Posts Tagged ‘business’

In the past twelve hours, I’ve booked two flight itin­er­aries for six dif­ferent flights to be taken in the next three weeks. In December and January, I’ll have vis­ited around eleven dif­ferent cities (pos­sibly more), in five dif­ferent coun­tries, on two dif­ferent con­tin­ents. In Feb­ruary, I’ll be adding even more coun­tries and cities to my list. By the time I return to Canada in the summer, I’ll have lived in seven dif­ferent coun­tries in four continents.

I am, without ques­tion, a vagabond.

Booking a flight can make my heart race. The feeling of landing in a strange city, lost and con­fused, gives me great pleasure. I actu­ally get a huge rush of endorphins, like a high, at the exact moment that I feel an air­plane leave the ground. I am hap­piest, and most sure of myself, walking through a for­eign place and watching everything around me. If I stay in one place for longer than a few weeks, I begin to get intense wanderlust.

It struck me the other day that what I’m doing is not exactly normal. Most people don’t take off from their homes for long stretches of time, and those who do most often travel in a way that’s markedly dif­ferent from mine. When I meet new people, I often get thrown by their ques­tions: yes, I’m trav­el­ling, sort of. But I’m still working. And I live in the coun­tries I travel to. No, I prob­ably haven’t seen that famous monu­ment, and I quite likely don’t care much to, either.

This is actu­ally the only pho­to­graph I have taken in San Fran­cisco, and it’s tech­nic­ally in Moun­tain View. Still, I find it more inter­esting than a snap­shot of a monu­ment that’s already been pho­to­graphed a mil­lion times over, by people expo­nen­tially more skilled than I (and likely wielding better cam­eras than the one in their phone).

I went to San Fran­cisco last week, but I didn’t see Alc­a­traz or the Golden Gate Bridge. I went to México City prior to that, but didn’t bother with the pyr­amids. While I recog­nize that some things are tourist traps with good reason, the more I travel, the less interest I have in these things. Part of this is because they’re often crawling with tour­ists, espe­cially in Europe, but another part of it is that vis­iting often feels empty. Sure, they’re beau­tiful or breath­taking or inter­esting, but I’ve invari­ably seen them already in movies and pho­to­graphs. The crowd of tour­ists mind­lessly snap­ping pho­to­graphs of these much-photographed monu­ments, as though checking off items from a scav­enger hunt, only exacer­bates this emptiness.

I don’t want to see the world through a lens. I want to taste, smell, and feel it as well. That’s why I’m trav­el­ling instead of watching a doc­u­mentary or zooming through Google Street View. I want to exper­i­ence and interact with the world around me.

The true journey, as the inter­jec­tion of an “out­side” dif­ferent from our normal one, implies a com­plete change of nutri­tion, a digesting of the vis­ited country– its fauna and flora and its cul­ture (not only the dif­ferent culinary prac­tices and con­di­ments but the dif­ferent imple­ments used to grind the flour or stir the pot) — making it pass between the lips and down the eso­phagus. This is the only kind of travel that has a meaning nowadays, when everything vis­ible you can see on tele­vi­sion without rising from your easy chair.

The incom­par­able Italo Calvino, “Under the Jaguar Sun”
(About travels in Mexico! Must find prior to leaving.)

I’ve always been prone to making up my own rules. While I tech­nic­ally wrote some­thing of a busi­ness plan (in about two hours, at four in the morning, off the top of my head), I didn’t do most of the things you’re sup­posed to do when run­ning a busi­ness. Hon­estly, some­times I wonder how I ever made it work, and how it con­tinues to work for me. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I don’t really do much of any­thing in the tra­di­tional way—my work, my edu­ca­tion, my rela­tion­ships, my pas­times, and my travels are all plotted out according to a set of rules that exists solely in my own head.

Ser­i­ously, I live here. This is not always what comes to mind when people think “Mexico”. I like it for its dirty parts as much as for its pretty parts.

Somehow, though, it all works. I become more and more delighted with my life as I veer fur­ther and fur­ther from the orthodox.

I’ve noticed that some­times people don’t under­stand this. I received a birthday card one year that said “Don’t worry, you’ll find your place and settle down even­tu­ally,” and it took me a while to stop being offended by the implic­a­tion that I’m unhappy because I haven’t roped down a man, staked out my plot in the woods, and started pro­du­cing chil­dren yet. While I know that many people are happy with this sort of pre­scribed life, I know I’m not one of them (or at least, I’m not yet, but I sin­cerely doubt I’ll ever be). It frus­trates me that some­times that means people will see me as a failure, because I’m choosing to do things in such an unusual manner. I abso­lutely love my life, and not everyone who “has it all” would say that. Some of the coolest, best-adjusted people I know are weirdos like me.

So buck with tra­di­tion. Drop out of school, live out of your car, take six dif­ferent wives. Don’t break the rules solely for the sake of breaking them, but don’t allow them to fence you into a life you didn’t choose. The world is full of people who are stuck by cir­cum­stance, but as a cit­izen of an affluent country, you have such a myriad of options open to you. Don’t follow the status quo just because it’s what we’re trained to do.

I want a world full of free-spirits and vagabonds.

