We might have suffered a stroke, but now our vitals look good.

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 06/27/10)

So here we are nearing the end of the 2nd quarter of the year. How would I characterize the health of our company this year? It's been like a person with some health problems. It might have had a mild stroke even. It suffered from poor circulation to the brain and extremeties. Chills. Cold sweats. Anxiety attacks. It sought the advice from other patients. (That own companies too.) Got a lot of second opinions.

Needless to say it's been a nail-biting blur. It's somewhat miraculous that we've hung on this year. Lots of companies haven't been able to. The 1st quarter was marked by doubt, contingencies, worst-case scenarios, new business calls and emails, meetings, and a LOT of time spent on LinkedIn. I'm happy to say our perspiration and perseverence is bearing fruit.

Somehow we managed to turn the tide on what we saw as a near-total shutdown of our clients' marketing activity for the first 4 months of 2010. Then in May we started to get email RFPs for new jobs from current (but inactive) clients. We lobbied one client that markets 5 different membership clubs to "get out there with some new creative". We suggested a mid-June meeting to show new concepts.

We then spent nearly a month leading up to that meeting coming up with 13 direct mail concepts that the 5 marketing managers would consider mailing to their lists. The meeting went well, lots of nods and smiles, and while we switched gears to other business activity, we wondered how many they'd choose. Or if they'd decided to go with some other creative vendor.

Then the emails started to trickle in. One manager wanted 1. Another wanted 3. Another wanted 2, and so on. Final tally as of this blog entry: 10 out of the 13 were chosen to be produced and mailed in the 3rd quarter. My business partner and I did a lot of high-fiving last week, let me tell you.

And more work has come in from other formerly inactive clients that came out of the marketing woodwork.

And now it's looking like billing for 3Q alone will make up for our losses in 1Q and 2Q. Amazing. As a friend and colleague says, when you run your own business you're always a phone call away from being overwhelmed. And as I always say, that's a good problem to have.

Riding out the recession.

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 02/27/10)

It was bound to catch up to us sooner or later. That ugly "R word" that evokes fear in the hearts and minds of corporate employees and their agencies. After weathering the volatile workflow and cashflow of 2009, a.k.a. The Year of Lowered Expectations, my business partner and I are now seeing the recession's teeth. And they look long and sharp and a little yellow.

So what is a small ad agency/design group to do? Well, the answer is get proactive. But first, let me share with you some of the things that happen in a recession - things we've experienced first-hand that educate us about how clients respond to something of this magnitude.

One thing is for sure: employees are worried. We took some of our clients (all of whom are marketers with varying degrees of age and experience) out to lunch in January and found them all feeling the sting of the economic slowdown as their customers are cutting back. Marketing budgets have been downsized. Perks and bonus have been reduced or eliminated. 401K contributions have been halted in some instances. Business travel is out - except for maybe the VPs. No holiday parties or lunches. Employees' contributions to healthcare plans are increasing. They didn't come right out and say it, but I'd presume it's pretty stressful and hurting morale. It's making an already difficult corporate job that much harder. And this is hard to hear from our clients.

Then there's the job loss factor. Many of our clients/contacts have been laid off and when that happens, we lose business. We often don't know where they've landed, or if we do, they often have an ad agency or list of contractors that are already in place. So their hands are tied. Some of them have decided to go back to school and either get an advanced degree or get retrained. I would speculate that others, many of which are women, have decided it's time to start a family and hope by the time the kids hit kindergarten, the economy will have restarted its engines.

So what's a small company like ours to do? Funny you should ask. As you may have read in a previous blog of mine, 2009 actually ended well for our company. Projects came fairly fast in the last quarter, and it allowed us to fill in some missing months of 401K contributions and to buy some new Macs. It looked as is if the grip on budgets was starting to loosen. But now we're back to treading water. We know we're covered for a couple months from a cashflow perspective, but beyond that, it's anybody's guess. Which means this: It's now time to take action or face the consequences.

For us, the issue is the industry in which we get the majority of our jobs. Most of our business comes from the magazine publishing industry. That indsutry is reeling from the recession -- subscribers are cancelling their subscriptions and newsstand sales are down. Nobody wants to drop $5 on a magazine AND another $5 on a latte. It's an easy choice. Magazines don't give you a withdrawal headache if don't get it by 9am. Plus, whatever content they're subscribing to can probably be found online anyway. Adversity breeds alternatives. (I think the iPad and iBooks Store is going to help revive it, but that device is going to need 4-5 years to mature, the way MP3 Players and the iPod did.)

