Posts Tagged ‘business’

It’s super-important.

Ser­i­ously, though, I’ve spent the last five weeks with my dom­inant arm in a giant cast. (Although after week two, I regained the use of my elbow and some fin­gers and by week three was able to use an extra couple of fin­gers on my right hand while typing, which has helped. My draw­ings, how­ever, still look like they were done by a five-year-old, and I sign credit card receipts with a squiggle and/or lip­stick kisses.) Mean­while, the work has by no means slowed down, even though my working speed has, and it’s still chal­len­ging to do simple things like make a sand­wich for lunch or empty the garbage.

Accord­ingly, I’ve been working rather long hours and have been becoming intensely stressed out. (Throw in the fact that I’ve quit smoking in sup­port of Bone Healing Power and the fact that I’m some­times still in a good deal of pain–breaking your bones stinks!) Luckily, I have the greatest cli­ents and friends in the world who help me out and under­stand when things take a little longer than they ought, or I’d have gone entirely insane by now.

I am not going here, although I rather wish I were. It’s basic­ally my stress-free island para­dise. Unfor­tu­nately, Croatia is a long drive from here.

So, in the interests of pre­serving that afore­men­tioned sanity, I’m run­ning away to a secret undis­closed island loc­a­tion this weekend, where I’m hoping I won’t be able to get cell-phone ser­vice, and I won’t have any way of leaving until a nice fish­erman comes to get me. My laptop, shock­ingly enough, is staying home (it’s very rarely far from me) and I’m excited by the pro­spect of no elec­tri­city, no emails, and no pos­sible way for me to try to get any work done. I’ve noticed that as I get busier, it’s harder for me to actu­ally take a full day off, in spite of how important it is for my mental well-being.

If you border on the edge of work­aholi­cism, I recom­mend get­ting tough with your­self and for­cing your­self into isol­a­tion. So long as you can return refreshed, and not dreading a massive pile of new emails, it’ll make you so much more pro­ductive in the long run. And so on that note: ciao, amigos!

I’ve really been focusing on trying to build my busi­ness these days, and I’m lucky in that it’s been working, for the most part. Of course, this means that I keep run­ning out of time for all those fancy things I like so much, like sleeping and drinking martinis.

It’s reached the point at which I’m so busy trying to stay on top of all my pro­jects that I don’t have any time to do the busi­ness side of things, and I’ve totally stalled as far as growth is concerned.

So, it’s time, once again, for the con­trol freak in me to take a back­seat, and sit quietly by while I hire someone.

Tell your friends! Here’s what I’m looking for.
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So my poor tele­phone is on its last legs, and I’m finally breaking down and get­ting a shiny new iPhone, for a wide variety of reasons. (It’s pretty! It does “smart” stuff that my Stu­pid­Phone Black­berry can’t! It can play music and take photos that don’t look totally ter­rible! Designing iPhone apps will be easier if I can actu­ally see how things work!)

This prob­ably means that I’ll be forced to finally change my voice­mail mes­sage, which is faulted for fea­turing a lengthy pause between me speaking and the beep, among other things like being mumbly and unclear. Since I very rarely pick up the phone, and I never pick it up when I don’t recog­nize the number, I am thinking I’ll change the mes­sage to read: “Hi! This is Sarah. I’m not picking up because I’m busy working on your pro­ject. Send me an email instead!”

My hatred for the tele­phone, I think, is well-justified. (I sound a little like a monkey on meth while on the tele­phone as well, but that’s irrel­evant. Mostly.) While some people seem to think it’s annoying that it’s so hard to get me on the tele­phone, I have my reasons, and I’m sticking by my guns.

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For the past few months, I’ve been plan­ning and plot­ting and get­ting myself excited about the pro­spect of another big trip. Those who know me are well aware of my fond­ness for travel, and I haven’t gone any­where inter­esting (Ottawa doesn’t count) for some time. I had big plans (South America, Death Valley, Mexico) that never mater­i­al­ized, for one reason or another, and I was sure that this was the one I’d be able to do.

