Anthony Whetzel: Bits, Bytes & Rants from a Business Owner/Creative Director.

Another year, another roller coaster

2011-12-30T14:34:00.000-05:00

It's the last work day of 2011, and my last posting of 2011, and I'll need the weekend to mentally prepare for another new year. All's quiet with clients as this is the eve of New Year's Eve. I should be doing digital house-cleaning with my work emails but can't face it today. All those thousands of emails - received or sent - that need to be deleted or sub-foldered. Sigh. I'll have to chip away at it over the weekend at some point. Need a clean slate for next year. And when I say clean slate, I mean a near-empty Inbox.

Like the title of this blog, 2011 was yet another roller coaster in the life of a small business owner. The first half of the year seemed like imminent doom, the 2nd half seemed like a tornado inside a hurricane (see previous posts).

This year we utilized more freelancers/contractors than ever before, and that was good for me. Since I'm the VP of Design & Emerging Media at O2 Agency (designer and/or design project manager on all projects), the amount of man hours required to get our assignments off the ground can be a bit daunting. We took on some very large scale projects this year, and having an additional art director and production artist on hand for support really made the difference between sanity and insanity for me. Though my wife would tell you I strayed into insanity and stayed there in Oct and Nov. (Sorry hon. The stress was unreal.) December was nuts too, but the pace did slow as we got closer to Christmastime. I dealt with only 1 design emergency while on vacation, so that was key to a recuperative holiday break.

On a personal note, my wife and I spent a week's vacation on Clearwater Beach, FL while visiting my family in that area. We were greeted with warm, sunny weather for almost the entire week, and we enjoyed a lot of quality time with my mother, brother, sister-in-law and my nieces. My wife managed to run a low-grade fever the entire week, despite having no other symptoms of the flu or anything else (as I've mentioned in the past, she's been battling Lyme Disease for many years, and this was probably just another one of those "surprise" gifts that Lyme brings). And that impinged upon our ability to go to every family party and social function. But she at least got a couple opportunities to walk on the beach and absorb some rays, and experience the sugar sand it's famous for. We stayed at the Hilton, which was fairly low key for the week that wrapped around Christmas weekend. Though it is a bit family-oriented and can even be rowdy at night with the 20-something set.

To get around, we rented that new Fiat J-Lo car. It's actually a pretty nice ride for a compact car. It seemed to turn heads with the 11-15 year old girl demographic anyway, which both my wife and I thought was pretty hilarious. One middle-aged guy mockingly wanted to drag race me on the Clearwater Causeway bridge. Heh. I actually think I would have smoked him if I'd taken the challenge seriously.

For New Year's Eve, we plan to hang with friends downtown in the Union Square area. And since they're on a high-floor, we might get a view of Times Square. We'll see.

Cheers everybody. Here's hoping you all had a great 2011, and that 2012 looks even more promising!

The BPE, Near Total Data Loss, Managing Freelancers and Jury Duty

2011-10-28T23:21:00.007-04:00

As the 4th quarter of this year got underway we began discussions with a big magazine publisher here in New York. They brought us in to brief us on the scope of a huge project — which I'll refer to as Biggest Project Ever (BPE). And it needs to be done in about a month. A proposal needed to be submitted ASAP. It wouldn't be sexiest project we'd ever taken on, but it might be the single largest. And if we were awarded the work it would basically save the year for us revenue-wise.

Soon after we dug into the details of our proposal for BPE, we realized the scope of it would require every ounce of project management skill my business partner and I could summon. BPE was going to be very challenging from a problem-solving and workflow/information flow standpoint. And the sheer scope of it clearly would dictate that we outsource a lot of the early-stage set up work — most of which could be done offsite.

Running simultaneously with BPE was the imminent threat that our office NAS drive was slowly losing its mind. (NAS stands for Network Attached Storage, for those of you who don't know — it's a high capacity hard drive that functions as sort of a scaled-down server for small businesses like ours.) I downloaded a firmware update to it one afternoon, and the next day it started to freak out on me. Files wouldn't copy from it. Folders couldn't be compressed. Read/write errors kept popping up. Maddening stuff like that. I of course started to sweat large cold bullets. The damn drive was malfunctioning. Those of you who have lost data or have come close to losing data know how utterly horrifying this scenario is. Our NAS drive had a 2TB capacity, and we had about 200GB worth of mirrored data that was in jeopardy. 11 years worth. The timing of this seemingly colossal failure was so not good.

