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?