From a dentist’s window in Ensenada. I’m not sure if this is con­sidered an unorthodox mar­keting tactic in Mexico or not, but for the pur­poses of this post, I’ll choose to believe that it is.

Last weekend was my birthday. (I won’t tell you how old I turned, but I am now offi­cially starting to feel old. If you’re really inter­ested, I’m sure a quick Google search will turn up some­thing that’s not yet a lie.) As a present, a friend took me on what can best be described as a “whirl­wind trip”: we rode his motor­cycle 3000 kilo­meters to New York City, and back, in four days.

It wasn’t until we’d hit Bangor, Maine on the second day that I real­ized just how insane of an idea that was.

For starters, when I say “motor­cycle”, I don’t mean a cushy touring bike with back­rests, stereo speakers, massive wind­shields, lug­gage racks, and padded seats. This was a beast of a super­bike, with a tiny little tri­an­gular seat on the back that looks like a mini­ature rocket. I jammed all of our vital belongings–two com­puters, sev­eral pairs of shoes (Excessive maybe, but it can’t come as a sur­prise), my flat-iron, three books, clothing–into my giant orange back­pack and strapped it to my back. The effect was as though I’d gained a 30lb hunch­back, and my bal­ance was thrown so out of whack that climbing up on the bike was roughly akin to mounting a nine-foot tall horse with a broken leg. After an hour, my ass ached like I’d never felt before, and my feet would keep going numb. By the end of the trip, I had fric­tion burns on my thighs and back pain that lasted for days, along with a giant smile on my face.

It was most assuredly one of the most insane, intense, incred­ible things I’d ever done.

Yep. This thing. I may as well have ridden a rock­et­ship. It was also hot as hell, so every time we stopped I’d strip off the moment I clambered down and fling my things all over the place, as evid­enced here.

Things I think I can’t do

When the con­stant pain wasn’t dis­tracting me, I was busy being ter­ri­fied. Three deer standing at the edge of the road waiting to jump out and kill me. Taking turns at 100 and leaning 45 degrees with the bike. Flying into my driver during an emer­gency stop coming into the city. Foggy night riding while a thun­der­storm lit up the sky around us. Lane-splitting between trucks. Con­struc­tion coming out of nowhere. Other cars cut­ting and swerving in. I’m a nervous passenger. There were so many times when all I wanted to do was say, “Listen. I cannot do this any­more. Drop me off at the nearest exit, and I will hitch­hike my way home. Thanks for the ride!” By day four, when we needed to make good time, and the riding was get­ting intense, and the wind blast was so crazy I was con­vinced I was going to be pushed off that tiny little seat, I was ver­ging on down­right miser­able. The only thing that got me through was sheer determination.

That determination—less char­it­able people would call it “bull-headedness”—has gotten me through so much. Earlier this summer, I went to Cape Breton with a friend. We found this charming place where you walk through the woods, clamber down a cliff using a system of ropes, cross through a rumbly river, and swim in ice-cold salt­water through a cavern until you reach this lagoon amid the rocks. Above it, there’s a cave in the side of the cliff, and more ropes. The boys who had gone the day prior told us we’d need lots of upper-body strength to pull ourselves up. One of them had even needed to be pushed up.

Of course, I figured I wouldn’t be able to make it. Pos­sessing an extra x chro­mo­some already pre­dis­poses me to be rather lacking in the upper-body depart­ment, and my twice-broken wrists of last year put me at some­thing of a dis­ad­vantage. I remember perching atop one of the rocks, about to jump into the icy lagoon, looking up at the cave in the cliff and being con­vinced I’d never make it.

Then I gritted my teeth, pulled everything in my body together, and I made it! I’m cer­tain it was that stub­born­ness, not any hidden reserves of strength, that fuelled my suc­cess. I’m also pretty sure that’s how I’ve struc­tured the entirety of my life.

Things that scare me

Breaking both my wrists last year made me pretty skit­tish about my vul­ner­ab­ility. Being in a couple of car crashes in quick suc­ces­sion when I was eighteen made me an extremely nervous pas­senger. As a gen­eral rule, I very much dis­like things that are beyond my control.

Obvi­ously, riding pil­lion on a motor­cycle is sort of a double-whammy for me. But I’m quite cer­tain that for­cing your­self to face things you fear makes you a stronger person. As a result, any­time I think “Oh, gra­cious. That sounds scary.” or “That sounds hard. I wonder if I’m cap­able of doing it?”, I take it as a sign that I must do it. Learning to ride a motor­cycle (I have a license now!)? Moving to South America for five months? Going zip­lining? Life mod­el­ling? Bring it on.

And of course, run­ning a busi­ness is one of these things. I’m amazed that I’ve been doing this for so long and I’m still ter­ri­fied of it and con­vinced I can’t do it at all. What if I mess things up and ruin my repu­ta­tion? What if I get jerked around and can’t pay my bills any­more? What if the stress drives me totally insane and I end up wan­dering about aim­lessly, mut­tering about em-heights and kerning?

Run­ning a busi­ness is one of the scar­iest things I’ve ever done, and it never stops being terrifying.

Being a brave little toaster

Facing fears in other areas of your life forces you to become stronger and more self-assured. That sense of determination—the “I don’t know if I can do this, but I’m damn well going to try as hard as I pos­sibly can”—is enough to push you to do everything you can in order to make it happen. I think, ulti­mately, I would have killed my busi­ness had I not started pushing myself to con­front fears in other aspects of my life.

