Kiite.: June 2006

2006-06-28

SuperMark

Your results:
You are Superman

Superman		70%
The Flash		70%
Spider-Man		65%
Supergirl		63%
Green Lantern		60%
Iron Man		55%
Batman		50%
Robin		45%
Catwoman		45%
Hulk		45%
Wonder Woman		33%

You are mild-mannered, good,
strong and you love to help others.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

2006-06-27

Pride (Lust & Envy)

2006-06-22

Mark Does the Math

I was having a conversation with a chum today about freelancing/working for yourself. He didn’t understand the fact that I can be busy and not have any money yet to show for it. As I explained it to him I began to feel like Courtney Love when she did the math for why most recording deals for musicians were punishingly unfair and ended up bankrupting most of the ones who didn't end up wildly successful. But here’s my analysis of what goes on for someone in my business. Now remember, I don’t generally get contracts – nobody hires me to sit in their office for a week or a month at a time, and rarely, if ever, do I get recurring work from a single client (much as I’m trying to change that.) Most of the time I get projects – someone hires me or my company to create a brochure or website.

Project: Website (fewer than 10 pages), including ecommerce section, small product catalogue (10 to 15 items), original design and writing.
Cost: $8255.00 (this includes a 30% markup I take off my suppliers)
Payment Schedule: 30%/30%/40%
So forget about the 3 weeks I spend courting the client, the 4 meetings, research, quoting, negotiating etc.

Let’s start from day 1. The client writes me a cheque for $2,593.50.

I have to do the photo shoot first. Now the photographer will do all his work in 3 days, a shoot, some colour correction etc. and then deliver a disk to me. He wants to get paid for that right away. So I write him a cheque for $1800. At the same time the designer has to start working on her designs and doing mockups. She also gets 30/30/40. So 30% of her $2800 is $840. Leaving me with an overdraft of $46.50.

We will also start writing now but that’s okay, I’m the writer I’ll live on $-46.50.

Day 15 (that’s three weeks in real terms). After 4 more meetings and numerous phone calls, one panic about copyright and a disaster with a rental van, we’re agreed on the design of the website, we’ve secured the ecommerce module from the bank and we’ve selected the photos. The client writes me a cheque for $2,593.50. The designer gets her second $840. The programmer gets his first $600 for starting to work on the ecommerce module. That leaves me with $1,153.50. I’ve now been working for three weeks at $9.61 per hour.

Day 30 (another three weeks). We deliver. Assuming the client actually gave us feedback and hit HIS deadlines, we’re good to go. The ecommerce module has been implemented and tested, the catalogue and shopping cart all work, the client is happy with the copy we’ve provided (or rather he micro managed and re-wrote everything we sent him and we finally gave up and let him put up his lame, incoherent ramblings because at this point we don't care) and the site is now live. The client pays us the final $3,458.00

We pay: $600 to the programmer for the ecommerce portion, and the final $1120 to the designer. That leaves me with $1738.00. That includes my $850 as the writer and the last portion of my ‘markup’.

In this example I’ve been working for 2 months on a project, seen almost no real money, and at the end of it have a ridiculously small payout. So of course the secret is to have many of these projects on the go at once, to find ways to manage them so that you are actually making money (because the level of hand-holding that the client things they’r getting for their 8 grand is stunning really) and to have them in many different stages of done-ness. Because there’s nothing worse than having 5 projects all start at once. That happened to me a few years back and I went three and a half months without putting any money in the bank. (Every how-to of money management says you should have a budget, and the first line of instruction on how to make a budget is to write down your income…ah yah assuming you know or can forecast your income).

This example is actually pretty close to a best-case scenario. You add things like a client who won’t return your calls promptly, won’t pay bills on time, who cancels or delays the project half way through but won’t pay you for what you’ve done. Or a client who says that he’s rethinking his strategy and will get back to the website in a couple of weeks once he’s met with this great new business guru/marketing coach he’s just met. And as soon as he says that all your timing and syncing up of start/finish dates just got blown up. So you go from perfectly ordered to utter shit in the course of three phone calls.

