Introducing the Agenceum

I've been busy setting up servers and figuring out what I need to do to launch this "niche design business" experiment I declared in my last post. All this material will appear on a new sub-blog called The Agenceum, which you can reach at http://davidseah.com/agenceum. The idea behind the name is Agency + Lyceum, and it was available as a domain name in case I want to expand this further in the coming year.

I'm going to try to work dirty, getting stuff up and running before it's completely ready. This will be difficult for my perfectionist side to deal with, but there are so many things to do that I really need to trust that I can refine things as they go. Plus, because I'm saying that this is a kind of experiment, I'm sort of giving myself permission to really suck so we can ALL learn from the experience. I love seeing what's going on behind the scenes, so taking a cue from that I figure others might find it interesting to see how I'm going about this.

So check out the new agenceum blog if you're interested in what goes on there. You'll notice that it's an almost-stock out-of-the-box WordPress setup, using a theme I found via the Theme Browser. It'll evolve as it goes.

Optimizing the Walk, not the Plan

Summary: I’ve been preparing the relaunch of my design business, and have realized that the way I’m doing it may not be suited to my “natural strengths” (now that I have an inkling of what they are).

If this is the case, I need to think of optimal action as applying the skills I have WITHOUT planning, trusting that I have the training to do it right. If firefighters act this way, perhaps I can learn from their example. And this suggests a radical plan of action.

>> READ FULL ARTICLE

World Domination 101.01: Tiny,Tiny Steps

SUMMARY: So how does one get started on a plan of world domination? In my case, by taking very small steps, equally-balanced between adopting the right mindset (which for me is to admit I “want more”) and creating a plan of some kind that will be measurable. I’m starting by establishing some basic assumptions about myself and the “terrain” I’ll be facing.  This ongoing series of articles is part of the new Methodology “World Domination” category here on the blog.

>> READ FULL ARTICLE

Spackling My Brand Identity: New Website Header!

One of the great sins of my personal branding effort has been to let a temporary photograph stand in as my website identity for so long. If you're reading this article through RSS you missed the new header image that has replaced the old collection of scotch bottles. I just didn't see the bottles anymore because I'm too close to the website, but every once in a while someone comments that they just assumed that my website is about drinking. I've resisted changing it until now, because I liked the photo, but I'm finally starting to define my design methodology and the image is incongruous with respect to a respectable practice. It's time to put my childish preferences aside.

The visual history of my website header is documented in my post Inadvertent Branding, but the short version of the story is that the bottles (see below) were a joking commentary on my cavalier attitude about moving my website between servers, live, without doing a whole lot of testing. At the time I was also rather fond of the colors in the image, taken with my previous-previous digital camera (a Canon PowerShot G2). Looking at the image now, I can see the nasty contrast issues. Check it out, preserved below for posterity:

The picture in the new header was taken at Starbucks with the 40D to illustrate a blog post, and was serving as (wait for it) a placeholder in my new website design. The new design, sadly, has not been going anywhere since January, so I decided to just grab the image from it. At least the new photo is somewhat informational in its subject matter. Plus, it has my two favorite pens in it (a Lamy Safari and Al-Star) laying on my favorite notebook (a Cachet Classic Graph). The eventual plan is to shoot a new header image depicting a ton of my favorite bits of gear used in support of my identity and design agency philosophy. But first, I've got to write it. So for now, this header will serve as a transitional brand image. That probably is some kind of no-no, but as I am also in a transition period, I am allowing for poetic license. So there. So much for growing out of my childish preferences.

Another transitional element I've deliberated added is the shift in colors toward the orange-blue palette that my latest business card is using:

The evolution of my business cards has never really matched the evolution of the website, but there's no more excuses now that I'm settling in a "design niche" I think is suited to my peculiar skillset and personality. To help, I'm using some language from the cards ("investigative designer") while retaining some of the keywords that the site has become known for ("productivity"). I also am using the gestalt dot story as a bullet for the design portfolio" button, which is now a little more obvious than before. I'm not sure if I like the bullet, but at least we're starting to get some repetition of elements between the business card and the website, which helps make it seem more like a "brand". It's not great consistency, but then again my so-called brand identity has always been somewhat "ambient" as opposed to "direct". Certain elements like proportions in my design work, color choice, typography, and use of photography have been fairly consistent over the past few years. The explicit use of my name has also been consistent; I demoted the original name of the blog, Better Living through New Media, to a subheader quite some time ago. This probably was a lucky decision, as I've discovered that I really do prefer to engage with people one-on-one, representing me-as-me.

