The worst of all possible outcomes.

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 03/11/18)

I just took a few minutes to reread my last post, which was from 2016. What has happened after that is something out of a business horror novel.

Basically, my professional career and personal life became a slow-motion, multi-car pileup on the interstate.

In December of 2016 the key stakeholders put pressure on me and my business partner to invest in the new agency venture in order to secure our 3% ownership (each) in the new company. We caved and invested a large chunk of profits from our company, O2 Agency.

By the end of January 2017 the owners announced they were going to close the new agency. A couple of nonprofit accounts cancelled their contracts due to production and data mistakes. This is bad news and trying to recover from it quickly is nearly impossible.

But, we soldiered on and searched for a larger agency to acquire us. The owners took our money in December, and decided to do an asset sale of the printing company plus the newly formed agency. Our % ownership quickly became 0% and our investment capital was gone.

We pleaded with the VC firm to return our investment. They did not. Legal fees would have cost us so much it wouldn't have been worth it to pursue.

In early February of 2017 we were notified that identity theft rocked the parent company and all the employee W-2s had been stolen. Cool, right?

In late February 2017, Unified Agency's BKV group in Atlanta agreed to take on six of us, which saved our jobs and stabilized our client roster. By March of 2017 we were all employed and we worked our asses off to maintain the viability of our group and our clients.

In July, we had to move to a new office space and we sold off everything in our office. It was a space occupied by Hiccup NY, also a Unified Agency company. Three of us occupied desks there but we were never fully integrated into the group. They didn't really know what we did each day, they had their own accounts (separate from ours), and we barely overlapped skill sets or activities. It was awkward and my gut told me it was temporary. Sometimes I hate my gut.

By late July 2017, Animal Legal Defense Fund, our largest nonprofit account, cancelled their contract with BKV. In the end, legacy data issues and disruption precipitated the exit. The account director got laid off in August.

Then one day in a conference call with my boss, my creative director/writer partner and I got notice that we'd be laid off as well. We'd be gone by the end of October. The loss of ALDF was too big to recover from. A make-or-break new business pitch at Consumer Reports in July wasn't a win. Things were starting to unravel.

A consolation prize was a small retainer to continue to work with my soon-to-be former agency, for one account. As they say, it was better than nothing.

I'll say this. In general, losing your job is awful, no matter what your age is. Losing your job in your mid-50s is devastating. Plain and simple. Why? Because there's a lot more at stake. The collateral damage and sudden loss of income forced my wife and I (and our two dogs) to move out of our rather expensive but comfortable apartment in Manhattan. We had to find sublet renters to fill in the months before our lease ends in July.

After much anquish and many family meetings in Novemer and December, over New Year's weekend we moved in with my mother-in-law (also in Manhattan), who lived just a couple blocks from us. She has an inoperable back issue, and my wife suffers from chronic Lyme disease. So the situation was looking rather poor.

My mother-in-law's apartment was a neglected rent-stable 2BR on W 84th Street. Nothing in the apartment worked properly. Things were put together in a slap-dash manner that gave the place a feeling of a low-rent ghetto. And yet, it sat on the top floor of a building and had a terrace that wrapped around three sides of the unit. Not the worst, not the best.

So, living suddenly became very, very stressful, and a little bleak. My wife did what she could to help out at her mother's place, but most of the day-to-day chores and care-giving for two women would fall to me.

My wife and I basically spent all of January cleaning things, purging things, fixing things, replacing things, returning things, and selling things. The logistics of it all was just mind-boggling and strained my marriage enormously. But, we somehow managed to endure, and get the apartment looking and smelling clean.

On the job front, since October 2017 I've applied to well over 50 creative director jobs, and have gotten only one in-person interview. Tough crowd. Really tough. Agencies, which I will never work for again, seem to be putting all their eggs in the video and social media baskets. Fine. Good luck with that. It's a tech trend, and tech will pivot away from itself. It always does.

So ... I've been through many, many shit-storms in my career, and this one may have been the biggest. I guess I'll survive this one too.

