A summer slump...

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 06/10/12)

It's June in New York City and since it's been 6 months since my last post, it's time to say something again. When I originally started this blog, I thought for sure I'd be able to post something quarterly but life and business have a funny way of changing your priorities.

I'll start this one by saying that the first 6 months of 2012 have been pretty underwhelming. You'd think after having a company for 12 years, we'd have stable accounts and fewer problems with cash flow. We were in fact pretty stable until the recession started to gain momentum in 2008. Since then, and especially the past couple of years, it's made the marketing world, and therefor a small design firm like ours, unpredictable.

Marketing budgets have either gotten slashed or marketers have shifted their budgets to other areas. Creative assignments have gotten less interesting — meaning marketers have become risk averse, and as a company, we seem to be working harder for lower billing.

For the past two years, we've seen the first two fiscal quarters of the year go quiet. This makes for a very stressful cash flow situation as it's hard to anticipate when the marketing dollars will flow again. And the radio silence from clients always triggers a fear response: we start writing more new business emails, mining LinkedIn more, reaching out to colleagues more, praying more.

Our biggest client has recently begun to assign more revision work for us, and fewer new creative assignments. This particular client uses our shop for a lot of direct response emails and direct mail, and from time to time some print ads and Web banner ads. The revision work is sending a troubling message. It says they don't trust us to generate new and effective creative concepts that will help them reach new customers. Some of the revision work isn't even our creative — they often originate from some other shop. And since the client owns the creative work upon completion, they can assign the revision work to anyone they choose. We're glad to have the work, but it's not exciting. There, I said it.

Another illustration of how differently the wind is blowing (with the aforementioned client): we recently presented 4 new concepts in a meeting of 12 marketing managers, a director and a VP of marketing, and after we showed the ideas and discussed their potential, everyone nodded their heads and said yes, we can work with some of these ideas, etc., etc., and then they never called back to green-light a single one of them. We worked hard on the concepts and developed some beautiful comps and the presentation landed with a resounding thud. It amounted to basically pitch work — and for a client we've had for 9 years. It was deflating and aggravating. It's part of doing business, sure, and I realize you can't always hit home runs, but I can't recall ever going into a concept presentation and striking out 4 times.

To add injury to insult, I managed to break my right clavicle in March. And yes, I'm right-handed. Good god what a mess that was. It was a pretty serious setback to our active jobs. In the 12 years we'd been in business, neither my business partner nor I have sustained a serious physical injury. My business partner tore a meniscus several years ago, but it didn't affect his ability to work or write. I on the other hand had to have surgery to rejoin the broken bones, and I was out of commission for about 8-9 working days. For the first time, I actually felt bad for my insurance provider — we'd just switched to them 2 days before the accident. It was the first time I'd ever broken a bone. Surgery was quick, but the pain and discomfort before it and after it was really quite remarkable. Percoset just made me spacey and forgetful so I can hardly recall what happened during that time. Physical therapy had me running in and out of the office 3x a week which also added to general disorientation. However, adversity creates ingenuity, and it forced us to adapt — to hire a freelance art director/designer to help out — and to maintain our day-to-day operations without losing traction on projects.

The irony of the whole thing was that the very project the freelancer was brought in for was killed a month later. The kill fee covered his invoices and not much more. Good times.

The larger percentage of my frustration and small business blues stems from the realization that we're woefully undercapitalized. I very much want to grow our business and take on staff, relieve myself from the day-in-day-out pixel nudging, take on larger scale work, diversify our business lines, gradually cut back on the project management minutia, yada yada yada. But the escape velocity required is more than my business partner and I can muster. We wear too many hats. I often read industry news about how B2B companies function, how they brand themselves, how they communicate with clients, how they market themselves, and I see weak efforts at nearly every outward facing communication from our company. It's maddening some days. Our website is embarrassing at best. We've not embraced social media. We don't utilize email marketing to share news and successes or promote our capabilities. I've tweeted and blogged on my own, but there are no extra man hours to do it on a company level. We need help but can't afford it. Interns aren't skilled enough. We can't seem to find the marketing dollars to afford the talent required to pick us up off the floor.