So that's that. I'm giving myself another 10 years to fix the rest of it :-)

Groundhog Day Resolution Review 6-6-2009: Two New Personal Rules of Thumb

It's been a pretty BUSY couple of weeks since officially finishing my last project, but it's difficult to say exactly what I've been doing. Even more strange is that I've felt very productive despite the lack of progress on many of my long-standing business goals; I would say I'm in a happy haze of non-planned productivity, guided by a sense that I'm on the right track. In fact, I completely forgot to do my Groundhog Day Resolutions review on the 6th, which is something I usually remember when I'm feeling kind of anxious about my productivity. In last month's GHD review, I made the following statement of purpose:

[...] My best guess: be a universal designer with a transparent process built upon three core ideas:

• storytelling as a driving design element
• the use of investigative reconstruction in the discovery phase of the design process.
• audience-validated scientific creative methodology

The original plan was to write up a lot of process documentation and build-out a section of the website to link it all together. The expectation was that this would make it easier for prospective clients to see what I could do and how I approached the work. What I ended up doing instead was spend a lot of time talking to other entrepreneurs in a group I founded called The Collective. And to my surprise, I'm finding that this experience has helped cement my ongoing business strategy to what may be my essential talent: connecting stuff together.

assembling a collective

"The Collective" is a group of local people that I thought should get to know each other because I thought they all had a similar "energy". Here's the current mission statement, slightly revised because I can't help but edit stuff on-the-fly:

1. To discover what's hidden and inspiring in our local community, sharing the best and weirdest nuggets with people who really need and want to know.
2. To connect individuals with the desire to bring ideas to life with an audience of supportive, talented, and eclectic peers.

After getting back from Taiwan, it was really important to me to start having regular meetings again. What I like about our meetings is that the purpose is no more than bringing people actively in the moment of facing a personal challenge, and yet everyone comes away with some useful nugget of information, idea, or insight that somehow begets more action. It is similar to the effect that I got from my old New Media Group (now defunct), but this group is explicitly designed around a core of sharing stories about our current actions, as opposed to being about a specific technology or professional field.

What I learned from the New Media Group holds true with The Collective: it doesn't take very much to create a group beyond volunteering to meet with people. By default, that makes you the leader, and after that it's all about the interest you can pour into the membership. What makes a group viable is finding the core participants that also add energy to the group; without that, the group will not be self-sustaining or fun. Since this group formed based on recognizing that there were people I knew who already had the right temperament, we started out with a strong core.

In the past, I would have said that finding people that really click together is an extremely improbable event, requiring a lot of luck and a favorable locale in a creative urban environment. But by applying the second rule, you can attract them.

create value every day, and make sure people see it

You've heard the expression that "results matter", and not surprisingly a lot of energy goes into making sure that those results don't get screwed up. We spend a lot of time agonizing about perfectionism, best practices, process, and correct decision making.

Now, I happen to love all that stuff, and when it's time to get focused and produce this is an attitude that is good to have. However, if you are trying to grow your opportunities (which as a freelancer, I surely desire), then focusing on perfecting your processes isn't going to help because that's stuff that is hidden or unparsable to your prospective audience, who are not experts in your field. So the obvious move is to properly explain it, which is a good thought but ultimately wrong. Spending a lot of time talking about process, scrambling to findi the right superlatives to conceptually frame your excellence in the marketplace, may make you sound competent but it doesn't create the impulse to buy. It merely creates the opportunity for you to continue to try to convince people that you can do what you say you can do, and that you are who you say you are.

The other way to do it is for people to come to you because of something they have seen, or through word of mouth. Something so intriguing that they have come to seek you out to inquire after it. This is, I think, the ideal scenario. The question is how to get there.

