particular order)…

FITC

I wanted to do a full write-up on my experience at FITC but after some thought (and some serious lack of time and energy), I realized it wasn’t worth it. In all honesty, the 4-day conference fell below my expectations. It was very Flash-focused this year, which is fine, but in many of the presentations there seemed to be a lack of enthusiasm for the material being presented. But there were still a handful of sessions that I really enjoyed - namely that of Grupo W (”The Madness of Interaction”), Gmunk (”Gmunk Kickdown 08″), and Joshua Davis (”New Works”).

Musical inspiration

It’s the season of [awesome] concerts as I’ve had the privilege to be in the musical presence of my favorite artists: Jason Mraz (last Sunday), Lifehouse (last night), and Jack Johnson (August 3). Music has always been my second creative love and immersing myself in live tunes is a truly inspiring experience. Aside from the auditory sensations, I came away from last night’s Lifehouse concert with some pretty sick visual stimuli as well. I’ll be sharing them in a later post.

Taxes!

As you know, today is the last day of tax season. If you haven’t filed your taxes yet, you’re either fortunate enough to not owe the government anything, or you’re now panicing because I’ve just reminded you that you have to do your taxes. This year was the first year I’ve had to incorporate my business transactions into my personal tax process and I’ve learned a lot in the process. I wanted to do a write-up on some of the things I’ve learned (i.e. rule #1: get an accountant), but I realize that it would have very little relevance now that tax season has passed. If anybody shows enough interest, I’ll do the write up. Otherwise, I’ll save it for next year.

I’m on the WinMo train

To satisfy my tech itch, I recently swapped my Blackberry 8320 Curve with a HTC Touch. I’m big on productivity and staying connected so any new phone I get must perform well on both counts. Of course the big difference between the Blackberry Curve and the HTC Touch is that the latter runs on Windows Mobile. While I still very much have my old MS juices running through me, I’ve always been reluctant to jump into WinMo because of poor market reviews of the mobile OS. I was told that version 6 (which is what the Touch came loaded with) is a leap ahead of its predecessors, and that the newly released 6.1 is even better. Comparing the two devices, they are both great business tools. WinMo has the one-up however because it syncs perfectly with my Outlook data and can run Word, Excel, and PowerPoint seamlessly through its Pocket Office suite. Ironically though, WinMo blows as a phone. I have a post in the works for those of you who are looking to add a smartphone to your on-the-go arsenal and are contemplating between Blackberry and Windows Mobile. And no, the iPhone is not part of that comparison.

I’m not going anywhere

Thank you for all the kind people that emailed me about my biggest mistakes. Apparently, it might have come off that I was leaving my business behind, but if you read carefully I’m simply making changes to it. It’s a really exciting time for me as I’m just starting to get knee-deep in the planning process of the next big thing. So you can all rest assured that I’m not going anywhere.

Back to work! Thanks for staying tuned in.

My agency will be undergoing a number of changes over the next few months that are part of the natural evolution of the business. With faces, structures, models, and handful of other elements due to be changed, I see the process as an opportunity to hit the reboot button and rebuild certain aspects from the ground up. This got me thinking - what would I change?

It’s not very often that a business gets a chance to tear down everything and start again. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears go into developing the brand, reputation, networks, clients, PR (for the SEOers), and basically every other grain of what you call your business - so much that “starting over” is a concept that is usually quite foreign to most. But let’s entertain ourselves for a bit, shall we?

What if you had the opportunity to do it all again? Over the years, months, weeks, and days that you’ve been a business owner (yes, this applies to you freelancers as well), you’ve picked up an immense amount of new knowledge. Knowledge that sometimes helps you realize that some of the things you’ve done were not the right things to do. Knowledge that sometimes makes you think, if I could do it again, this is how I’d do it.

So what would you change? What would your business look like if you were to start it again today? What were your biggest mistakes and what have you learned?

To get the ball rolling, here’s a few of my biggest business mistakes:

• Not setting aside budgets for internal work: Budgets for client work are a no-brainer and are easy to justify. Why shouldn’t internal work have the same rationale? Your brand, website, and products are all important assets that, when properly invested in, will offer a [bigger] return.
• The ‘we can do that’ mentality: Every small agency’s tagline should be “we can do that” - not because it’s a good strategy, but because you end up saying it so much that you it might as well be a tagline. Trying to take on too many things outside your realm of expertise will thin out your business and leave you delivering less than mediocre results.
• Not having a hiring strategy: When you first start out, your business doesn’t need 30 sets of hands. It probably doesn’t even need 10. What’s more important to focus on is getting the right set of hands to work with you to build the business and more importantly, to run and execute the business and bring in the revenue. Partnering with a developer to match your design skills = great idea. Hiring a team of designers before you even have an established flow of work coming through = bad idea.
• Not having a growth strategy: Hiring is part of this, but a bigger part is having a plan for how your business will grow in 1, 5, or 10 years. If you’re a lemonade stand, you should have a plan on how you will grow your business into some kind of industry leader in lemonade production or distribution (for example). Without a growth strategy, you’ll always just be that same lemonade stand at the front of your house (or in my case, that lemonade stand with a really thirsty neighbor - thanks Satish).