Again, the proactive thing: it's become clearer and clearer that we've got to diversify our client roster. But before we can hit the streets running, we've had to update our antique website and marketing materials, revamp our rate card, freshen-up our positioning statement and marketable skills, and then go back out there, armed. But I'm prepared for frustration. New business development usually does not yield instant RFPs. It'll take time to populate.

Our sales plan is fairly simple. Dig around on the internet, cull email addresses and phone numbers from potential clients' websites and write them a new business inquiry email - what's the worst that can happen? It doesn't get answered. Move on. We're emailing old contacts like crazy. We're requesting connections on LinkedIn. I just built us a profile on Guru.com (I don't think it'll yield much, but you never know). We're looking into Google's AdWords. We created PDFs of our portfolio for distribution. And we've even done some cold calling. And let me tell you, if you never had respect for the folks in sales at your company, try cold calling a lead. It's humbling.

That's our approach to the recession as of this writing. We keep thinking, work hard and the clients will come. Or return, as it were. The overwhelming majority of our clients have come from referrals but now we know we can't rely on that as much. The game's changed at least for now. It's really tough out there, but I know we'll learn from it. A nasty recession can be an eloquent teacher.

Notes from Seattle, working remotely.

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 01/28/10)

My wife and I came to rainy and gloomy Seattle on Sunday, January 24th, ostensibly for her to continue her battle/treatment for Lyme disease with a new Lyme-literate specialist who practices here. We're here for almost a week and will head back to NYC on Saturday, January 30th. Her doctor's clinic is actually in Kirkland — about 30 minutes north of downtown Seattle — so we're staying at a Courtyard Marriott in Kirkland. It's not exactly an up-and-coming suburb, but we've managed to find some decent eateries, and even swallowed our pride and ate at the Olive Garden (!) for lunch once. We did manage to find a cute little conveyor belt sushi place nearby so that sort of rebalances the food equation.

While here and shuttling her back & forth to the clinic, I of course work remotely as many professionals do. However, as a creative director and designer it's certainly a step forward to be able to do this without massive interruptions in our workload and workflow. There are pros and cons of working while traveling, and especially when working from the west coast.

The most obvious is the challenges of the 3-hour time difference. So far, I've had no problem keeping my body clock on NYC time and getting started sometime between 6 and 7am. This has worked well all week. We start the day, have lunch and end the day pretty much in sync.

Another challenge is getting work done efficiently. If you travel and need to work and/or solve a problem with a job that's in production, you have to have access to your job files. In the early days of my business, whenever I worked remotely I took my laptop along, and I copied our entire active client job library onto a portable Firewire drive and made layout revisions on it. Then we I got back, I copied the files back. This works fine as long as A) your files all copy without errors, B) you gave yourself plenty of time the night before to sit there and watch 100GB of data copy, and C) nothing happens to your drive in transit. I once took a trip and realized in my hotel that all the backup software I'd used had not copied the most recent "modified" job folders to my portable external drive. It was a depressing moment.

So for the past several years, my modus operandi has been to keep all job files on our office network drive and utilize the power of DynDNS.org. It allows me to access our network externally from any available broadband internet connection by recognizing the dynamic IP Address our router connects with at our ISP. Even with that somewhat sophisticated method of file access, copying the art and layout files can be slow. Like most home or business ISP's offerings, upload speed is much slower than download speed. Consequently, opening or copying my files from a remote location is slow because data is uploading through a slow connection out of our office, and thereby, to me. It works, but it's not nearly as fast as working within your own office's network. Be patient with this method. It saves you the stress of carrying your company's job files around, but it costs you in time.

I can't speak highly enough of smartphones in general, and the iPhone specifically, when working on the road. We've used it to navigate ourselves to virtually every destination we've needed in Seattle through the built-in maps app. (Conversely, the Sony GPS we brought along was nearly useless and often displayed a "weak signal" indicator. Avoid their GPS products.) The Whole Foods app came in very handy when we needed some things that only they stock.

In general, I found Seattle and its suburbs to be pretty wireless compliant, if not a bit too open maybe. I found open wireless connections all over the place. Good for me and accessing info with speed, bad for people who trust the universe and probably get hacked a lot.

Lastly, and this is more of a topical note rather than a summary and closing statement: I was here in Seattle while the Apple iPad media event broadcast on Wednesday. Cool product. I want one. I'm already thinking of the possibilities for client apps for it, and on a more personal note, planning what to do with all my future leftover bookshelf space at home.

That's all from the northwest corner of the U.S. Until next time...