In the very first Printable CEO™ form, The Concrete Goals Tracker, I emphasized that for any of my actions to move my business forward, they had to fulfill the two criteria of tangibility and being seen. If your activities don't produce something tangible that is seen by someone other than yourself, they are supportive (which is productive) or a waste of time as far as your goals are concerned.

After spending the past few years creating productivity forms based on this idea, I've come to the conclusion that opportunity comes from the pursuit of just two actions:

• Creating something I can see, touch, or evaluate with my own senses
• Actively making the effort to show what I've made to the people around me

I remember once asking a fine artist painter what they hoped to "achieve" with their work. He looked at me funny, knowing that I was an ignorant engineer who had somehow tricked his way into Art School, and said that he was happy for the audience to provide their own interpretation. He was creating a work that would encourage new thoughts, making connections between experiences they've had with the piece that he had created for his own mysterious purposes. The art, for him, was in the interaction. And so it is also with creating tangible artifacts to share; people will find their own uses and bring their own interpretations with them. But if they like it and see possibilities for integrating your work into their life, you are in the unique position to offer it. But they have to see it first. And for that to happen, you've got to make it and then go out of your way to show it.

Adding the lesson of The Collective to the previous two actions:

• Endeavor to recognize, create and show things that add value to the world and its inhabitants

Without this statement, the tangibility and showing are really just random shots in the dark. I got lucky that some of my writing and projects on this website caught the eye of people, and that experience of having mattered to a few people fired me up to do more. I made sure that what I made mattered to me first, and then I shared them in the hopes that the works would trigger useful applications in whoever happened to come across them. What is new for this month, though, is actively endeavoring to add value to specific people in my local network of entrepreneurs. There is something magical about that which I haven't completely sussed out; it may just be that people are social creatures, and by creating these bonds I am fulfilling my need for connection. The statement is also, perhaps, the foundation of true design as I would like to practice it.

wrapping up

So what am I planning on doing for the next month until 7/7/2009?

• Continue to hold Collective meetings for local energizing.
• Get involved in other people's projects by knowing what they are doing (in essence, helping them "show" what they're making so I can communicate this to other people)
• Resurrect the stalled freelancer network project, but this time I will apply the criteria I describe to create a dossier of freelancers based on my own assessments and personal interviews. I just like to know what's going on, really, but I also need to know who my go-to developers and designers are. My rolodex is awfuly thin.
• Chip away at the description of what I do, but from a connection-making perspective. I still need good materials that describe what I do,. and that also applies to fixing the website. I'm kind of resigned to this being a long-term project, but with the first three items on this list, I think my motivation will rise because I'm immersing myself into the business of others.

Dave out!

24 Hours a Day

It's the first day back from my Taiwan trip, during which I was able to connect with a lot of life-affirming family experiences. Today is also the first day in about 4 months since I felt like I was allowed to think about something that was NOT the museum project. While I have a few possible leads percolating that I should attend to, I'm purposely relishing this first day as the beginning of a new period of endeavor. I can resume a path that I now know is critical to my sense of well-being.

There are several things that I am regarding as critical: regular blogging about ideas and inspiration and having the time to creating and refine new tools and ways of understanding. I'm looking forward to redeveloping local community and social media connections, which has been on the backburner for several months, and somehow making it a core part of how I do my work. I'm very intrigued by the possibility of creating new offerings in the areas of writing, creative direction, and product design. The question is how to actually go about getting all this done with as little fuss as possible, while not starving to death.

balancing guilt with mission

While I largely enjoyed my last project, I found it difficult to keep my mind satisfied with just the single project, especially as a remote-working arrangement. Although I wasn't required to tune out all my other side projects, I nevertheless felt a kind of guilt when I wasn't spending every peak productive hour on the many project challenges we were facing. While it all worked out pretty well in the end, I can't help but think that with just some more hours spent here and there, it might have been better or more sophisticated. In fact, I know that more time spent in any way would have resulted in improvement. However, I also recognized early on that there's a limit to how much you can sacrifice of your personal life to a project before it starts to corrode the core of your soul. I think I struck a reasonable balance for this project, but I still felt guilty about reserving the time for myself; this is perhaps a vestige of working for video game and startup companies. It's a dumb attitude to have, I know, but if there's some way of avoiding the feeling of guilt, I'm all for it. In this case, it's giving myself permission based on prior negative experiences.