If you're reading this and you're a talent acquisition person, contact me at awhetzel@icloud.com.

I can probably handle anything you throw at me.

Here's one way to save a failing business.

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 08/13/16)

The last time I posted to this blog was last July and I thought at the time that I'd start a series on epic client fails. Well, that sort of fell by the wayside. I still have plenty of material on the subect, and I hope I can circle back on that idea and post more Stupid Client Tricks.

Instead, I'm going to turn to developments in my business. It's been a pretty wild ride for the past year, hence the title of this post.

Around August of 2015 I felt like I'd done all I could do to keep my small design company afloat. The work we were being assigned wasn't very interesting or challenging, and was just a lot of low level, bottom of the barrel stuff that I hesitate to even call design work. It hardly felt like the kind of work a 15 year-old company should be getting. On top of that, during 2015, a series of corporate mergers and acquisitions, and business reorgs signaled the impending loss of nearly all of our top clients. And we hardly got any warning.

American Express Publishing (Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, and related affinity clubs) and its consumer marketing group got sold to Time Inc. Shortly after that, Time Inc. was spun off into its own company, separate from Time Warner. Then Time Inc. laid off all its creative and production staff within the consumer marketing department. They outsourced it all to Tag Worldwide. Some people went to Tag and some got severance packages. It's a familiar story in the world of business.

By the end of 2015 the RFPs and ongoing client creative needs had trickled to zero. This is a common situation with small companies like ours, but that didn't make it any easier to accept. Over the course of the year, the marketing managers with whom we'd worked for so many years had either moved on or they'd survived the layoffs, but their hands were tied due to outsourcing contracts. The business landscape had changed dramatically — and for us, for the worst.

So, I thought, OK, maybe it's time to stage a career reinvention. Many people do this in their 40s and 50s. While I was down in Florida in September 2015 helping my mom through double-bypass heart surgery, I pondered the possibility of going back to school and getting my Master's Degree in design. I discussed this with my business partner one night, and I think it shocked him a little. It kind of shocked me too. We'd started our company in 2000, and we'd managed to grow it from a handful of referrals to a company averaging annual gross revenue of $500,000. I explained how I felt like I was done with the magazine publishing industry and all its turmoil and disruption. I thought we should get a valuation on our company and explore a sale, or merge our book of business with another company. At the end of the phone call he understood where I was coming from, and we agreed to start shopping our company around.

On the Master's Degree front, I reached out to a former professor of mine who was still teaching at University of Florida, my alma mater, and we talked about the implications of my going back to school. I was 52, but I felt I was still sharp and in step with design and media trends. I thought I could really offer a lot to a university design department. He thought it was a great idea and suggested I pursue it. UF was in a state of transition between department directors, so maybe there was an opportunity for me down the road if I got accepted into the program. So I went ahead with the idea. I started the ground work of requesting transcripts, logging into university sites and setting up profiles, collecting images of my work for online portfolio submissions, etc. It was a part-time job for a couple months. By the time I'd hit application deadlines, I'd managed to submit to School of Visual Arts, UF, and Virginia Commonwealth University. I should have sent out more apps to other schools, but I did what I could with the time I had.

On the business sale front, I started writing emails to industry contacts and companies that may have a need or interest in a small creative shop. I started my efforts in early October, and after a few non-reply emails, we found an interested party. A salesperson for a large printing company in Maryland put us in touch with his company's CEO. They just happened to have begun the process of spinning off their in-house marketing and creative agency. They had a nice stable of nonprofit accounts, for whom they produce direct mail and direct response emails. They were lacking depth on the creative bench, and they needed creative strategy and ideation. Our timing was excellent.

By the end of October, we had our first meeting with the business developers, as well as the venture capital group behind it all. We began to hammer out terms for a joint venture, to build a new agency that would pull together 8 different small companies, including ours.

Cut to February of 2016 and we have our first summit of the new agency team members down in Rockville, MD, at the site of the huge printing facility. We all give a short presentation of our respective small businesses and expertise, and we all seem to get along quite well.