The other level of stress and frustration I've had, and this points back to the undercapitalization again, is our office space. We've been in the Port Authority bus terminal area for almost 5 years now. In that entire time, our block has been under constant construction. We've joked that the best moments are when the sirens drown out the construction noise. We also have a building that has never replaced its post-war- era windows, so they're these big double-hung steel mothers with single paned glass. Which means virtually no noise reduction. We're on west 38th street, and it's a major west-east thoroughfare. An on days when the construction shuts down a lane, the traffic backs up all the way to 10th Ave. And we all know what happens when New Yorkers sit in traffic for more than 30 seconds: the street becomes a Dada symphony of horns. The most deafening of which are the fire trucks. If a fire truck is stuck in traffic, the driver will just lay on the air horn until blood shoots out of your ears. I've actually had to cancel client phone calls at times.

But wait, there's more. A couple weeks ago scaffolding went up along the street level in front of our building. That means they plan to do exterior work on the facade. Lovely. It also means jackhammers. And high blood pressure. What do you think? Time for a vacation?

Another year, another rollercoaster.

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 12/30/11)

It's the last work day of 2011, and my last posting of 2011, and I'll need the weekend to mentally prepare for another new year. All's quiet with clients as this is the eve of New Year's Eve. I should be doing digital house-cleaning with my work emails but can't face it today. All those thousands of emails — received or sent — that need to be deleted or sub-foldered. Sigh. I'll have to chip away at it over the weekend at some point. I must start the new year off with a clean slate. And when I say clean slate, I mean a near-empty Inbox.

Like the title of this blog, 2011 was yet another roller coaster in the life of a small business owner. The first half of the year seemed like imminent doom, the 2nd half seemed like a tornado inside a hurricane (see previous posts).

This year we utilized more freelancers/contractors than ever before, and that was good for me. Since I'm the VP of Design & Emerging Media at O2 Agency (designer and/or design project manager on all projects), the amount of man hours required to get our assignments off the ground can be a bit daunting. We took on some very large scale projects this year, and having an additional art director and production artist on hand for support really made the difference between sanity and insanity for me. Though my wife would tell you I strayed into Crazy Town and stayed there in Oct and Nov. (Sorry hon. The stress was unreal.) December was nuts too, but the pace did slow as we got closer to Christmastime. I dealt with only 1 design emergency while on vacation, so that was key to a recuperative holiday break.

On a personal note, my wife and I spent a week's vacation on Clearwater Beach, FL while visiting my family in that area. We were greeted with warm, sunny weather for almost the entire week, and we enjoyed a lot of quality time with my mother, brother, sister-in-law and my nieces. My wife managed to run a low-grade fever the entire week, despite having no other symptoms of the flu or anything else (as I've mentioned in the past, she's been battling Lyme Disease for many years, and this was probably just another one of those "surprise" gifts that Lyme brings). And that impinged upon our ability to go to every family party and social function. But she at least got a couple opportunities to walk on the beach and absorb some rays, and experience the sugar sand it's famous for. We stayed at the Hilton, which was fairly low key for the week that wrapped around Christmas weekend. Though it is a bit family-oriented and can even be rowdy at night with the 20-something set.

To get around, we rented that new Fiat J-Lo car. It's actually a pretty nice ride for a compact car. It seemed to turn heads with the 11-15 year old girl demographic anyway, which both my wife and I thought was pretty hilarious. One middle-aged guy mockingly wanted to drag race me on the Clearwater Causeway bridge. Heh. I actually think I would have smoked him if I'd taken the challenge seriously.

For New Year's Eve, we plan to hang with friends downtown in the Union Square area. And since they're on a high-floor, we might get a view of Times Square. We'll see.

Cheers everybody. Here's hoping you all had a great 2011, and that 2012 looks even more promising!

The BPE, near total data loss, managing freelancers, and jury duty.

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 10/28/11)

As the 4th quarter of this year got underway we began discussions with a big magazine publisher here in New York. They brought us in to brief us on the scope of a huge project — which I'll refer to as Biggest Project Ever (BPE). And it needs to be done in about a month. A proposal needed to be submitted ASAP. It wouldn't be sexiest project we'd ever taken on, but it might be the single largest. And if we were awarded the work it would basically save the year for us revenue-wise.

