The highs and lows of 2009.
(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 12/23/09)
Another year as a business owner in New York City comes to a close. It was quite a blur. Without a doubt, the year was defined by the threat of a worsening economy. At the onset of 2009, I seriously considered the very real possibility that our client activity would suffer. At best, we'd lose a substantial percentage of gross revenue. At worst, we'd lose everything and shut down the company. Hopefully it wouldn't come to that.
The first quarter started off well and even into the spring, business activity was on plan with previous years. In April, we purchased two MacBook Pros for ourselves as our older G4s were starting to chug through most websites. The first day my business partner left the office with his, he dropped it on a train platform on a rainy day, and it took us two weeks of scouring eBay for parts, and a full business day to repair it. It never was quite the same after that. But he'd have to limp along with it until we could replace it later in the year.
A difficult and welcomed transition took place in May. We do a fair amount of html emails and print direct mail for Time Inc. for many of their magazines. For years, they'd been stuck in the horrible world of a QuarkXPress 6.5 workflow, and when we upgraded our Macs to OS X Leopard in late 2008, QXP was renderd virtually unusable. Time Inc. also handles the print production aspects of many of our jobs for American Express Publishing's (also one of our clients) print promotions. Every project was agonizing. Then in May of 2009, we got word they'd be transitioning to Adobe Creative Suite 3. We were ecstacic. The world was saved. We were finally able to migrate both clients to CS3 and our productivity improved dramatically. And after hating Quark with such a passion for so many years, I could finally let go of my anger. Now I anxiously await the news of their bankruptcy. If it happened tomorrow, it would be 10 years overdue. There, I said it.
Then in late June I got married. We had fantastic wedding ceremony in NYC at Bryant Park Grill. Our honeymoon took us to Fiji — boy was that a pressure valve of relief from all the stress of the wedding planning and the business demands! We returned to New York City in early July after two weeks in the South Pacific feeling rested and so married.
Then in August, September and October, business activity started to slow. It was very worrisome. We began to plan for a serious slowdown and consider some contingencies. We halted contributions to our 401k plans. We watched our expenses very carefully. Somehow we managed to maintain salaries and just held on and hoped new projects would increase in number.
In September, I finally (for the love of God!) got an iPhone. What a great cell phone. It's about time us Mac users got a phone that worked seamlessly with our address book, mail and calendar apps. And the 3G version rocks. I immersed myself in the world of Apps. After 4 months, I still can't beat Scrabble on Expert level more than 10% of the time.
In November, business began to pick up again thankfully. Then we had trouble with our Epson large format color inkjet printer. When printing to large paper, the head would just lose track and slam into the inside of the housing. It's a sound that raises the hair on your neck. After Epson said to take it in for repair, I scheduled a drop-off with a repair center in New Jersey two days before Thanksgiving. A week later, the guy could find nothing wrong with it. Really, really frustrating. So a return trip to pick it up and bring it back to our office on West 38th St. took place after Thanksgiving. The Sony GPS I used to get me there started failing on the way back so I had to feel my way back to the city from Lodi, NJ, and get the Zipcar rental back in time. It was a total waste of time and effort.
Then in early December we decided it was time to make year-end technology upgrades. We bought a new 2TB RAID network storage drive for our office. (Kudos to my buddy Gary Morse who runs Razorpoint Securities. The guy's a genius. We had that drive configured and running in under an hour.) We also needed to upgrade most of our Macs and our large format laser printer. We bought a 21" iMac for bookkeeping, a 27" iMac for our production artist, and a new MacBook Pro to replace that sputtering, damaged older MBP for my biz partner. I'm just about through all the software upgrades/reinstalls for OS X Snow Leopard, and the laser printer is on the way, due Jan 5.
About a week ago, that iPhone I mentioned? It died on me. I put it to sleep one morning and it wouldn't wake up. However, a trip to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store on Broadway and 67th St. yielded a replacement. MobileMe was well worth the annual $99 that day alone.
All in all we had a few bumps in the year, but we definitely ended on a high note. And we even managed to make up for the months of 401k contributions we missed.
Just another tricky year of business ownership. Cheers. And Happy New Year!