Building on that insight, I'm very much aware that there are going to be compromises between time I'd like to spend creating new stuff, time spent maintaining the business, time creating new infrastructure for growth, and time actually earning money. And that's just the work side of things; then there's all the personal time. As it was with the museum project, I need to be mindful that all these activities are important, not just the ones that seem more important. It helps, perhaps, that the model of life I'm pursuing attempts to combine personal time and work time, which is sort of the missionary mindset that I grew up with. I touched on the mission in my last Groundhog Day Resolution Review, which is to generally write about and create things that are universally empowering with a group of people that enjoy the same thing. In other words, make stuff that makes a difference, with people that believe that this is a mission well worth pursuing.

I've been defining my mission for a very long time, and have evolved ways of dealing with the intangible contributors to depression. Much of the Printable CEO Series is designed to give shape to otherwise-invisible forces of procrastination and blow them aside with concrete progress markers. Today, what's foremost on my mind is setting expectations for what I can realistically do in a day. Since my mind is also very much on getting billable hours scheduled, I have to also be mindful of not letting those thoughts unbalance my overall mission. Billable hours are not the point of having my business, after all. My business exists to fund the mission.

setting starting guidelines

So today's thought was that I needed to set a guideline of billable hours per day, and let that shape the way I schedule all my other mission-critical activities. Billable hours are one of those things that seems important, particularly because many business advisers stress that revenue is king. I agree that it's important, but I'm capping its importance to sustenance levels. And the sustenance figure is shockingly low: 4 billable hours a day, 5 days a week. At first that might seem absurd, but considering that as a solo business practitioner I have to do all the non-billable activities like marketing, networking, business development, accounting, and so on it is actually pretty optimistic. The other side of the revenue equation is controlling costs and managing cash flow; with a lowered billable hour bar, keeping tabs on costs and cash becomes more important. This historically has been an area that I've never found very interesting, but now that I an acknowledging the need, I can start to see the opportunity to evolve some new tools and processes.

So where does the rest of the time go? To overhead activities related to business development and maintenance, but a goodly chunk will go to maintaining blogging momentum. I know from past experience that this will lead to productive connections later. For example, the photograph that leads this post shows 24 boxes, which is the beginning of some kind of planner tool that I can just see at the edges of my imagination. Four of those boxes represent billable hours. Eight of those boxes are sleep. The other boxes get sucked up with maintenance. What kind of big picture tool could develop from having just drawn those boxes? What insights can we gain from representing time as a stack of boxes next to 4 categories of activity? I don't know, but I'm putting it up there because I think it might go somewhere. The mere act of writing it down has created a thread of investigation, and the audacity of sharing this incomplete thought may trigger a reaction from the Internet. The universe has a strange way of getting back at you, and in a way my entire business model is based on the belief that this is a good way of creating opportunity. If you read between the lines of successful businesses that have adapted to market forces, this is the essential mechanism at work.

So...here we go!

Groundhog Day Resolution Review Day 5/5/2009

It's that time again, Groundhog Day Resolutions Review Day. I happen to be on the tropical island of Taiwan at the moment, attending numerous family functions related to the passing of my grandmother and 80th birthday of my father. The return to Taiwan, a place that I have associated with intellectual captivity from the ages of 9 to 18, is proving to be an excellent backdrop to my thoughts about the future. In short: it's not as bad as I remember it, and I'm seeing the island from a more mature and empowered perspective.

There's a lot to like about this place: great food, an incredibly dynamic society, lower cost of living (if you know how to live like the average Taiwanese), and an increasingly international atmosphere. It's a lot different from the 1980s. I'm even starting to think that I could finally learn the language, armed with the investigative techniques that I have developed over the years.

where we are now

While I'm feeling positive overall, my ongoing resolution to develop creative and financial independence has been causing a small amount of restlessness. As I said in the 4/4/2009 review, my resolutions are based around the following:

To write about what catches my eye, create that which illuminates, and through these actions build financial independence.