Soon after we dug into the details of our proposal for BPE, we realized the scope of it would require every ounce of project management skill my business partner and I could summon. BPE was going to be very challenging from a problem-solving and workflow/information flow standpoint. And the sheer scope of it clearly would dictate that we outsource a lot of the early-stage set up work — most of which could be done offsite.

Running simultaneously with BPE was the imminent threat that our office NAS drive was slowly losing its mind. (NAS stands for Network Attached Storage, for those of you who don't know — it's a high capacity hard drive that functions as sort of a scaled-down server for small businesses like ours.) I downloaded a firmware update to it one afternoon, and the next day it started to freak out on me. Files wouldn't copy from it. Folders couldn't be compressed. Read/write errors kept popping up. Maddening stuff like that. I of course started to sweat large cold bullets. The damn drive was malfunctioning. Those of you who have lost data or have come close to losing data know how utterly horrifying this scenario is. Our NAS drive had a 2TB capacity, and we had about 200GB worth of mirrored data that was in jeopardy. 11 years worth. The timing of this seemingly colossal failure was so not good.

Seven tech support calls later to Western Digital (the maker of the NAS drive) concluded that our drive's RAID hardware was failing. But the good news was that it appeared that the data could be copied off it. I ran over to Staples and picked up a 1TB external drive, connected it, started the copy process, and went home. I bought a new NAS drive the next day, and then begged my close friend and network security guru Gary Morse, President at Razorpoint Security Technologies, to come by and save our company's data on a Saturday night. He's a mensch, let me tell you.

We restored all the company files on the new drive, but there's another layer to all this anxiety. The following week we were awarded Biggest Project Ever. Oh and I had to report to City Hall for jury duty. Yeah. That's right. Jury duty. Can you believe it? I still can't.

So in order to get BPE off the ground while the first stage jury duty selection process holds me hostage downtown, we bring in freelancers to help out. Fortunately we knew a couple of pros who could do just that. I keep hoping I'll get dismissed early in the process and I can get back to work. And FYI — they don't allow computers, cell phones or any electronics in the jury duty assembly rooms anymore. Not even in the room designated "Juror Work Room". It was agonizing.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday go by without my name being called. I'm thinking maybe I'll get lucky and sail through this unscathed. Thursday however was a different story. Shortly after I arrived in the morning I'm forced to watch a video on the Grand Jury process and responsibility. What? What is this? This is not good. Then later in the day, a lottery of names were called out and I became Juror #21, on a Federal Grand Jury. Damn! It was devastating. Some of these jury panels have to participate for 18 months! I went into a mild state of shock. I pleaded with the judge when my turn came, but no dice... he wouldn't excuse me. And my service would require one month of participation. Good God. A month. Really? It was really bad news. The only silver lining was that our particular jury panel would last only a month. That's OK I thought. I'll die of sheer exhaustion by then anyway.

The rest of October was a blur from that day on. As it turned out my jury duty service would require only a half day one day per week. And for those of you who've never had the honor of being a grand juror, you don't sit in on one case — you vote to indict or not indict defendants based on evidence an attorney presents. And within a half day you can hear 3-4 indictments/cases. But it was nerve wracking all the same. The grand jury process keeps you on a short leash. Every evening at 6pm all the jurors had to call a number to check a message that gave us the next day's instructions: whether we had to show up or not, what time to show up, etc. And that's how it went through the month of October. I'll end my service November 2nd, and then I think I get a break from jury duty for 6 years. Ya-effing-hoo!

BPE got off the ground with the help of our freelancers. I've worked every single day since the last week of September. It was really a bitch to get through all that. My business partner really stepped up and directed projects well in my absences. It looks like we'll survive the storm — a little tattered but no broken bones.

This is how scary having your own business can be. It can be unbelievably toxic and stressful for long stretches. Things you never thought you'd have to deal with suddenly appear in front of you and you have adapt. It really makes you appreciate calm waters when your little ship glides into them again. Your mind relaxes, your blood pressure returns to normal, and then you plan a vacation.