Months pass. We agree to the joint venture terms, we develop a new company brand, build out the identity and collateral materials, rent new office space on Madison and 32nd street, and off we go. We moved in on June 1, 2016 and continued to develop the future marketing plans and positioning of our company, called Katalyst Partners, Inc. (KPI).

By the end of June, 2 of the legacy in-house team members in Rockville quit. They had been there a long time and we assume they simply got too riled up by the changes afoot. My copywriter/creative partner and I were immediately pressed into duty as full-time VP/Creative Directors within the marketing and creative services group, in addition to managing our own small business unit that provides creative services to the magazine publishing industry. Several trips to Rockville, and many, many 12- to 15-hour days later, we made the transition and adapted to the culture of a new company. I think it's one of the hardest things I've ever done.

When all the dust settles — maybe by the end of the 2016 — we'll be able to assess what happened with a little more clarity. For now, we've managed to think our way out of a difficult situation with regards to our evaporating client roster at my original company. While our core magazine publishing clients seem to be fading away, they are still sending projects to us. Only time will tell if that's going to continue or if publishing is going to pivot away from us completely.

As it turned out, SVA and VCU declined my Master's applications. UF had accepted me as an "alternate," but once the new company venture showed promise, I declined the candidacy.

So that's my story as of today. The tornado inside the hurricane is still swirling, but I think the sky is clearing. Or are we just in the eye?

Epic client fail #1: legal interference.

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 07/18/15)

Over the past year or so I've been wanting to post a new blog -- since I only manage to sit down long enough to write about 1 a year -- and post something that's dear to every creative person's heart: the client fails. The bloopers, the miscues, the oversights and poor decision-making.

I've tried to jot down some of these mistakes when they pop into my head. I'm sure there are more, but here's one to kick things off. I'll start with the most recent one and work backwards in the next few blog posts.

Last year my design firm was awarded an assignment to produce some cover wraps and direct mail efforts for a popular entertainment magazine. One of the DM efforts featured a portion of a $10 bill on the envelope's face, and a matching $10 bill on the top panel of the letter/order form inside. Since they were offering $10 off a subscription renewal, it was a no-brainer to lead with $10 bill on the creative. We presented the concept to the marketing team and they green-lighted it.

Then the lawyers got involved.

Their legal department said we couldn't show the $10 bill actual size (which is what we'd done because we were showing less than 1/2 of it). We countered with: the portion of the $10 bill being displayed is less than 1/2, and we aren't showing the back. There would be no confusion or misrepresentation to the consumer that it's legal tender. The lawyer was still nervous. I took matters into my own hands. I called the federal government. Seriously. I called the branch that oversees and approves the use of US currency in advertising and promotions. After being bounced around to several different departments, got disconnected, re-routed and forwarded to half a dozen different phone numbers, I wound up talking to a guy in a government office in Brooklyn about it. He assured me that our approach was within the legal guidelines of displaying US currency. Great I said, we're legally compliant, done deal, I hang up.

I took this back to my client's legal team and still they sharted in their pants. Even after the visual was approved by the goddamn federal government, the publisher's consumer marketing lawyers still said no. They said the $10 bill has to be scaled to 150% or 75% of actual size. I said "Those are the legally approved specs for representing an entire bill, not a portion. The portion we're showing is less than the 5/8 required of banks and merchants for accepting or exchanging a bill, plus we're not showing the back. There is no way a consumer is going to mistake the printed envelope and order form artwork for an actual $10 bill." Still they balked. "Make it 150% and we'll approve it" legal said. Sighs and mumbles of frustration filled the office. We being the dutiful little design firm, we obliged.

We got our concept printed by caving in to a legal department's (or one lawyer's) ignorance of the facts. This is often how smart creative gets turned into dumb creative. It can be the difference between a getting a control and not getting a control. The $10 bill at 150% looked hokey. We never did get the response data on the mailing.

You know the old joke: What do you call 1,000 lawyers at the bottom of a lake? A good start.

As they say, humor always has an element of truth in it.