Posts Tagged ‘business’

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Whether it applies to life, business, cooking dinner, figuring out how to pay rent, or how to continue paying tuition for school. If you can’t be creative in your thinking, your decisions, your work, you’re at an astounding loss.

By the way, today’s post really is about creativity. I’m forewarning you before I go off on a slight tangent explaining how I came to these thoughts.

I’m one of those guys that’s absolutely addicted to flash games - can’t get enough of them. But recently there haven’t been hardly any good ones. Today, I found the amazing one. This is literally the best freaking game I’ve played in months.

99 Bricks is a mix of Jenga and Tetris, with a bit of the physics that is all the “rage” in flash games recently. This has got to be one of the most creative games I’ve ever come across. Yes it’s just a simple conglomeration of two different games but it’s become something completely different. Something that simply hasn’t been done before.

I applaud creativity because without it we would not have any of our present day innovations. Creativity drives business and product creation. When you are creative, you can look at a market like golf and find a different perspective that is completely unique and someone needs to see. You can show them that perspective!

It takes creativity to fix problems. Americans have been doing it for decades and now we’ve become so creative that we’re able to spend $1.22 for every $1 we earn. We don’t have that money but by a stroke of creativity someone has figured out how to spend it.

Granted, that’s a bad example because that’s creativity used inappropriately. Figure out, creatively, how to spend $.70 on each $1 you make while getting $1.50 of value for it. Now that’d be creative.

It takes creativity to make something out of nothing, a lot out of a little. That’s why art and design is often given the name of “creatives”. It’s that work that not everyone thinks they can do, but they CAN. You can! It’s only creative because they have the right tools and know the right questions.

After that, you just make up the answer. Because there are a million answers as long as you know what question to start with.

The guys that make millions are creative. They know how to make their own answers and find their own conclusions. Whereas “Joe the Plumber” (haha, it had to come eventually!), knows how to follow directions. He was trained and knows how to plumb pipes. He doesn’t know how to sell his services, manage his business, or handle all the necessary legalities. He’s a cog in a machine.

He’s a damn excellent cog but that’s all he’s allowed himself to be. Society says that being a cog is safe, it’s secure, and by being one, you can hold a steady roof over your family. But what happens when the axle turning that cog stops?

That cog, (you?), is dead in the water. So please, be creative today! Wait, put that creativity on hold for 2 minutes, and post a comment first. A creative comment! But be my cog and post one!

If you think about it, we’ve become fairly reliant on a relatively unproven means of communication and wealth called the Internet. I’ll explain…

Humans have been around for a long time. This isn’t a post discussing exactly when, but regardless of who you talk to it’s been at least thousands of years. In that time technologies have come and gone with their times. Long ago, Egyptian times, we used papyrus for writing, for messages to be written on, delivered by a court courier and often saved in the database of all Egyptian databases, a pyramid.

Then people discovered different ways to make papers and inks. They were more cost effective and easier to produce. Enter the growth of literature, the Bible, organized religion, and government.

Fast forward to 2008 and 90% of the US population has broadband in their home. Which is absolutely mind-boggling! I remember logging on my first time when I lived in Colorado. I was all of 10 years old and we had a 56k connection with PeoplePC. You know who I’m talking about. Like AOL they built their business off of subsidized agreements. AOL’s agreement gave you free email, chat and browser as part of your internet connection. People PC on the other hand gave you the same plus a subsidized desktop computer.

It made computing cheaper for the masses.

Oh but that first time with the dial tone and the computers talking through whatever little speaker is on the motherboard.

That was the beginning of the Internet Age. It’s been all of 12 years and I like many of the people I know base our entire livelihoods around it.

But the Internet is not your only means of communication and business. It’s not your livelihood nor is it a lifeline. It’s a tool. Your network is your business. I’ll say that again for clarity: your NETWORK is your BUSINESS.

If I lost all my possessions, was living on the street, and had to start completely over, I could get back on my feet in a few weeks. I would begin calling my contacts, making new business plans, seeking work and putting the pieces back together.

Only recently have I truly began understanding this principle but it’s gotta be one of the best I’ve ever learned or can ever teach.