The actual method of following-through with this I had left to "selling products that tickle my fancy", the current incarnation being the preprinted pads I'd started selling experimentally a couple of years ago. I don't have any idea whether it's viable as a product over the long run, but certainly the very act of trying creates opportunities that are yet unseen. So long as I don't lose money on this, I'm probably going to be OK. When I return to the United States in mid-May, I plan to get back on this project and really make it happen. Ever since I was in the 4th grade, I've wanted to print stuff and distribute it; I used to buy sheets of carbon paper when I was a kid and make forms in triplicate, because I was so enthralled with the idea of creating multiple impressions from a single action. In a way, this is the reason why I also like computer programming: write once, distribute forever. The idea of putting something out there in the world that is real and tangible is one that I just find innately exciting.

where we're going

In the meantime, there are certain realities I've got to face. First and foremost, I've just come off a year-long project, and it's time to drum up some new business. I'm rusty at the new business development side of things, and so it's time to start talking to people and letting them know I'm again available. However, in the context of Groundhog Day Resolutions, I should be focused on drumming up the right kind of business. This goes beyond hawking my market-ready skills in the analysis, visual design, and interactive development realms. What's more important to me is the KIND of projects and clients I best work with.However, I also need to eat, so I can't afford to be too picky about my projects. The compromise: be as clear as possible what kind of projects have been a historical "good fit". It's time for some marketing communication.

And so, I've been writing out several lists to help define my main points. Here's my rough list:

• Practitioner Types: visual designer, investigative designer, interactive designer
• Universal Skills: pattern recognition, analysis, ideation, explanation, documentation
• Trade Skills: Flash/Director development, UI Design, Information Architecture, Information Graphic Design, Digital Media Production, Copywriting
• Special Emphasis: Story as major design element, workflow and process improvement, productivity and empowerment, cross-discipline thinking, novel approaches to change perspectives
• Personal Qualities: Likes 1-to-1 relationships. Likes work that affects people on the individual empowerment level, not faceless corporations.
• Ideal Projects for Hire: Start with a question or desire, discover and develop a hypothetical process, create an implementation strategy, create artifacts.
• Ideal Areas of Endeavor: To start, PCEO forms, stationery, concept and product designs, software utilities
• Qualities of Work: informational, insightful, expressed through functional design, imbued with aesthetic and functional quality.
• Interested Businesses: software companies, advertising agencies, educational material developers, museums

I'm at the point now where I'm stare at these lists a lot to figure out which points need to be explicitly communicated and which points can be conveyed indirectly. My best guess: be a universal designer with a transparent process built upon three core ideas:

• storytelling as a driving design element
• the use of investigative reconstruction in the discovery phase of the design process.
• audience-validated scientific creative methodology

These are all ideas that I've touched on over the past four years; it's time to stand firm and establish the foundation of my "designer identity".

I've been chasing this for a looong time, and now that I'm free to starve to death on the open market, I'm feeling especially motivated to get moving. :-)

So that's the emphasis for the month of May. We'll touch base again on June 6 to see how it went. If you have posted your own Groundhog Day Resolution Review for today, please feel free to leave a comment with a link back to your entry; it would be cool to have an informal group review!

Groundhog Day Resolution Review Day 4/4/2009

The past month has been devoted toward getting our interactive project polished for the opening of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center. We'll be doing final tweaks to the interaction and presentation for the remainder of this week, and then we're done. Done! After that, I can start to think about what comes next for me.

I couldn't remember what my actual Groundhog Day Resolution (GHDR) was, and it turns out that I didn't really define it succinctly this year. The GHDR-related posts of this year have been pained attempts to maintain some semblence of momentum in the face of another project that consumed the bulk of my mental energy. Today, I'm content to just say that I want to write about what catches my eye and create that which illuminates, and through these activities establish financial independence by selling products that tickle my fancy. This may not be the fast track to wealth, but it's the way I would like to do it.