I’m a big fan, how­ever, of pushing bound­aries incre­ment­ally. If you sud­denly dive into some­thing ter­ri­fying, it’s easy to become para­lyzed by fear, and no longer retain the ability to respond in an agile way when things change, as they invari­ably do. It’s important to push through things you’re afraid of, and things you don’t believe you’re cap­able of doing, but you can’t allow your­self to become locked up by them if you take on too much at once. It’s a fine balance.

It’s for this reason that I keep ramping up my adven­tures. I’m deep in plan­ning mode (by which I mean “vaguely thinking about from time to time”) for my next crazy adven­ture, which is shaping up to involve a few dif­ferent con­tin­ents. By pushing things a little fur­ther every time I do them, my brain starts learning that it can handle whatever chal­lenges I can throw at it. I stop being appre­hensive when some­thing crops up and I think I can’t manage it, because con­sistent exper­i­ence tells me that I can.

This is the classy way to relax. (Don’t worry, I’m in Con­necticut. The gas sta­tions are spot­less.) I was per­forming some variant of this sprawl, often with the back­pack still strapped on, at every gas sta­tion down the eastern sea­board (when I wasn’t busy doing cartwheels to stretch out.) Coin­cid­ent­ally, this is also how I look when I’ve had the week from hell and have been working non­stop put­ting out fires, scram­bling to get things done, and gen­er­ally going crazy. Like this one! Good times.

And hey, if I hadn’t pushed myself to make it through this trip, I may not have learned how to smoke a cigar­ette while riding a motor­cycle in New York City. You’re wel­come, lovely cli­ents. I do crazy things to make you happy.

I have sent out so many estim­ates in the past couple of months, it would make your head spin. This week alone, I have three open estim­ates floating about, and another couple of leads to follow up on. I hate writing estim­ates. It takes a lot longer than invoicing and feels much less rewarding. It’s always a tiny little bit nerve-wracking waiting for the response back: will we be making beau­tiful things together?

I don’t know if it’s some­thing I’m doing wrong, but I haven’t heard a single yes in all this time. I’ve been doing my reg­ular client work, and I’ve been taking on little main­ten­ance or exten­sion pro­jects for old cli­ents here and there, but I just haven’t picked up an exciting new pro­ject for ages. I am going through a brutal busi­ness dry spell.

I’d love to say I’m totally cool about it—but that would be a lie. I’m freaking out a little. It doesn’t help, of course, that I recently gave the taxman a metric ton of cash, or that I’m still adjusting to being back in a country where wine costs triple what I think it should, and that I keep doing asinine things like racking up expensive speeding tickets. I’m nat­ur­ally pretty para­noid about money, which is great in some respects—I have no debt and money stored away that I refuse to touch until I actu­ally am desperate—but lousy in the respect that it means that I feel like I’m “broke”, even though I’m really not.

Is it crazy to worry that your busi­ness might be barren? (Probably.)

1. Keep calm and carry on.

When my dry spell started (what feels like a mil­lion years ago) I totally freaked out. I was con­vinced that I’d finally done in my busi­ness and was destined to spend the rest of my days living in a card­board box (full of shoes) under the over­pass. I debated moving to Costa Rica and becoming a banana farmer.

Then I took a deep breath and remembered that it’s summer—or, at least, Canada’s variant of the theme—and that busi­ness is always slow this time of year. There’s a summer slow­down every year, and every year I’ve had this exact same panic attack. Per­haps there’s a pat­tern there, given how I’m not presently eating out of dumpsters.

2. It’s not me, it’s you.

Most of the responses to my estim­ates haven’t been straight-up “no”s. Most have been vari­ants of “we don’t have the budget right now”, or “the client changed their mind”, or “we’ll revisit this later in the year”. There’s a good chance that a lot of these leads will turn into actual pro­jects in the future—I’ve had some leads turn into great work years down the line. It’s not really a com­forting thought when I’m looking for work now, but it at least helps my self-esteem to realize it’s not just because I suck that the work isn’t coming in as enthu­si­ast­ic­ally as I’d like it to be.

It’s easy to let this sort of thing get you down, which is a dan­gerous place to be. I’m at my hap­piest when I feel like I’m being pro­ductive and I’m pro­du­cing great work for my cli­ents. This feeling of idle­ness, coupled with the sting of rejec­tion, can easily derail motiv­a­tion. I’ll admit I’m in a bit of a slump, and it hasn’t helped that I’m still suf­fering from the wan­der­lust and a sort of exist­en­tialist what-does-it-all-mean life-evaluation syn­drome induced by my return to Canada.

I posted a list of pos­itive reminders on my fridge, where I can look at it every day, and told myself to get it together. You can’t take any­thing per­son­ally when you’re run­ning a business.