I’ve built a network of people that I truly love. These are the people, friends, that I’ve met through business, school, and in coffee shops that I love, and we mutually want to see each other to succeed. The networks of today are the tribes of thousands of years ago. It’s that group mentality that drives each of us. We group with like-minded people in order to accomplish goals.

The hunter tribes and nomads of humanity’s early life worked together. They hunted in groups, lived together and helped everyone inside the group survive. It seems to be something that a majority of people have forgotten in our time.

More people now than ever, live on their own in single room apartments, which is absolutely insane. We live in a different society now but those social groups, those networks, those connections operate in exactly the same way.

Working together is easier than working alone. Your business will grow as will each of those in your network. Great things grow out of groups because of the combined resources of many. The more people you know and can work with, the better off you’ll be.

So I want you in my network. I want to see you succeed, to be able to love you, and work with you in my business. Drop a comment and let me know what you’ve done to grow your network.

It’s been a while since my last post, but in that time I’ve been extremely productive! On a short tangent, I find it extremely frustrating when I ask how someone’s been and they tell me they’ve “been busy”. That is not a real response! If I’ve taken the time to engage in conversation with you, I want you to be able to put forth a real effort and talk with me rather than metaphorically throwing me aside like a dirty rag.

All this comes back to say that when I’m speaking to someone, be it you reading my blog, or a friend face-to-face, I make a point of not saying that I’ve been busy. Rather I say I’ve been productive or I’ve been working on a lot of exciting things. Something to that effect.

There’s so much more depth to the statement and it simply begs for a question in response. I absolutely love conversation so I will jump at any chance to further one. And over the past week or so I started realizing I was missing out on too many possibilities for good conversation by not posting to my blog of late!

I’m not going to post a screenshot of my last design. It just doesn’t need one. I went from one very simplistic, clean and stylish blog to another! But a ton has changed in those intervening months that necessitated a new blog design.

I’ve also combined by work portfolio with my blog. That makes it a LOT simpler for me to manage and likewise just as simple for people to access each then.

I’ve switched my hosting to (mt) MediaTemple! Woooh! I’m probably one of the last people to get on the bandwagon but I’ve finally done it and I can say enough good things about these guys.

I went to Illuminate Conference in October; it was amazing. Although if I were going to go into a full review of it at this point, a full month AFTER the conference I might not be the last person writing about it. I think I’ll wait until March or so until I give my full review.

I’m working on some very exciting projects though with some really cool people so the rest of the year is looking stellar and I’ll be able to close out 2008 as my best year yet.

I’ll be posting at least every other day if not daily from now on so get ready to hear some great ideas. (I want to hear yours too!)

Let’s be honest: you are a freelancer to make money. This is your income. The goal of your work should be to make a living using the skills you own and love. But what are your client’s needs? Do those needs and interests match your own?

I was reading Freakonomics this past week. One chapter struck home in a business sense. The chapter talked about realtors and how, even though they may seem to be looking out for your best interests, that’s often not the case.

Realtors are just like any other hard working business man: they want to maximize profit over time. They want to sell your house as quickly as possible for as little as possible. Eventhough you hired them to sell your home, their job isn’t to get your to most bang for your buck, but rather to get your home sold fast so that they can get their commission as quickly as possible.

That’s often why when selling your home realtors will suggest that you start marking down the price on your home. The home is of no value to them unsold.

Likewise as a freelancer, a design, or project is of no value to us unsold. But even when it is sold, it’s of less and less value if more and more time has to be put into making changes. In that case, we freelancers can be very much like the realtor that was looked at previously.

How then can we align our interests with our clients?

As a freelancer, I strive to offer quality service, amazing designs, and usually at a reasonable price. Although what if I am charging too little for my services? It’s possible that I could increase my rates (which I have several times over the years) to allow a greater budget for myself, while continuing to provide the excellent service and design that I strive for.

But thinking about it like that doesn’t suit most clients. As a business, a website or design is only as useful as the value it provides them. Whether that value is in the form of increased sales or greater brand identification.

If I can create a design or user interface that effectively increases sales of a business by $50,000 annually, wouldn’t that work be worth 50%, 25%, or even 10% of that amount?