Yes of course you can threaten, of course you can use other means at your disposal but of course while you do you’re still out the money, the time, and the energy.

This post is not meant to be depressive. I actually like what I do. But these are some of the challenges I, and others like me, face.

2006-06-20

Stuff & Junk II

I haven't blogged in about 2 weeks or so, except for that last brief post about getting fat. For those who actually read this thing, I apologize for my tardiness. However judging from the resounding calls for a new blog post, I'm guessing most of you enjoyed the break.

This post has no point. I'll warn you that now. Joe, this is a stream of conscious thing here so enjoy.

It has been one month since I went back to being self-employed, and so far so good - I think. The money is a bit slow coming in, but that's alright, it'll come when it comes. I have re-started my own business again, and will also be working with some pals of mine in their biz. You see, when I left this before and went to get a job working for 'da man' I made a couple of promises to myself about what it would be like if I was ever to come this way again: I would not be the sole salesman and the only producer of work. It’s just too damn hard to do it all, and too hard to switch gears between being a creator and producer. Related to that is that I vowed I would not do it alone. I would work in some kind of partnership. When you’re the only guy in your company you are limited as to how much you can make (not that I ever got close to that limit), but also, more importantly for me, you are responsible for 100% of everything in your business. Nothing happens unless you do it, and some days you don’t feel like doing it. We all have ‘blah’ days at work right? Those days where you drink coffee, watch youtube.com and read salon.com, thesmokinggun.com and of course theonion.com… and they’re not that bad really. You’ve done enough work the day before to carry you so you can coast for a while. That’s a lot harder to do when you’re working for yourself.

So when I was contemplating going back to working solo, and my colleagues Henry and Minter asked me to work with them, it seemed like the right thing to do. It turns out they’ve achieved a certain Ceiling of Complexity™ in their business and need some help getting beyond it. That’s merely a way of saying that Henry can’t work the clients and produce the work all on his own anymore, so I’m here to help out. I also decided to be more specific about what I’m doing. It was a mistake I made last time.

During my first 4 years running Spark Creative, I was a generalist; I tried to offer marketing and communications services (mainly as a writer) to any client who needed it, for any kind of project. I realise why I did that. I use the metaphor of monogamy (ironic I know). But the reason that I could not ever be specific (to an industry, type of client or type of work) was that I was afraid that by saying yes to only one or two types of work, I was saying no to all that other stuff. It’s the same reason that men have a hard time committing. It’s not because they are not in love, or don’t want to spend the rest of their lives with that one person. It’s that they can’t shake the feeling that by saying “yes” to one girl or boy, they’re actually saying no to every other one. So in that man’s head “I do” really sounds like “I will not ever have sex with Angelina Jolie, or that girl at the coffee shop who always gives me extra cinnamon.” (The fact that they’ll never get the chance to do Angelina, and the coffee shop girl is a dyke, is irrelevant because this is not a rational conversation – this is what a man feels.)

It was the same with work. The problem with that logic is that for one thing, I wasn’t getting a lot of work from all over anyway. And secondly it made me feel desperate for work. And then you end up with clients like this. (Oh they’re offline – well they made cloth covers for your TV. You can read about my experiences with them here.)

So this time things are different. I’m working with the boys at RethinkIT and having a great old time of it so far. My work is much less writing-ish, and more on the project/client management side of things. We’re expanding, and looking to make a break into what we consider a very lucrative area of business: ethnic marketing. Here’s why: Toronto is the most multicultural city in the world (according to the UN). Nearly half a million people in Toronto and area speak Chinese as a first language. To find a city with more Chinese people, you have to go to China. Toronto is the third or fourth largest Italian city (and that includes all the cities in Italy). And so on… You see the point. There’s a massive ethnic and cultural minority population in Toronto and the rest of Canada so why not help companies market into that. And that’s what I’m going to do.