3.  Don’t get desperate.

Don’t take on pro­jects you’ll hate (unless they’ll pay a ton). Don’t do stuff for a lot cheaper than you would oth­er­wise. It’s so tempting to take on lousy pro­jects when it feels as though nothing is coming through, but in the long run, doing so is devaluing both to your own busi­ness and to the industry as a whole. I’d rather spend my time finally sorting out all my accounting (ugh) than par­ti­cip­ating in spec work, or entering lame-o design con­tests where my logo could win $100 if I happen to be the lucky chosen one. (Actu­ally, there’s a whole slew of revolting things I’d rather do than that.) Ulti­mately, devaluing your work just because things happen to be slow will con­tribute to the sense of neg­ative self-worth brought about by the slump, and it’s dif­fi­cult to recover once things start run­ning smoothly again.

4. Focus on other stuff.

I’ve got a list as long as my arm of summer projects—some design related, some not—and I have no time to do any of it. It’s driving me bonkers, actu­ally. I’m in a dry spell! Shouldn’t I have gads of time to fritter away? Appar­ently, it doesn’t quite work this way, since I’m spending a lot of time sending out emails and going to meet­ings for pro­jects that don’t pan out. It’s frus­trating, but a neces­sary part of the process.

I’ve been doing a little, though. I’m social­izing more. I’ve actu­ally read a whole entire book all the way though to the end. I’ve been going on little short-jaunt in-country trips to appease my wan­der­lust. I keep buying wine bottles with ugly labels, with the inten­tion of doing my own personal-project redesigns. (Admit­tedly pro­gress on this front tends to be sul­lied by my drinking the bottle as “research” before get­ting down to work.) I’m plan­ning for my next series of travels, and learning to ride a motor­cycle so I don’t kill myself touring Thai­land. I bought vin­tage roller-skates and am learning how not to fall on my tail­bone. I’ve got a whole list of business-y admin type things to do, and another list of per­sonal pro­jects and fun things. I’m cer­tainly not bored.

I have wanted a pair of roller­skates since I was a little kid, and now I’m a little ter­ri­fied of them. Appar­ently breaking both your wrists in one summer makes you paranoid.

Keeping busy dis­tracts from the fact that you aren’t, in fact, busy at all.

5. Think happy thoughts!

Ulti­mately, in order to get through a slump, I think you need to stay men­tally afloat. For me, it’s too easy to get dragged down by a slump, which only mag­ni­fies the problem. My busi­ness is the only stable, con­stant thing in my life, really, and I’d be lost if I felt that I’d lost it.

So instead, I’m focusing on all the good things that are going on. For starters, all these people are coming to me asking about work, which is a great sign. I’m still not doing any active mar­keting, and I’m still get­ting leads. For every client who drives me up the wall and tempts me to use Let me Google that for you, I have two great cli­ents who I adore and whose emails make me smile. I’m still making enough money to keep me in sand­wiches, diet Coke, and shoes for the fore­see­able future. My life is never boring and I basic­ally get to make up my own rules for everything. I have won­derful cli­ents, great friends, and I can travel the world while run­ning my business.

And if I can just remember how lucky I am, I’ll stop feeling so defeated when things aren’t perfect.

Every year, I have the best inten­tions to cel­eb­rate my busi­ness’ birthday in some fashion. Every year, I remember two weeks too late. Trig­gers & Sparks is basic­ally my neg­lected child. I sup­pose that might explain why every now and again, it throws temper tantrums.

There are a number of anniversaries I could celebrate—the day I left my full-time job, or the day I was first paid for work, but this one falls nicely in the middle and is simple enough to remember: by sheer coin­cid­ence, the date on my offi­cial busi­ness regis­tra­tion is 06.06.06. While I’m neither reli­gious or satan­istic, I do believe in serendipity, and thought a pat­tern of num­bers that has such impact on people could only be a good sign. Next year will mark my offi­cial six-year anniversary. Maybe if I set an alarm for it now, I’ll actu­ally remember to break out the cham­pagne and fire­works when it rolls around.

Alright, so I did throw a birthday party in early June, but I must have been so dis­tracted with cel­eb­rating human birth­days that I totally forgot about my poor little business.

I’ve learned a lot since I built my first “pro­fes­sional” website—obviously—in trade for a beau­tiful bicycle that was stolen about ten minutes after I got it. Here are the most important things.

1. Never say no. Instead, say “expensive”.

This flies in the face of everything that everyone says about being a freel­ancer, but I stick by it, and it’s worked quite nicely for me. If someone comes to me with a pro­ject that sounds boring, tedious, or gen­er­ally awful, I won’t say “no, I won’t do that” unless I know I’m not cap­able of seeing the pro­ject through to its com­ple­tion well. I’ll just say “sure, I can do that” and quote a nice high figure. That way, if the client balks at the price and tells me they can’t afford it, nobody’s lost out—it’s basic­ally like I’ve said no. How­ever, if they say yes, I’ll pro­ceed with the pro­ject and be well-compensated for whatever addi­tional frus­tra­tions or tediums come along with the project.

This approach may sound mean, but it works. It also means that some­times I can charge less for the pro­jects that are going to be more fun, but may not have as large a budget. Of course, this only works so well because I aban­doned hourly billing for almost all pro­jects and switched to a flat-rate, which has been a major blessing. And switching to flat-rate only worked once I’d been doing this for long enough to be able to tell how long cer­tain tasks take, which took at least a year.

2. Stop working 18 hour days.

This is a con­stant pro­cess for me. My five months in South America helped me enorm­ously with my work­aholi­cism. I actu­ally find it chal­len­ging to work week­ends now, and I usu­ally only work around ten hours a day—sometimes even less!