Seven tech support calls later to Western Digital (the maker of the NAS drive) concluded that our drive's RAID hardware was failing. But the good news was that it appeared that the data could be copied off it. I ran over to Staples and picked up a 1TB external drive, connected it, started the copy process, and went home. I bought a new NAS drive the next day, and then begged my close friend and network security guru Gary Morse, President at Razorpoint Security Technologies, to come by and save our company's data on a Saturday night. He's a mensch, let me tell you.

We restored all the company files on the new drive, but there's another layer to all this anxiety. The following week we were awarded Biggest Project Ever. Oh and I had to report to City Hall for jury duty. Yeah. That's right. Jury duty. Can you believe it? I still can't.

So in order to get BPE off the ground while the first stage jury duty selection process holds me hostage downtown, we bring in freelancers to help out. Fortunately we knew a couple of pros who could do just that. I keep hoping I'll get dismissed early in the process and I can get back to work. And FYI — they don't allow computers, cell phones or any electronics in the jury duty assembly rooms anymore. Not even in the room designated "Juror Work Room". It was agonizing.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday go by without my name being called. I'm thinking maybe I'll get lucky and sail through this unscathed. Thursday however was a different story. Shortly after I arrived in the morning I'm forced to watch a video on the Grand Jury process and responsibility. What? What is this? This is not good. Then later in the day, a lottery of names were called out and I became Juror #21, on a Federal Grand Jury. Damn! It was devastating. Some of these jury panels have to participate for 18 months! I went into a mild state of shock. I pleaded with the judge when my turn came, but no dice... he wouldn't excuse me. And my service would require one month of participation. Good God. A month. Really? It was really bad news. The only silver lining was that our particular jury panel would last only a month. That's OK I thought. I'll die of sheer exhaustion by then anyway.

The rest of October was a blur from that day on. As it turned out my jury duty service would require only a half day one day per week. And for those of you who've never had the honor of being a grand juror, you don't sit in on one case — you vote to indict or not indict defendants based on evidence an attorney presents. And within a half day you can hear 3-4 indictments/cases. But it was nerve wracking all the same. The grand jury process keeps you on a short leash. Every evening at 6pm all the jurors had to call a number to check a message that gave us the next day's instructions: whether we had to show up or not, what time to show up, etc. And that's how it went through the month of October. I'll end my service November 2nd, and then I think I get a break from jury duty for 6 years. Ya-effing-hoo!

BPE got off the ground with the help of our freelancers. I've worked every single day since the last week of September. It was really a bitch to get through all that. My business partner really stepped up and directed projects well in my absences. It looks like we'll survive the storm — a little tattered but no broken bones.

This is how scary having your own business can be. It can be unbelievably toxic and stressful for long stretches. Things you never thought you'd have to deal with suddenly appear in front of you and you have adapt. It really makes you appreciate calm waters when your little ship glides into them again. Your mind relaxes, your blood pressure returns to normal, and then you plan a vacation.

Really? It's Been 8 months since my last post?

2011-06-12T23:34:00.001-04:00

My apologies to anyone out there who's following me and reading this drivel. I haven't posted anything since August 2010, and it's a testimony to a) a rebound in the economy late last summer, and b) that rebound translating into a freighter-load of new projects that landed in our busy little company, and c) a little help from LinkedIn.

I remember a former client of mine (a marketing guy) emailing me back in probably 2006 or 2007 about urging me to join LinkedIn and I went pfff, nah, I'm not interested in another social networking site. And he said no it's not like that, it's more focused on businesses and professional networking. I still poo-pooed it and dismissed it, skeptic that I am.

Then about a year later I kept hearing chatter from colleagues and clients about LinkedIn, and it seemed like it was gaining momentum in the business world. Not long after that it became downright embarrassing if you didn't have a profile on the site. Peer pressure won, so I joined up (as did my business partner) and we started banging out the invitations.

Cut to 2011, and between the two of us, we've amassed a list of current and former clients that would impress any new business developer. But as everyone knows, a LinkedIn profile is only as good/current/relevant as the profile itself. And some people in our networks seem to not give a shit about it at all.