I took some significant steps last month by hiring a personal assistant to handle some of the groundwork in finding a local printer and establishing an Amazon fulfillment account so I can do another run of Emergent Task Planner Pads to have them available all the time, and from there expand into other types of pre-printed products. My reasoning is that with a persistent, easy-to-fulfill presence on the Internet, I'll be able to create a small marketplace for useful forms and productivity planning products. The whole idea tickles me, like having a lemonade stand on the Internet.

Another component of the plan is to make myself available to more people, because this is ultimately what leads to satisfying project work. As interesting as the museum project was, our team was spread between two coasts and the lack of face-to-face time almost killed me. I hadn't realized this was such an important aspect of my working life, but apparently it is more critical to me than ever before. Therefore, I'll be actively seeking collaborators and co-schemers in the Southern New Hampshire / Greater Boston Area to see what kind of daily face-to-face time I can guarantee in my workday. This means that I'm going to be building the organization itself and actively nurturing its culture around familiar themes:

• surround myself with positive-minded, self-empowered, conscientious and kind people who are obsessive about excellence.
• make and show what we mean

As I move into May, my time for new projects will start to open up, and I'll be taking on new work. I've already gotten a couple of nibbles for interesting projects, but I need to ensure that I am not starving my ultimate goals.

For now, however, I'm completely soaked in finishing up the current project. After that, I need to re-enter the world that I've shut myself out of for the past six months: blogging, social media, collaboration, and discovering sources of personal inspiration. There are dozens of people to email and chat with with hundreds of threads to follow. Simultaneously, I'll make an attempt to rebrand strongly around my core values and funnest competencies; I feel it's gotten way too serious around here lately. I'm thinking there needs to be more pictures of cats, sandwiches, and odd objects found in between the machinery of culture.

Yeah.

GHD Resolution Review Day 3/3/2009

It's my first Groundhog Day Resolution Review Day for 2009, and I still haven't gotten around to defining my Groundhog Day Resolutions (GHDRs). In my last rambling report on the process, I had attempted to outline a comprehensive approach to the definition process; rereading it, my attention wandered within seconds, so I have just distilled them into a set of steps:

1. First define A VISION: a story of the "more-awesome" version of the life that I want.
2. Next, itemize my existing strengths and tendencies (both good and bad).
3. Finally, create three levels of action, built around the existing strengths from step 2:
   • Define several tangible steps that can be achieved in a short amount of time (15min to 1 hour)
   • Define a tangible achievement levels, built from tangible steps, that results in a new vision-related resource or capability.
   • Devise a means of measuring the effectiveness, through counting or direct observation, of your new capabilities.
4. Tell people you're going to do this, and then do something.

This methodology, incidentally, is based on the basic video game theory I apply in designing simple games.

I've procrastinated long enough in defining step 1 and step 3, and it's probably because my mind automatically is trying to optimize my decision making with thoughts of THE BEST WAY, THE MOST EFFICIENT STRATEGY, and MAXIMUM FLEXIBILITY, which tends to make me want to go read some more books or babble onward because there is no way of knowing which approach be the one that is most optimal. So I'll just pick a place to start and, trusting to hindsight being 20/20, will find out later.

THE VISION is, in its simplest form, to live a meaningful life of individual creativity and contribution. I'd like it to be self-sufficient, and I want to have a sense of authorship. So without mulling it over too much longer, I'm going to declare just one resolution: Create a shop filled with stuff I like. This has been a long time in the making, starting with the original drive to sell printed paper pads over a year ago. And most recently, I've been inspired anew by reading British fashion designer Paul Smith's book You Can Find Inspiration in Anything. My sister had given it to me some time ago, and while I had flipped through it I had not read it closely. There is a marvelous introduction by author William Gibson, which makes perfect sense editorially-speaking if you've read Pattern Recognition. The philosophy of the Paul Smith enterprise itself is not about fashion, but about connecting playfully with individuals; fashion just happens to be the medium through which Paul Smith makes this happen world-wide.

So...let's make that shop. Just make it. Design and optimal thinking can come later, once I have something I can look at.