For years, I’d to work every single day, from the moment I woke in the morning until the wee hours of the night. This felt normal, after all—when I was in school, I was always working as well, and even when I was working, I was doing freel­ance work after get­ting home. I’ve always been like this—I have a lot of energy and I feel better when I’m pro­ductive. But run­ning a busi­ness is so unstruc­tured (at least the way that I do it) that Extreme Work­aholic Beha­viours simply aren’t sus­tain­able long-term.

I spent the first few years of busi­ness con­stantly burnt out, and even­tu­ally it really started to get to me. I was let­ting things slip. I’d have little mental break­downs in which I’d burst into tears, bab­bling about “the jug­gling balls break when I drop them!”, and then would refuse to leave my bed­room for a few days until I’d recovered. My work was suf­fering, and my brain would prob­ably have even­tu­ally imploded on itself.

These days, I work less. I socialize more, and I try to do healthy things I never had time for before like eat and exer­cise on a daily basis. I’m hap­pier, I’m doing better work, and my cli­ents are hap­pier. Everyone wins!

3. Talk to everyone and their dog.

I will take a meeting with anyone. Anyone! Since coming back to Canada I’ve actu­ally been having lots of in-person meet­ings and I’ve real­ized I really miss it. (That may just be because I don’t usu­ally drink coffee unless I’m going to meet­ings, and it makes me very excitable.)

Often­times these meet­ings won’t lead to busi­ness at all, so they’re a time invest­ment that may not pay off. I’ve actu­ally been tricked into “meet­ings” that turned out to be more like “dates” more than once, which can be a little awk­ward when you realize what’s happened.

Meeting people and talking to them is never an effi­cient use of my time. How­ever, it allows me human inter­ac­tion that I often lack sit­ting in front of a screen all day, and I often learn things I wouldn’t oth­er­wise from an email con­ver­sa­tion. There’s some­thing to be said for sit­ting down with a stranger for an hour. Everyone—generally speaking—can teach me some­thing, whether it’s of rel­ev­ance to my work or not, and I’ve learned so many things for all these mil­lions of meet­ings over the years. They’ve also helped me become expo­nen­tially more sure of myself. Some­times just hearing your­self talk and real­izing that—surprise!—you know what you’re talking about can do just that.

4. Con­stant work is worth its weight in platinum.

Cash flow issues can really make or break a busi­ness. (Canada Post employees, this is why I give you dirty looks when I pass you milling about in front of the dead post office that con­tains my cheques.) I have a line of credit that covers me when I’m waiting for invoices to be paid, but it’s not an ideal situ­ation as it becomes very easy to acci­dent­ally end up in over your head when you can’t really budget effectively.

Years ago, I started doing reg­ular weekly work for a local cli­ents. It’s often not the most wildly exciting work, and it doesn’t pay nearly as well as the one-off pro­ject I do, but it’s been a life­line for me. The fact that I don’t have to write up estim­ates, go to meet­ings, send end­less emails, nego­tiate or wait for the work, means that I can offer a lower (hourly) rate than I usu­ally would, and get­ting paid every two weeks means I don’t worry so much about my cash flow any­more. Basic­ally, it gives me the bits that I liked about having a “real job”—stability—without cramping my vagabonding-unscheduled-flower-child sort of style of business.

5. Work less, charge more.

I charged all of $300 for one of my very first web­sites. It was such a bad idea, and the incred­ibly low rates I started off char­ging def­in­itely explain why it took me a few years to actu­ally be making any money at all. My rates increased fairly dra­mat­ic­ally for a little while until they reached some­thing of a plateau. I’ve hit the bal­ance point where I feel that what I charge is fair, indic­ative of my ability, and allows me to buy shoes every now and again (okay, some­times more often than that, but don’t tell).

Char­ging more means that I can spend more time on pro­jects, which I like to do. I’m kind of on the anal-retentive super-detail-oriented side anyway, and char­ging $300 for a web­site simply doesn’t allow me to do the kind of quality work that I like to. From time to time, people still email me looking for the cheapest option, and I explain that I’m no longer com­peting on price. I don’t want to be the IKEA of graphic design. I want my design work to stand up, and I’d rather my cli­ents not have to build everything them­selves from incom­pre­hens­ible dia­grams. My cli­ents pay more now than they used to, but the work they get is infin­itely better. They get my full atten­tion, they get sup­port whenever they need it, and the end result is always much, much better than it would have been had I been char­ging bargain-basement prices.

And again, my cli­ents are hap­pier. More and more, I’m working with cli­ents I love, who respect my work and my sug­ges­tions, and who really are a delight to work for. I’m hap­pier working for these people, and they in turn refer other awe­some cli­ents over to me. It’s a lovely cycle.

Just one part of world I’ve seen—the beau­tiful, com­plic­ated Bud­apest. Summer 2009.

All told, I’m so lucky to have come this far and still be run­ning my busi­ness. I have the kind of freedom I’ve always wanted—I can travel the world, I can sit out­side and work on sunny days, and I’m con­stantly chal­lenged and excited by new pro­jects. I’m never bored, I get to meet some great people, I make my own rules, and I very rarely have to wake up at 8am.