Then there was the example of one of our former clients whose profile announcements, ("so-and-so has just updated his experience") kept appearing almost daily for about a week. And I'm sure his co-workers must have seen them too. I said wow, sounds like so-and-so is either looking for a new job or is on the cusp of landing one. Sure enough, he emailed us both a couple weeks later and said "hey guys, I'm over at _____ now, here's my new info...". "Really? Best of luck in your new role. Thanks for letting us know!" (Like we didn't see it coming.)

In addition to the LinkedIn contacts and potential new business tool it represents to a small business like ours, we also took it upon ourselves to try a new business developer -- as in, a real person -- in late 2010 and early 2011. She found us on the internet and was old school: only wanted to work by the hour ($100 an hour and no commission on future billable jobs), and would work from a list of companies and contacts that we'd provide (which we culled from a 4-inch thick 2009 edition of Advertiser's Red Book we'd scored off eBay for $35). We picked our dream clients, and she went to work, burrowing her way into those selected companies. She'd get a contact and his/her info, forward to us, and we'd email them an intro letter, along with a link to our website to see samples of our work and to contact us if they needed a shop like ours.

Seemed fairly simple right? The process was relatively easy to manage and could all be done with email. My feeling was, if we got 1 new client, just 1, especially one that's outside the magazine publishing industry, from which we get probably 95% of our revenue, then this effort was worth it. As of this writing, not a single meeting has resulted from our efforts. We got a few nibbles, a few replies, mostly "check back with us later" or "check back when Jill or Richard or Amy is back from vacation." That sort of response. There are still a couple from that list who may have some potential, but I'd say it's probably a long shot.

All that said, I still feel optimistic about our networking prospects, and the power of a site like LinkedIn. And I think the year is going to be a good one. Early this week another former co-worker of my business partner emailed him (via LinkedIn) and said he was at a new company and was looking for a small agency/creative team and we met on Friday. It all transpired in less than a week. Maybe he's just kicking the tires, or maybe it's the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

A Summer of Good News/Bad News

2010-08-22T18:19:00.001-04:00

Now that we're two-thirds of the way through summer, and two months since my last blog post, it's time to get all 4 of my followers/readers up to date. A lot has been happening business-wise and of course in current events. Let's start with the bad news.

If anyone remembers the summer of 2010 at all, it will probably be associated with one thing: the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Sure, the economy is still gasping for breath, but the spill stole the spotlight. It dumped 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf, and lasted nearly 3 months before they capped the well head. How it will affect the lives of those who make a living in the spill zone and the long-term future of sea life is anyone's guess. But one thing's for sure: as a nation we haven't taken the necessary steps to diversify our national energy portfolio. And any financial manager will tell you if you're too invested in one area, you take large risks with your investment. And so we have. It has taught oil companies a hard lesson as well: cutting corners on safety will most certainly hurt your employees, their families, your reputation and your share price.

One of the interesting things to track during the Gulf oil spill crisis was the shift in the Advertising/PR strategy of BP. Not only was the clean-up effort a remake of the old black and white movies of the Keystone Cops from the standpoint of those working with or around BP, it was also a slow-motion train wreck from a PR perspective. Not long into the spill, the feel-good ads that presented BP as being "alternative" and "green" disappeared from TV and print ads. They were replaced by BP manager testimonials about how they're "here for the long haul" and that they'll be "making a commitment to the environment" and so on. I don't doubt that the managers in the ads felt they were speaking the truth. But the reality is that BP didn't know heads from tails on how to coordinate the clean-up effort, and I wouldn't be surprised if we see more bad reports in the future coming from beaches and communities where BP has shirked its responsibility. Or has played pass the buck and pointed the finger at the U.S. Government.

Now the good news. My company has seen a solid rebound in new job requests from the lackluster first half of the year. It appears that our clients have turned on the marketing faucets again and job orders are steadily coming back in. We noticed a big up-tick in June and it's been steady so far through July and August. I'm crossing my fingers that it gains momentum through the rest of 2010 and into next year. Though I must say I'm cautiously optimistic - there's a lot of chatter from the financial sector about lukewarm forcasts and weak job growth projections. And slow sales growth in the housing market.