My job then is not to simply choreograph a pretty website, but to design a website that increases sales. Because if my client makes money, I make money.

And my interests, are then the same as my clients interests, which makes this whole business easier for the both of us.

Does anyone really know what Web 2.0 is? Honestly and down to earth has a good idea of exactly how all of “this” fits together? Sure, there are a lot of ideas, but they all seem to deviate from a deeper core.

“It’s about allowing the people greater control…”

“Web 2.0 is the freedom of information…”

“It’s flashy graphics and pretty interfaces…”

The French Revolution was about giving control to the people. The constitution was built on freedom of information, specifically, freedom of the press - to be able to spread information. And I’m pretty sure I saw enough flashy graphics in the 1990s and early 2000s where we had poorly designed websites and myspace “glitterz”.

None of these things are Web 2.0 and I describe us, the people of Web 2.0 itself, as an awkwardly-pubescent girl because that’s exactly how we’re thinking. We (Web 2.0) want to be so much with so little that we fracture ourselves and split off in too many directions.

I had a few friends in highschool that fit this bill exactly. They wanted so much out of those four years, that they sought to join practically every club and publication, as well as taking as many advanced courses as possible. They were part of Literary Magazine, Newspaper, Yearbook, Theatre, FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America), Honor Society. The list goes on…

But they didn’t really know what they wanted to do, because they tried to be too many different things.

I propose one thing that Web 2.0 is:

Quality over quantity!

Take social networks for example (Facebook, Bebo, etc.) They’ve succeeded for the most part, in deriving quality from your networks over quantity. No longer do we have to live with the likes of Hot or Not, Match.com, or True.com. We can network freely knowing that if we want a good, quality hookup, all we have to do is turn to our network and announce our available and seeking status.

Gmail has brought forth the same concept in email. Although you may be mistaken, it’s not about Gmail’s 6GB of email storage that you can get. They’re all about providing you with the best, user friendly features to increase your productive use of email. Better spam filters, threaded email conversations and more should only be the beginning.

What to do about this Web 2.0?

Don’t get me wrong, the web is amazing. But it’s not all about the web! More likely, I would say it’s a playground for experimentation in business on a larger scale.

Recently I’ve seen a large transformation in the food industry. America as a whole, has become very unhealthy. We’ve sought quantity over quality for ourselves for the past century as a result of the industrial revolution.

These last few years though when I go into Safeway, I’m seeing more organic foods on the shelves. Foods made with quality ingredients that are good for your body. I’m not suggesting that Web 2.0 caused this change, but rather it’s the same change that we see so vividly on the internet.

People want better food. They want quality food. They’re now willing to give up their Big Macs and 64oz Cokes for a good-for-you meal that also tastes good.

The automobile industry is making similar changes. People want a better driving experience. They want to be able to control their ipod using voice recognition. It’s much safer to drive and alot easier for the driver. Enter Microsoft SYNC.

SYNC is a good product, but not good enough. I call that when I’m in my car and I roll down the windows, SYNC should automatically turn up the volume to balance out the ambient noise of the wind rushing past my head. If an ambulance is in the area, SYNC should be able to hear and recognize where it is and tell me to pay attention for where it’s coming from.

It’s about quality people. Stop touting the amazing features your business has and start catering to the consumer’s needs. They want to be pampered, not overwhelmed.

In part 1 I gave you the first three tips from Indiana Jones. They went like this:

1. It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you
2. Protect your assets, like a large bobcat protects her cubs
3. Community service as a business asset

Now’s time for the next three!

4. Fight for what you want

This one is similar to #2 (Protect your assets); different in the fact that our goal here is obtaining something we don’t yet have.

It comes into play in a couple of instances:

• The contract/client/project that’s really going to boost your visibility and/or generate leads.
• You need something, anything in order to keep your business afloat

Nothing is ever handed to anyone on a silver platter. That took me a while to find out. I assumed for a while that if I knew my stuff and told some people that I was here (think Horton Hear’s a Who, that’s about how loud I was) then easily without effort I would get some clients that wanted my work.

Boy was I wrong!