As it turns out, it’s not. Due to a variety of factors, I’m staying home. While this was a little crushing at first to realize (I was so excited!), I am choosing instead to approach it as an oppor­tunity to enjoy the nice Hal­ifax weather that’s been hap­pening lately (must be a cosmic fluke and/or the uni­verse con­spiring to send me thou­sands of tiny little signs that I should abandon my plans of aban­don­ment) and to spend more time doing fun pro­jects, which I almost invari­ably wouldn’t be doing if I were on the road.

For starters, I’m finally going to invest the time and floor­space into set­ting up a proper work­space for myself, rather than just loun­ging on the couch all the time–I do miss having cre­ative space (why oh why did I sell my drafting table at a yard sale for $15?) and things stuck all over my walls, and some­times the entire upstairs of my apart­ment looks like it’s been hit by a cyc­lone that car­ries nothing but paper scraps, bottles of ink, and empty cans of energy drinks.

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Two years ago, I made an incred­ibly rash decision. I was standing in front of a row of boxes, a little worse for wear due to an excess of cel­eb­ra­tion the prior evening. A sick feeling settled over me, and I decided to run with the impulse.

Two hours later, I was a blonde. (Actu­ally, this isn’t true. It took more like the entire weekend and six boxes of bleach to get there, which ulti­mately des­troyed my hair and left me with no option but cut­ting it all off, even­tu­ally, but that’s another story.) For me, it was a massive change, as I’ve always been prone to identify myself by my hair­colour. People often know me as the girl with lots of bright red hair (admit­tedly, I’m still working on get­ting the “lots” part back), and all the varied pre­con­cep­tions and ste­reo­types people have about red­heads tend to apply to me, too. (Whether that’s an issue of nature or nur­ture, I’m not quite sure, but let’s assume it’s irrelevant.)

So going blonde was def­in­itely an impulsive choice, and part of my desire to do so was to play with my own sense of self. It was fun for a while (mostly because I’d show up places to see friends, and they’d look quite shocked), but even­tu­ally I went back to some­thing akin to my nat­ural colour (after testing out almost every other colour com­bin­a­tion avail­able to me. Ser­i­ously, it’s no wonder my hair ended up des­troyed).  The exper­i­ment led me to realize just how much of who we are—both how we see ourselves, and how others see ourselves—is encap­su­lated in our appear­ance. As much as we may try insist on silly maxims like “don’t judge a book by its cover” and “it’s what’s on the inside the counts”, what’s on the out­side is almost invari­ably a reflec­tion of what’s on the inside.

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Things I’ve learned lately: appar­ently, the internet likes breasts. Who knew?

When I posted my Get­ting Naked entry a few weeks ago, my web­site traffic spiked impressively.

Look! It sort of forms a boob shape, too!

I’ll admit, I was a touch nervous about pub­li­cizing my extra­cur­ricular activ­ities, for a second, for fear of neg­ative back­lash. North Amer­icans in par­tic­ular can be par­tic­u­larly prudish about nudity in all its forms, artistic or oth­er­wise, and where this is, in theory, a Busi­ness Web­site, it did cross my mind that some may con­sider it unpro­fes­sional to dis­cuss such things.

These days, the line between A Busi­ness and That Busi­ness’ Owner is becoming blur­rier and blur­rier. More and more people are freel­an­cing or run­ning sole pro­pri­et­or­ships, and the ubi­quit­ous­ness of Face­book, Twitter, and Google means that, whether we like it or not, we are all bec0ming more and more pub­licly access­ible. I see there being two ways of approaching this, whether you’re a busi­ness owner, career-minded pro­fes­sional, or vag­a­bond with an iPhone.

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Last summer, I ran away from home. 5 weeks, 7 coun­tries, 6 cur­ren­cies, 6 lan­guages, 9 dif­ferent beds, 4 planes, 7 buses, 9 trains, 5 fer­ries, 3 cars, and innu­mer­able rides on the buses, trams, and metros of dif­ferent cities later, I returned: blisters on my feet, forever altered.