I hope my next post sometime in the 4th quarter has more good news. Maybe it'll be titled The Autumn of Good News/Good News. And maybe some of us small businesses will hold on through the worst of it. We've made it this far.

We Might Have Suffered a Stroke, But Now Our Vitals Look Good

2010-06-27T22:49:00.000-04:00

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

2010-02-27T15:59:00.001-05:00

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

2010-01-28T16:33:00.007-05:00

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...

The Arc of Technology...

2010-01-13T22:48:00.003-05:00

When I entered the professional world in 1987, I had virtually no computer experience or appreciation for their operating systems and hardware. While in college I had played with the all-in-one Macintosh 512K that the campus gallery had bought, and had drawn some abstract little nothing of a piece of art using MacDraw or MacPaint or some such program, I basically had no idea they worked. And then was thrilled by printing the image out on a dot matrix printer. That would have been around late 1984/early 1985. It was named the 512K because that was the maximum amount of RAM it would handle. Think about it. 512K. And a 400K hard drive. It had a 3.5" floppy drive, but that's what you ran your programs from.

Then when I got hired by a then little-known company called Prodigy, which would become one of the first major consumer-oriented online services companies, I was trained on IBM PCs and really felt immersed in new technology. We were using PC ATs at the time, which were rather large units, probably the width and depth of a microwave, and about 8" in height. On top of the PC sat a 640 x 480 monitor, capable of 16 colors. Next to it sat a Hayes 1200 or 2400 baud modem (I have no idea how slow that is — I just know it's slow). We used a proprietary graphics program for generating sites and banner ads for advertising clients that used those 16 colors, and if we used any of 3 or 4 patterns, we could create the illusion of up to say 24. I remember the fervor over the news a couple years later than new PCs would ship with CD ROM drives. This would be a game changer for installing a more robust version of the service, and possibly expand the quality of onscreen graphics and product images. By the time Prodigy had a chance to expand the graphics capability of its software and service, the Internet opened up and off-the-shelf tools for creating HTML and GIF or JPG files buried it. (Speaking of Prodigy, its first CEO, Ted Papes, passed away on January 8, 2010).

In the mid-1990s I started a company with a colleague from art school and the first computer we bought was a Macintosh PowerBook 180c. We maxed it out with 14MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. A few months later we added a high-end desktop Mac, a PowerMac 8100/80 tower, which had a 80MHz processor, a beefed-up 24-bit color graphics card and 21" CRT color monitor. We used portable SyQuest drives with 44MB and 88MB disks for portable data. If you've never seen a SyQuest drive or disk, it's worth Googling. The were portable yes, but the drive unit weighed a good 8 lbs.

A year or so later, around 1996, I left that company and started to freelance as a graphic designer. The first system I bought myself was a used Mac IICi, but soon after that bought a PowerMac 8500 tower, with a built-in CD-ROM drive, 128MB RAM, another 21" color monitor, 24-bit color graphics card (that I had to install myself), Iomega Zip drive (remember those? 100MB disks, about the size of a 3.5" floppy disk), an Iomega Jaz drive (for larger jobs, 1GB and 2GB disks), a US Robotics 28.8K modem for dial-up Internet connectivity, and an external 2X CD-R drive for burning data to CD. Btw, while I had this system I upgraded the RAM with an additional 64MB, which then cost $369.00. Today, you can buy 8GB of RAM for a MacBook Pro for about $120.00.

Cut to last December, when my company purchased new some Macs - all of which have 3GHz processors, 4GB of RAM standard, 500GB hard drives. The larger iMac has a 1TB hard drive. I can't even do the math of how many times greater in speed that is from the old Mac 512K I used in college in 1985. All I know is that they super fast, and rarely crash. Wow, did I just write that?

It's mind-boggling to witness sea change after sea change with programs like Adobe Creative Suite and so many others that are so feature-rich. And yet the components of a computer continue to accelerate in speed and capacity and become smaller and thinner. Meanwhile, the price of a system remains constant, or in most cases, lower in cost year over year. It's good for businesses, like mine, whose technology start-up costs are far lower than in previous years. And it's something that I never cease to find fascinating. What's next? Looks like the iSlate (or whatever Apple decides to name it) is right around the corner. Get ready for another paradigm shift.