I never intended to start a busi­ness, and every now and again, I con­sider going back to a real-live job. How­ever, the longer I do this, the less and less likely that becomes. I really do love my job.

Crossing the Rio de la Plata after a week-long “hol­iday” in Uruguay, I real­ized how much the way I spend my money has changed. Now that I no longer need to steal film from the gro­cery store or cal­cu­late the exact per-grain price of a loaf of bread, I find I’m more willing to spend a little bit more money on things. For example, I’ll no longer buy a pair of shoes that retails for less than $100, although I’m almost insistent on only allowing for new shoe pur­chases when the afore­men­tioned shoe is on sale. I’d also rather pay a little more for a direct flight, or a faster ferry, or even the con­veni­ence of a cab to the air­port. While I’m sure this isn’t sur­prising to most people, I’ve always been per­petu­ally cheap. It took some time before I real­ized that price and value aren’t always as dir­ectly related as I thought.

The first web­site I ever built, as a gradu­ated pro­fes­sional, cost my client a whop­ping $300. I wish I could say I was six­teen when I did it, but I was twenty-two, working a full-time job and freel­an­cing on the side. Looking back, it’s no sur­prise when my first year of busi­ness after quit­ting my job landed me in debt. I’ve always had a policy of keeping my expenses as low as pos­sible, but char­ging $20 an hour simply didn’t cover such non-tax-deductible neces­sities as “eating on a daily basis”.

When I first started out, my biggest mis­take, bar nothing, was char­ging too little. My inten­tions were good—I wanted to save my cli­ents money, and I wanted to provide quality design for a low price. What I failed to realize, of course, was that would become a dif­fi­cult task when I quit my day job to run my busi­ness full-time. Sure, my cli­ents were happy, but I was broke, over­worked, and stressed out.
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In five days, I’ll be on my way to South America. I’m wildly excited, of course. People keep asking me if I’m ready, though, and I’m never quite sure how to answer. I mean, I have a suit­case that will hold 25 pairs of shoes and still have enough room for a couple weeks’ worth of out­fits. I’ve got an apart­ment in Buenos Aires all lined up. I’m finally cast-free and I’m working on my physio so that I’ll be strong by the time we hit the Amazon rain­forests. I have a supply of sleeping pills for insanely-long flights and bus rides across the con­tinent. I have my busi­ness here sorted out and ready for the trans­ition. I know how to say “Where is the nearest shoe store?” and “I have broken my wrist!” in Spanish. I don’t have any kind of proof that I’m a Cana­dian cit­izen, but that’ll only present me with trouble when I’m attempting to return to the country, after all. I love trav­eling, I love adven­tures, what the hell is wrong with me, after all?

I recently real­ized that I hate change. This rev­el­a­tion came as rather a sur­prise to me: I’d always con­sidered myself some­thing of a chaotic free-spirit creature. Shouldn’t I hap­pily embrace change? Why does uncer­tainty make me feel so queasy?

When I was in school, they told us that, as graphic designers, we had two choices, career­wise. We could get agency jobs, where we’d basic­ally work 18 hour days for an 8 hour salary, or we could go it alone as freel­an­cers and pray that our cli­ents would actu­ally pay their bills. (I’ve since real­ized that this advice is faulted on many levels, not­ably for failing to take into account Mys­ter­ious Option C, which is you real­izing that Hal­ifax is bursting with bril­liant unem­ployed designers, and going back to school to study accounting.) I was quite cer­tain, right then and there, that I could never handle the uncer­tainty of owning a busi­ness. I’ve always been a little para­noid about money, which, while I sup­pose is much healthier than being a little cava­lier about money, means that I’ve been overly cau­tious at times in my life, espe­cially when it comes to going into debt.

I figured I’d never be able to hack it as a self-employed type, mostly because I wouldn’t be able to manage the stress and uncer­tainty of it all. I ended up run­ning a busi­ness mostly by acci­dent; I was working at a video game devel­op­ment studio and doing freel­ance work on the side, when the freel­ance work took off and I was forced to choose between the two. Quit­ting my job was, of course, utterly ter­ri­fying for me, and every now and then, I really do miss the sta­bility of a steady job.

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Busi­ness­wise, the last few weeks have been quite active for me. I’ve heard from lots of new cli­ents and have started quite a number of new pro­jects. I’ve even heard from old pro­spects I’d for­gotten about, and I’ve had interest crop up from new con­tacts. I noticed, how­ever, that while I’m working an awful lot, I’m spending quite a sur­prising amount of time on non-billable work.

Usu­ally, I’d determine this Not a Very Good Thing. It’s always dan­gerous, when you’re run­ning a busi­ness, to fall into the trap of spending too much time working on the busi­ness, and not enough time working in it, but I sus­pect I rather tend to err on the other side, and I could do with spending more of my time making my busi­ness run a little smoother.

So, I may be crazy busy, but I’ve been investing some time into set­ting things up so that my pro­jects can run a little more smoothly, which I expect to be well worth it in the long run.

1. I started using Basecamp.

I avoided using Base­camp for ages. I’m a big fan of boot­strap­ping it, and as a result I avoid any­thing that entails a monthly fee like the plague. I’m also only a one-man op, at least most of the time, so I don’t usu­ally need a great deal more co-ordination than “sending out emails back and forth”. I once installed a stan­dalone pro­ject man­age­ment system, and found it inef­fective: I was spending too much time entering dates and todos and doing admin­is­trative tasks, rather than actu­ally achieving any­thing pro­ductive, and my cli­ents were con­fused by the inter­face and pro­cess. Accord­ingly, I gave up on the idea of pro­ject management.