These, and many more, are considerations that I’ll keep in mind as I begin to build the next instance of the agency.

What about you? Leave your biggest mistakes in the comments and share what you’d do differently if you could start over again (if anything).

PS - As further support that this is an important topic to consider, Naomi from the IttyBiz factory has also recently asked the same question to her readers. Check out her blog if you haven’t already - it’s one of the most entertaining and insightful small business blogs around.

If you ask a marketer to figure out the best ways for a business to serve its customers, their first intuition would likely lead them to turn to surveys and other forms of market research. While this is an efficient method with a proven record of success, I’d like to point out an even easier and more cost-effective method for those of you (like me) who don’t have the convenience of a market research department to depend on.

Live life. And pay attention.

Yes, it’s that simple (sometimes). Remember that long before we become marketers or business people, we are customers. As customers we engage and interpret a number of different experiences every time we interact with the outside world. With each interaction we pick out the good and the bad - maybe not consciously, but we definitely form preferences over time. These day-to-day preferences form a goldmine of customer insights for you to leverage. All you have to do is pay more attention to what you like and don’t like and right away you’ll start to figure out things that you and your business can do to help serve others better.

Not convinced? Let me give you a few examples.

Read the rest of this entry >

In my spare time lately I’ve been catching up on a good dose of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares with Gordon Ramsay. If you aren’t familiar with this show or who Gordon Ramsay is, here’s the premise in one sentence: Scottish award-winning celebrity chef rescues failing restaurateurs from bankruptcy with brutal honesty and humorous obscenities.

Aside from his entertaining overuse of the F-bomb, what I’ve found is that Ramsay brings a wealth of experience, knowledge, and insight to the table on how to run a business. He himself has been at the head of many self-started restaurant ventures - some successful, some not so successful - and his passion, talent, and wisdom are clearly elements that have led him to become one of the most well-known businessmen in and out of the kitchen.

In Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, Ramsay applies a number of basic principles to help failing restaurant owners turn their fate around. While the series revolves around the food industry, much of Ramsay’s lessons are applicable to businesses of any nature. Here’s a list of 10 of those lessons that will help you run a more successful business.

Read the rest of this entry >

This is a self-response to Great ideas, a mild rant I made a few months ago that questioned the commitment of an entrepreneur to his self-started venture and his/her ability to divert his/her interests into new side projects.

From the original post:

…as an entrepreneur, how restricted are you from diverting your attention to other ventures? Is it a formal duty or a personal judgment call that holds you back? Do you create policies that govern these scenarios for you, your partners and your employees? Does that make things a bit hypocritical? Does that make you hypocritical?

It’s taken a few months to set in but in my current state of mind I’m not only a strong believer that great ideas, otherwise known as brain crack, should not be restricted, but that they should also be encouraged within any organization dynamic enough to handle it.

Being your own boss gives you the flexibility and atonomy to run your business the way you want to. It means that if your creative agency wants to start a subsidiary that sells t-shirts tomorrow, then it very well can (not to say that it would be the best business decision though). The difficult debate here is what amount of commitment - time, energy, brain matter - do you owe your main venture and the people involved with it? This is what seems to have been deeply disturbing me back in October. But here’s how I see it now.

Side projects keep you fresh.

They keep your brain from going stale over working on the same thing over and over again by giving you something new and exciting to work on.

Side projects make you versatile.

They put your talents to the test - including those that aren’t used in your core work. Diversifying your interests also means diversifying your skillset, making you a more dynamic and competitive individual in the market place.

Side projects leave you happy.

The energy boost from having a great idea will leave you foaming at the mouth. They call it brain crack for a reason. Plus the satisfaction of launching something new will give you the very same tingly sensation that you experienced when you launched your first venture.

So, you owe it to yourself, your ventures, and the people you work with to take in some brain crack every once and a while. My agency has already begun internalizing this model and it’s made our daily work that much more up-beat. But don’t just take it from me; many great things have already come from people who have embraced their great ideas and allowed them to flourish - and all without losing direction or focus on their main priorities.

FreelanceSwitch and all its sister sites presumably all spawned from great ideas at the Eden house. Nick of the infamous N.Design Studios has built his entire brand off side work like Best Web Gallery and the ever-growing Web Designer Wall. More recently, the guys at Shane and Peter have launched Sproutwire, a great new tool geared at those interested in only the best of the best small business reads across the internet. Hell, even one of my business partners owes much of his success to his past side projects.

So the moral of the story is this: embrace the brain crack. Especially for you entrepreneurs and freelancers - don’t let your client work be all that you are. Be fresh. Be versatile. And most importantly, be happy.

More on brain crack

• the show with zefrank (07-11-06 edition)
• The Brian Shaler Blog (That Internal Project…)