The Highs and Lows of 2009

2009-12-30T22:11:00.004-05:00

Another year as a business owner in New York City comes to a close. It was quite a blur. Without a doubt, the year was defined by the threat of a worsening economy. At the onset of 2009, I seriously considered the very real possibility that our client activity would suffer. At best, we'd lose a substantial percentage of gross revenue. At worst, we'd lose everything and shut down the company. Hopefully it wouldn't come to that.

The first quarter started off well and even into the spring, business activity was on plan with previous years. In April, we purchased two MacBook Pros for ourselves as our older G4s were starting to chug through most websites. The first day my business partner left the office with his, he dropped it on a train platform on a rainy day, and it took us two weeks of scouring eBay for parts, and a full business day to repair it. It never was quite the same after that. But he'd have to limp along with it until we could replace it later in the year.

A difficult and welcomed transition took place in May. We do a fair amount of html emails and print direct mail for Time Inc. for many of their magazines. For years, they'd been stuck in the horrible world of a QuarkXPress 6.5 workflow, and when we upgraded our Macs to OS X Leopard in late 2008, QXP was renderd virtually unusable. Time Inc. also handles the print production aspects of many of our jobs for American Express Publishing's (also one of our clients) print promotions. Every project was agonizing. Then in May of 2009, we got word they'd be transitioning to Adobe Creative Suite 3. We were ecstacic. The world was saved. We were finally able to migrate both clients to CS3 and our productivity improved dramatically. And after hating Quark with such a passion for so many years, I could finally let go of my anger. Now I anxiously await the news of their bankruptcy. If it happened tomorrow, it would be 10 years overdue. There, I said it.

Then in late June I got married. We had fantastic wedding ceremony in NYC at Bryant Park Grill. Our honeymoon took us to Fiji - boy was that a pressure valve of relief from all the stress of the wedding planning and the business demands! We returned to New York City in early July after two weeks in the South Pacific feeling rested and so married.

Then in August, September and October, business activity started to slow. It was very worrisome. We began to plan for a serious slowdown and consider some contingencies. We halted contributions to our 401k plans. We watched our expenses very carefully. Somehow we managed to maintain salaries and just held on and hoped new projects would increase in number.

In September, I finally (for the love of God!) got an iPhone. What a great cell phone. It's about time us Mac users got a phone that worked seamlessly with our address book, mail and calendar apps. And the 3G version rocks. I immersed myself in the world of Apps. After 4 months, I still can't beat Scrabble on Expert level more than 10% of the time.

In November, business began to pick up again thankfully. Then we had trouble with our Epson large format color inkjet printer. When printing to large paper, the head would just lose track and slam into the inside of the housing. It's a sound that raises the hair on your neck. After Epson said to take it in for repair, I scheduled a drop-off with a repair center in New Jersey two days before Thanksgiving. A week later, the guy could find nothing wrong with it. Really, really frustrating. So a return trip to pick it up and bring it back to our office on West 38th St. took place after Thanksgiving. The Sony GPS I used to get me there started failing on the way back so I had to feel my way back to the city from Lodi, NJ, and get the Zipcar rental back in time. It was a total waste of time and effort.

Then in early December we decided it was time to make year-end technology upgrades. We bought a new 2TB RAID network storage drive for our office. (Kudos to my buddy Gary Morse who runs Razorpoint Securities. The guy's a genius. We had that drive configured and running in under an hour.) We also needed to upgrade most of our Macs and our large format laser printer. We bought a 21" iMac for bookkeeping, a 27" iMac for our production artist, and a new MacBook Pro to replace that sputtering, damaged older MBP for my biz partner. I'm just about through all the software upgrades/reinstalls for OS X Snow Leopard, and the laser printer is on the way, due Jan 5.

About a week ago, that iPhone I mentioned? It died on me. I put it to sleep one morning and it wouldn't wake up. However, a trip to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store on Broadway and 67th St. yielded a replacement. MobileMe was well worth the annual $99 that day alone.

All in all we had a few bumps in the year, but we definitely ended on a high note. And we even managed to make up for the months of 401k contributions we missed.

Just another tricky year of business ownership. Cheers. And Happy New Year!