If you want something, you have to fight for it. Securing assets you want can be an all-out brawl, Super Smash Brothers style.

5. You can’t do it all alone

And it’d be better if you learned that sooner rather than later!

No one can do everything on their own. If we tried, we’d long ago be extinct (we’re not asexual!) Needing someone else as a part of your enteprise doesn’t mean you’re less capable than someone else.

Behind everyone there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of people supporting the person that you see. Whether that comes in the face of friendships, family, partnerships, or the occasional Indian VA (I want one!)

Often in business it’s much better operating with a partner for a few reasons:

1. If the venture fails, it’s not all on your back. You have someone else to share the good and bad.
2. Secondary perspective. It’s a lot easier to see if the train is going to crash when you’re looking from two different perspectives. Then you also have the aid of the second hand to mend the problem before the trail derails!
3. Two brains are better than one. It’s much easier to work with projects/people when you have the resources of two brilliant minds to utilize.

6. Know what your competition doesn’t

Now this is a general tip, meaning it doesn’t come with any examples. Although I’ve left it as the last tip because Indy most of the time simply knows a lot more than anyone he comes up against.

Whether that be in this case where the Nazi’s staff was too long or when he simply knows more because of experience. He succeeds because of it.

Utilize your knowledge to get an edge up on your competition. We aren’t playing some gentlemanly sport like tennis! Take all the chances you have to get a head up on the competition.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed these useful, maybe entertaining tips. If you have any more that Jones might be able to give post them in the comments below!

Have fun at the movies this weekend!

Disclaimer: The photos are copyright the Indiana Jones people. I’m assuming that specifically means George Lucas himself. So go buy the movies, they’re awesome!

I’m very excited for the new Jones movie, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I’ve re watched the first three, three times over the last week. It might be a little bit of overkill!

As such, I’ve been noticing how much Jones’ work compares to my own as a freelancer. This is part one of the top 6 freelancing tips, courtesy of Indiana Jones.

1. It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you

Jones definitely knows a lot of people, but it’s the people who know him that advance his pursuits. Jones is known for being amazing. He’s a respected archeologist at a North Eastern college and still has time for fun adventures on the side.

How can I be awesome?

It’s called meritocracy. In other words, demonstrated ability. For those wikiphiles:

…responsibilities are given based on demonstrated ability (merit) and talent rather than by wealth family connections…

To get people to know you, you have to make yourself known by what you do. No one’s going to come looking for you so show them yourself!

If you’re a writer, enter a contest and win!

If you’re a designer, land that big project and tell people about it. Or better yet, ask that company to tell about it.

2. Dont screw with the Jones, or protect your assets like a large bobcat protects her cubs

Do you remember the beginning of the Last Crusade? Where “young Jones” finds that golden cross and very soon after has it taken? Damn crooked sheriff!

Then he eventually got it back a couple decades later. Point being, he fought long and hard for that cross. That’s what you as a freelancer have to do with your business.

I’ve learned this principle very well from my dad. He owns a lot of stuff. Although not all of it falls into the business category, he protects all of it like any mother would her cubs.

Why is this important to me?

As a freelancer, we are on our own. Often the goal is to maintain several streams of income but unless those are protected as crucial assets, they can simply walk away.

Take for example the client. Remind them how important you are to them. Send out regular newsletters or simply keep in constant communication with them. Protect them and they’ll keep coming back to you.

3. Community service as a business asset

You’d definitely get noticed as a “do-gooder” if you saved a couple hundred Indian children from slavery. Realistically though, that’s probably not going to happen for most of us.

Community service is integral to building a strong, profitable business. Even if it’s only as a PR measure (would you really not feel better donating some money here or there?) it’s worth it.

And most donations are tax-deductible!

You want to present yourself as good for the client, the industry and the community.

Here’s an idea. Why not start a scholarship for aspiring writers/designers? It could be a yearly $1000, that gets your name out there as a successful professional, widens your audience, and brings you much more than you paid out in new projects/clients.

I’m going to leave you in suspense at this point. Come back on Thursday to read part 2 and get Jones’ next three freelancing tips before you see Kingdom of the Crystal Skull later that night!