To this end I have hired a personal assistant for 40 hours this month. The way this came about was completely serendipitous: I was talking to my friends Sid and Sara at Plastic Camera Studio. Sid shoots portrait and editorial photography in the Southern New Hampshire area, and Sara shoots fine art photography using the albumen process. Sara also works in various adminstrative capacities at educational institutions nearby, but I had never thought that this was an opportunity until we were all hanging out one night in the studio jabbering about trips. I was thinking about planning a trip up through California over a month, meeting people and doing design gigs while writing about the process. Sid told me about their plan to someday return to California for a photographic expedition, California being the only place they didn't linger the last time they did a cross-country tour. As we discussed our ideas for funding our trip, it occurred to me that there was quite a bit of overlap in the planning. Shared interest + administrative experience + willingness to see what happens lead to me commiting to 40 hours.

I've never had an assistant of any kind before, but I'm finding that it's sharpened my attention on certain matters. For example, I've had to think of how to explain what I'm trying to do to someone in the room with me. Also, some old management habits surfaced to be reshaped in the context of "being in charge". And as always, Clarity is Fleeting, so we're trying to establish some means of communication that helps provide the continuity and context for the work. Right now that solution is BaseCamp plus brief meetings. After assigning the rather nebulous task of reviewing all my Printable CEO material, we regrouped and decided to focus on getting the store working. That means (1) making new product and (2) selling it online. She's gathering contact information for all the printers in this area (and a few online) that we can establish some kind of relationship with, and after that she'll be establishing how one goes about using Amazon Fulfillment. The goal is to have something in operation at the end of this month, or be ready to do it.

In the meantime, I am in crunch mode on the Museum project I've been working on over the past year, a large-scale interactive children's exhibit for a Holocaust museum opening this April in Skokie, Illinois. This is the final crunch, so I have had very little time to blog or think about new business in May. However, I've had a few ideas:

• I may be offering some coaching hours to see if I like it; this isn't much different from the highly-appreciated "executive sounding board" service I sometimes offer to clients.
• I also do want to pick up the development of the long-dormant Flash version of the Emergent Task Timer as a way of getting familiar with the current crop of Flash development tools. Adobe AIR? Maybe even iPhone development, though I dislike AT&T so much that I would probably just develop with the emulator and team up with someone.
• There's the repackaging and reorganization of content on davidseah.com itself into a more accessible magazine-like format.

I've always liked the idea of having a magazine, but I've never known exactly what it would be about. When I started blogging, I blogged about what I liked in hopes of discovering just what those main categories would be, but never thought that was enough reason for itself. Reading about Paul Smith's approach, in which he just sold stuff he liked, I'm getting the idea that this might be the approach that work for me: write about the stuff the catches my eye, with trademark obsessiveness. There is always a market, though small, for quality obsessiveness packaged well. Will it be enough to sustain me as a business operator? We'll see how it looks on April 4th, our next GHD Resolution Review Day.

Explaining My Freelance Practice

I was chatting virtually with my friend Britt Raybould about just what it is that she "does" for work; this has been an ongoing three-year conversation since she first introduced herself to me at South by Southwest 2007. I know she's intelligent, competent, driven, and writes well; I just didn't know exactly how to frame these desirable qualities in my mind in a "work" context.

In the last exchange we had this morning, she shared with me the fruits of a night's thinking about the problem, and bing...I finally got it. And at the same time, I had an insight about how I should tackle the challenge of describing myself in a way that felt intuitive. It's a matter of remembering that the biggest challenge of describing yourself isn't coming up with the right keywords and categories; it's being able to paint a picture in people's minds about how they work with you.

I've been spending a lot of time over the past few years figuring out how to describe myself accurately, and I actually enjoy this. I love trying to find the differentiating nuances in my work that also reflect my personality. However, I haven't spent so much time thinking about how to "paint the picture", figuring that so long as I kept showing things people would figure out if they liked what I did or not by themselves. It's a practical implementation of "The Law of Attraction", the idea that "like attracts like". It also is a good way to not have to make a decision about what it is that I do in convenient "HIRE ME FOR THIS" form. This is probably because I hate labels and boxes; they feel so limiting, and I that's why I don't have a regular "business website" packed with the usual service offerings.