2001 Called... It Said Hey Nice Website.

2009-12-23T11:14:00.004-05:00

It's astonishing how quickly time can fly by and through it all you keep saying yeah I'll update that site next week or month or year. I've never been a procrastinator when it comes to self-promotion. But revamping my own website just seemed like a time suck that I couldn't afford at any point in the past 10 years. Then again, having an outdated website is something I can't afford either. It makes me look like a soon-to-be extinct species of tech man. One that prospective interviewers (if there are any in my future) would inhale and say "Oooooh, wow. Yeah. 2001 called and said hey nice website."

And this leaves me with few options. I can't just keep reposting new content to an archaic site architecture. There are too many examples of that already. (Craigslist.) What good is a portfolio, whose leather exterior turns people off? I have to move forward and embrace the new. It's certainly not a foreign concept to designers and programmers. Something new is always coming. And we adopt The New Thing fairly readily.

For me, the procrastination has been the result of some very real and substantive changes in career direction. Right about the time the current/outdated iteration of anthonywhetzel.com was built and launched online, I started a company with a copywriter/business partner. We started our company in June of 2000, probably one of the worst years you could do so, aside from say 2008. And this start-up required a lot of time, effort and development. In New York City, there's virtually no end to the demands: taxes, accountants, lawyers, office space, bookkeeping, rent, software and hardware purchases, office networks, routers, switches, high-speed internet providers, heat in the winter (as well as "we have no heat" calls to the super), telephone and cable service outages, quarterly estimated taxes, partnership filing vs. C-corp, new business development, sales, creative fees and rate cards, and on and on. And it's still happening now. O2 Agency, as the company was named, still functions today, guided by the 2 of us and a freelancer, and almost 10 years later we're still a company clients call.

But the fallout of all this has been the abject poverty of my own website.

So with a persistent and gentle nudging from my wife, whose best friend's husband Steve Hartzog is a web tech guru and teacher, I decided to embark upon the process of upgrading my site again. I've begun the foundation work already: starting with a new re-branding of my name and identity (creative director/designer) with a new logo, fresh new fonts and soon, the roughing out of a new GUI, to which Steve will apply all sorts of cool code. Needless to say, a lot has happened since I coded my own site using html framesets!

Something else happened since the last time I built my website: smartphones. Now I'm challenged to consider building a site that could be easily read by any of the recent crop of Web-enabled mobile phones. And since the iPhone and other models don't have a Flash plug-in for mobile browsing yet, the technology employed for the website will likely avoid Flash. Which is fine - there's an amazing array of slick Javascript tools that can make for a rich online experience.

This will be fun. And demanding. But absolutely necessary. I'm excited and full of new ideas. The holidays will probably derail my progress initially, but hopefully in the next couple months I'll have a site that I can once again be proud of. Here we go.

My First Fifteen Minutes...

2009-12-03T20:03:00.001-05:00

I remember creating an identity for a client of mine 5-6 years ago, and in the process discussed with her what she'd do with her new brand. I'd already assumed she launch a website, assign me the job creating some basic collateral pieces, stationery system, etc., and she told me she was going to set up a blog, among other efforts. I'd heard of them at the time of course but didn't actually know anyone who in fact blogged. Or if they did, the didn't do it on a regular basis. I said hey, sounds great. Let me know when it's up and running.

Cut to 3-4 years later and every other day the "blogosphere" is mentioned in some form of news media. The term itself now seems passe, or at least, hackneyed. Or maybe it's a part of the atmosphere about which scientists never wanted us to know. It does seem as though hot air builds up in it. Bdump-teesh. I don't want to mention any names, Ann Coulter.

But it's undeniable that blogging has taken off. Or perhaps it has simply matured as a medium. I've received links from time to time from friends who point me to someone's eloquent, if not sometimes tedious, blog from one industry or another. But I can't say that I was ever really impressed so much by someone's industry insights that I ever felt compelled to write about a particular topic of my own. I do enjoy writing, and dabbled in poetry and even a screenplay at one point in my early- to late-20s.

So that brings me to this realization: maybe it's time I do this and begin sharing some of my experiences as graphic-artist-turned-New-York-City-business owner with others. I've spent 22 years in the business of design and advertising. Maybe it's time to start using my brain not just for conjuring creative solutions for clients, but to voice some opinions (and maybe even some frustrations) about the industry that supports me. Here we go. This could get interesting.