My busi­ness weathered the exper­i­ment better than my feet. One of the things that most excites me about design is that, in theory, I can do it from any­where in the world–all I really need is my Mac­book, an internet con­nec­tion, and the con­tents of my head. The idea of being free to come and go as I please–of being truly mobile–is intox­ic­ating, espe­cially when I’ve become such a travel junkie. Not only does travel make me stronger and more inde­pendent, but the exposure to new con­cepts and cul­tures is cer­tain to shape me as a designer. How could it not be bene­fi­cial to my career–wandering through strange streets, finding new museums, con­stantly pho­to­graphing the new visual land­scape? (Note to the taxman: I will here­in­after be claiming all air tickets as busi­ness expenses, okay?)

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For a girl who never wears a watch and doesn’t care much for num­bers, I’m obsessed with time. When you bill an hourly rate, of course, this is only to be expected—after all, the time = money equa­tion becomes far more self-evident when you know exactly what an hour is worth.

In theory, this focus on time should engender the ability to del­egate. If it takes you two hours to do some­thing that you could bill, say, $120 for, but you can pay someone $60 instead to do (regard­less of how long it may take them, and assuming that they’ll do it just as well, if you happen to be a con­trol freak like I am), it should make sense to start passing off tasks.

The problem is, when you have a pre­cise idea of how much that extra hour you spent sleeping cost you, you sud­denly start to believe that sleep is anthema to your busi­ness and well-being. Three years of run­ning a busi­ness full time have taught me, finally, that this is just a blatant lie.
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This year has marked my first ven­ture into “selling stuff”, instead of just “selling myself”. It’s been a little hit-and-miss: my Valentines seemed pop­ular (they were listed on Ooh! Shiny! and in the Etsy blog, and I’ve heard loads of pos­itive feed­back), which was immensely exciting, but they didn’t sell like mad. (They didn’t really even sell like slightly-unusual.)

First lesson learned: just because you make some­thing that people like, doesn’t mean that people will actu­ally buy it.

This weekend, at a friend’s sug­ges­tion, I booked a booth at a local farmer’s market. For only $60, it seemed like a wildly clever busi­ness idea. How could I pos­sibly NOT make a fortune?

Well, not only did I not make a for­tune, but I actu­ally didn’t sell a single card, unless you count the one that I traded a book­seller for a tattered copy of The Slang of Sin. There were quite a few people who came by and told me how much they liked them, and one person even asked how much they cost (they were next to a sign that listed prices, but that seems irrelevant).

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January marks the three-year-anniversary of the day I told my employer to “take this job and shove it” (in all ser­i­ous­ness, HB Stu­dios was a fant­astic place to work, but Office Space was what gave me my moment of epi­phany required to take the leap). Three years seems like forever ago, and I’ve learned so much since then, but it’s always good to look back and figure out what I could be doing better.

So, where my major issue has always been burnout (both of the cre­ative sort and the plain old good lord, am I ever exhausted! variety), I’m looking to add more work-play bal­ance to my life. Over the past year, I’ve become better at adding play to my life, and, just in the end of December, I found myself unex­pec­tedly doing things I’ve always meant to do while run­ning my busi­ness, but have somehow man­aged to evade quite con­sist­ently: eating and sleeping on a daily basis, working less than six­teen hours a day, and playing with cre­ative pro­jects that take me away from The Machine.

My poor kit­chen table. It is utterly COVERED in ink stains now.

What I’m excited about for the new year, not sur­pris­ingly, are also the things that I’m pas­sionate about in my life. (more…)

Thank you to everyone who responded to my hiring notice; I’ve selected a can­didate and am looking for­ward to being able to tackle new pro­jects in the very near future, including the much-anticipated (by myself) and much-required over­haul of my web­site. More details to come soon!

I received an abso­lutely phe­nom­enal response, and was able to meet with a number of really fant­astic people. (I wish I could have hired everyone!) That said, it was inter­esting being on the other side of the hiring pro­cess, and I think if I’m ever in the pos­i­tion of applying for a job again, I’d do things a little dif­fer­ently as a result.

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So, having noticed it’s been nearly six months since I last updated my web­site, I think it’s about time I took the plunge and hired someone to help me keep this busi­ness run­ning better. I’ve con­sidered this a number of times in the past, but my gen­eral inab­ility to relin­quish con­trol, of any­thing, to anyone, has always pre­vented me from going through with it. Time’s come to grow up, ditch the nar­cissism, and realize that I’m not the second coming, and I need some help from time to time.

That said! Here’s what I’m looking for. (more…)