Then, along came the Night­mare Pro­ject. If you know me, you’ve prob­ably heard of the Night­mare Pro­ject. (Not to be con­fused with the Night­mare Nib­bler, which was actu­ally a Dream Pro­ject, and needs to be added to my web­site very shortly.) I may still be working on the Night­mare Pro­ject on my deathbed. It’s been mis­man­aged; it’s out-of-control; and every day there are twenty dif­ferent emails flying round, indis­crim­in­ately reply-alled. I have no idea if files I’m sent are final, there’s no repos­itory, no organ­iz­a­tion, no whatever. It causes me an immense amount of stress and I have very little con­trol over the situ­ation, as the pro­ject man­age­ment isn’t in my hands at all.

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Walking home the other day, I saw a new tattoo shop had opened up near my house. “Classy Tattoo Par­lour”, the sign pro­claimed in loud, all-caps serifed let­ters. Of course, it was in a strip mall, so even if it were the classiest joint in town, full of ladies in bee­hives smoking from mile-long cigar­ette holders and men in fine suits drinking scotch (it’s pos­sible that “classy” and “debauchery” are con­fused in my mind), there’s some­thing of a dis­con­nect there.

It got me thinking about how often com­panies mis­rep­resent them­selves, some­times inten­tion­ally, and some­times acci­dent­ally. In a world where we all have less “face time” with companies—I’ve worked with all kinds of cli­ents I’ve never met, and some whose loc­a­tions I’m not sure about at all—it’s easy to see where our poten­tial cli­ents might not be as trusting of us as they ought to be. If a cus­tomer doesn’t trust a com­pany, he’s unlikely to give the com­pany any business.

So, how do you go about estab­lishing your credibility?

1. Answer your emails, please!

This has got to be one of the most valu­able things that you can do for your busi­ness, espe­cially if your sales are mostly gen­er­ated via the internet. Email is the method by which most cli­ents will reach you, and if their first few ques­tions go unanswered for lengthy periods of time, they’re going to think that this will always be the case. If you’re working with someone who’s halfway across the globe, email com­mu­nic­a­tion is sud­denly ten­fold more important, and if you don’t respond to your emails, your cli­ents will simply assume that you’ve run away with their money and pro­jects. I emailed a com­pany a simple ques­tion about their product three days ago and have still heard nothing; at this point, I’m highly unlikely to pur­chase any­thing from them. Even a simple “we got your email, we’re looking into it, and we’ll be in touch soon” might have suf­ficed, but it’s simply irre­spons­ible to ignore an email for any more than forty-eight hours.

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Hiring a designer is a tricky pro­cess. You’ve got to pick someone, some­times out of nowhere, pay him a bunch of money as a deposit, and hope that he comes up with some­thing you love. Chances are good that whatever you need designed is some­thing you care a great deal about (espe­cially if you’re a startup or have a stake in the suc­cess of the product/company/website), so you really want to make sure to get it right. But how do you go about finding a designer that’s going to be a good fit for you?

I’ve never felt the need to hire a designer, what with being one myself, but I’ve cer­tainly been hired by lots of people who are looking, and I’ve also heard all sorts of nightmare-designer stories from my cli­ents. (Yep, for every client from hell, there’s also a designer from hell.)

Here’s what I’d do!

1. Look at his portfolio!

Above and beyond any­thing else, this will give you an idea of what you might be able to get from a designer. Obvi­ously, your res­ults will vary (you, as the client, are an integral part of the design pro­cess), but you’ll be able to get a feel for a designer’s style and abil­ities from his port­folio. If a designer doesn’t have a portfolio—well, quite frankly, this shouldn’t even be pos­sible. If you’re looking to hire a designer who doesn’t have a port­folio or a web­site, there’s some­thing amiss.

2. Ask around.

Ask your friends for recom­mend­a­tions. Most good designers sub­sist almost entirely on word-of-mouth, and with good reason! If you know people who’ve hired a designer, chances are they’ll be happy to refer you so long as they had a good exper­i­ence. You can also check the bottom of web­sites whose design you really like—most of the time, there’ll be a link to its designer in its footer, and you can go from there.

3. Ask questions.

And lots of them! Does he write his code by hand? Does he follow W3C stand­ards? How long has he been in busi­ness? The more ques­tions you ask, the more com­fort­able you’ll feel when it’s time to start working. This will also give you the oppor­tunity to see how your designer com­mu­nic­ates, so make sure that if you plan on doing most of your com­mu­nic­a­tions during the pro­ject via email, you are asking ques­tions over email. If you’ve found a great designer who can’t com­mu­nicate, you will run into prob­lems down the road.

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Shit hap­pens. It may be trite, but it’s true. You can be the most organ­ized, thoughtful, and thor­oughly pre­pared busi­nessperson in the uni­verse, but even­tu­ally, some­where along the line, things will spiral out of con­trol. Sud­denly, your metic­u­lously planned pro­ject has turned into a beast: a mess of missed dead­lines, a slew of thwarted expect­a­tions, or an end product that simply isn’t shaping up right.