In other areas… Well regarding the last post. You see I quit smoking in January of this year (yay me!) and now I’m fat. Yes I am 173cm and 77kg mostly on my gut – blah. Yah so I really should have started working out earlier (Pride Day is way too fucking early), but there ya go. I started on Sunday with my personal trainer (why not, he owed me a few sessions anyway and it worked last time I went with him). So my goal is that in three months I’ve dropped 5% body fat. Hell, my goal is to not get chatted up online by guys who are into ‘stocky’ guys.

What else? Um, well yah so it’s Pride day this weekend. And my father’s 60th birthday. Poor guy, ever since I came out he’s been pretty much screwed because his birthday falls on or near Pride weekend nearly every year it seems. We’re going up to his place for a party for him on Saturday then heading back downtown to walk on Church Street and have a beer or two. I’ll probably blog later on Pride. But I’m looking forward to this one actually; Hame’s in town and our friend Gary is about to experience his first one. He’s excitable anyway, so surrounding him with 900,000 fags and dykes oughta make his head explode. (And when we take him: cute, 20 and Chinese, to our old rice queen’s Pride Brunch, some other heads will no doubt explode). Friday I’ll be at the Village Rainbow patio with Fr. Paul for his annual Haj to the gay Mecca (as far as Canada goes) freshly waxed and mani/pedi’d he’ll be a terror I’m sure.

This post is going on too long. So I’ll blog more later on why I suspect I’m allergic to my house.

Have a great week.

It's been a long time

It's been a long time since I blogged. 12 days really. And I'm not really going to start now. It's 11.40 on Monday night, so i'll go to bed now and blog in the morning when i get to work.

2006-06-14

Canadians fatter, but smoking less

This was the headline in the Globe and Mail today. I can say with certainty that this is true.

2006-06-08

I used to be a geek

I'm still a nerd of course, but I'm not longer the geek I once was. Just have a read of hte last post and you'll see how non-geeky I am these days, when I can't even solve such a problem as a buggery printer. I went on Tuesday to the new Apple Store in the Eaton Centre and asked one of the geniuses at the Genius Bar what I should do. He made a few suggestions, the first of which worked.

I once was a real geek. Some of you know that I worked as an IT guy at an office full of Macs (and project managed a database migration program, and designed databases). But now technology has moved on and I've become a mere user (or as the kids say luser).

Now in my own defence Tuesday was not a good day all 'round. I was frustrated by the computer misbehaving, by a client misbehaving, and by the complete inability to get a phone number.

But I'm better now. I still can't find the phone number, and the client is still an ass, but at least my printer works.

Steve complained that my suggestions as to who to fuck (Steve Jobs of Apple an that guy from Samsung) were awful. So by way of apology, here you go.

Fuck him.

And him.

2006-06-07

Technology Sucks Ass

This is the latest in an ongoing series that happens when I get frustrated about the technology I have in my life. Like today. I wasted three fucking hours trying to make a printer work on my computer. This is a printer that used to work on my other computer, but now does not. I hate it all.

I'm sure there's a blog in there someplace about how our reliance on technology demonstrates our weakness when technology fails. A post in which I would use examples of the blackout of a few years ago where we were all reduce to no tech at all, and so were forced to be human in a quiet dark world. But right now, I can't be fucking bothered going there. Fuck it. Fuck technology, fuck printers, fuck printer drivers, Fuck Steve Jobs, and Fuck Jong-Yong Yun. Fuck every last single one of those fucking fuckers who ever fucking had any-fucking-thing to do with technology.

I'm going to buy a typwriter.

2006-06-02

Airplane Otaku

Today I had a meeting near the airport. Nothing terribly importat as far as I can tell, but it was painless and over quickly. After I popped into the Country Style Donuts and got a coffee. That coffee shop is very cool, and quite famous, because it's located here:

Notice please the direction of that one runway, and the little dot representing the coffee shop. So I sat on the hood of my car for a while and enjoyed a view like this before driving back into the city.

Kiite.