I’m a con­trol freak, so of course I don’t let this happen too often. How­ever, last week, a big pro­ject I’ve been working on for some time got away from me. It had been slowly plod­ding along, months behind dead­line and mostly-stagnant, while I worked on other things and waited for the bits and pieces I needed to come in. I figured nothing was wrong, really—sure, we were way behind dead­line, but the client knew that, since they missed their dead­lines, right? The design pro­cess tends to stall if the client isn’t coming up with their end of things (feed­back, con­tent, etc), so I’m used to pro­jects that go into a bit of stasis for a while. I figured it wasn’t a big deal.

Kabloo-ey!

Wow, was I ever wrong. Sud­denly, some­thing happened with the client—I’m guessing that my con­tacts got chewed out by their boss—and they started emailing me three times a day, asking where things were. I was working on a team with a writer and a pro­ject man­ager, plus two client con­tacts, and there was sud­denly a massive influx of emails flying around all over the place, each more aggressive and inflam­matory than the last. I had been working with an illus­trator based out of [some­where far away], and I started to realize he just wasn’t deliv­ering in a timely manner, he’d go AWOL for days on end, and that I wasn’t able to prop­erly com­mu­nicate my client’s vague dir­ec­tions to him. My stress levels spiked, and panic set in. I’m going to fail, I told myself. I’m going to fail, the pro­ject will tank, and I’ll never work again. It’s over for me. Might as well start handing out resumes to cof­feeshops now.

But appar­ently I’ve now got this big bad logical-calm-adult brain going on. It told the pan­icky screaming little kid inside my head to shush, and started fig­uring out how to fix things. Now, a week later, the pro­ject is nearly fin­ished (well, sort of), my stress levels are reduced sig­ni­fic­antly, and I’m working with a new illus­trator who’s turning stuff around at light speed and gets my client far better than I do.

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Well, appar­ently my busi­ness should be slowing down right about now as everyone runs off on summer hol­i­days, but it’s emu­lating a steam­ship more than any­thing else. (Which is nice, except that my house looks like it’s been hit by a hur­ricane.) I’ve been insanely busy but have been trying to keep bal­anced (rel­at­ively speaking): I’m still (sort of) taking Sat­urdays off, I bought a pretty vin­tage bicycle that I’m riding around town, and I’ve learned how to go swim­ming with a cast (held over my head, of course), and I ran off a few weeks ago and glistened (ladies don’t sweat, of course) my way through the epic heatwave/monsoons that hit Ottawa and Mon­tréal. It doesn’t really count as trav­eling, which will need to happen in the near future, but I was able to catch up with all sorts of won­derful people I haven’t seen in ages, which is just as good—if not better—for the soul.

I’m glad I’ve finally figured out how to keep things bal­anced, at least a little—I remember one summer when I was on an intern­ship, and I was so deep in work­aholi­cism I didn’t go out at all. Sum­mers here are so brief, it’s nice to be able to enjoy them! I actu­ally have a suntan (although very few people believe it—basically I’m just “less glow-in-the-dark white) and have been run­ning around doing sum­mery things in spite of having spent nearly the last three months with my arm in a fibre­glass cage. (It comes off in six days! I am keeping a count­down, written in Sharpies, on the cast itself.)
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Four years ago, when I started out my busi­ness (or whenever it was—I always get fuzzy on the dates) I was char­ging all of $10 an hour (some­times less, as was the case in my first job). Looking back, it’s no sur­prise, really, that by the end of my first solo year I was so broke. Tech­nic­ally, it was more than min­imum wage, so I thought it would suf­fice. Of course, I forgot that around 50% of my time is unbil­lable, which has a rather dra­matic effect, either on your “hourly” rate, or on the number of hours a week you need to work in order to be profitable.

There’s a maxim to pri­cing freel­ance work that goes some­thing like this: you can have two of the fol­lowing three ele­ments: fast, cheap, and good. When I first started out, I tried to be all three. Nat­ur­ally, there ended up being some com­promise, most not­ably with respect to the “fast” and “good” ele­ments of the equa­tion. As I grew as a designer and a busi­nessperson (it still sounds funny calling myself that), the scales shifted: my prices increased as the quality of my work and pro­cess increased.

For some time, I struggled with the idea of offering cli­ents their choice between fast and cheap, but I’m coming to realize that this, too, is imprac­tical on a larger scale—I’m so con­sist­ently busy that it simply doesn’t make sense for me to take on very many lower-paying gigs, regard­less of how spread out their timelines may be. I really prefer working on pro­jects with shorter timelines, anyway: the work-to-reward cycle is so much shorter (and thereby more grat­i­fying), and a more rapid cycle of devel­op­ment means that the pro­ject remains fresher in my mind—I don’t forget details or need to re-learn any­thing as we pro­gress. So, unless it’s a case ofhey-I-really-did-need-this-yesterday, in which case a pri­ority place­ment and rapid-turnaround can be secured with a rush fee (although I’ve found most cli­ents with urgent pro­jects sud­denly decide it can wait a little, after all, when they dis­cover that it’ll cost more), “fast” is non-negotiable. Quality, nat­ur­ally, is even less negotiable

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