Since I need to start rustling up business for April/May 2009, I can't put this off too much longer. Thankfully, Britt's comments to me have kicked me in the butt towards action.

The Standard Approach

As much as I prefer not to be pigeon-holed, I must admit that labels and boxes are effective tools in narrowing down a potential niche of work. I can throw out a few of them quickly--design, writing, interactive, Flash, productivity--and a certain narrowing of understanding occurs. Potential clients actually get an idea if they can use me or not to get certain types of work done. The questions that inevitably arise next are:

• What kind of design/writing/interactive is that?
• Are you good enough to meet my needs?
• And in the best case, will blow away my expectations?
• And will this be a great value for my money?

Back when I worked in more traditional web agencies, my typical reaction to these questions would be to provide the information I thought the prospective client needed to make the decision, using as little boilerplate as possible. By boilerplate, I mean making empty claims on paper. You know, stuff like, "you should hire me because I am excellent and conscientious and devoted to making you look good." It may be a true sentiment backed by genuine intention, but it lacks substance because experience has also taught us that intention and action do not guarantee satisfaction. In other words, you may get the exact results you paid for, but you might not be happy with what you got. Que sera.

So instead of focusing on these kind of statements or relying on my client list to make indirect claims of excellence, I put the thinking work into the response, provide useful insights, and show examples of past work that are relevant to the problem. A lot of people freak out at this approach, saying that I'm giving away the ideas to a prospect who is likely to turn around and just implement the solution themselves, or even just use it to re-pitch their RFP to get a lower price somewhere else. While this is certainly a possibility, I don't see how I can lose. In the best case, the prospective client is impressed by my analysis and candor and we start a good working relationship. Or, the prospective client sees that the way I'd implement the problem is how they would do it too, and they're happy to pay someone to do it right because they don't have the staff resources to handle it themselves. And if the prospective client is just fishing for free information for the cheapest price under the guise of putting out work for bid, they've done you a favor by looking elsewhere because they've just shown a lack of business morality that will bite you in the butt later. I'd rather just provide the insight for free, then consider the time well-spent in collecting another datapoint on what people are up to in the business world.

Freelancing is a feast-or-famine lifestyle at times, and since clients are perceived the ones with the power, freelancers is to think in terms of maximizing their exposure to as many clients as possible. Then, the trick is to be as flexible as possible without hurting yourself. This is basic survivalist thinking, which begets what I might call the standard freelancing approach:

• Where do prospective clients look for freelancers? I better make sure I'm with all the other freelancers then, because that's where the clients will look.
• How do prospective clients find freelancers that do what I do? I know they ask for, so I better list those same things so they find me in keyword searches.
• How do I convince prospective clients to hire me? I need to show them the work I've done that is the work they are looking for.

Once you take care of these three questions, the process becomes a game of numbers and luck. If enough people see you, and you stand out in a way that they happen to like, you'll get chosen. Superb salesmanship and follow-through then come into play, and your reputation will start to grow. It just takes time.

The Personal Approach

I'm not planning pursuing a straight service model, otherwise I'd just be hanging my set of keywords up on various job boards. The skills I have, in other words, are NOT my offering. I'm seeking a certain kind of personal interaction that happens to make use of my skills; this is the expression of my general desire to create more "awesome and inspiring" experiences for myself and people that I like. The logic may sound business-backwards, I know, but wouldn't it be great if I could make it work? And I know it can work...just go to SXSW Interactive or a Podcamp sometime and see for yourself.

I see my challenge not as "accurately categorize the work", which is how I would describe the Standard Approach outlined in the previous section. That's phone-book thinking, guaranteed to put you in competition with everyone else that "does" the same thing. And from a design perspective it's a big sin, similar to organizing a website based on how the database schema came out, or like writing code documentation based on a list of methods in the API. This is dumb, because there is little sense of what causes what and why, which is essential to creating any kind of meaningful understanding. You just end up with a collection of descriptors that are not connected in any kind of narrative or qualitative sense, which ends up being as frustrating as a bad round of charades. You need to have some kind of story that lays down the foundation, which then helps put you in context to the prospect's vision of the good life. That's a great place to be...now you just have to deliver! :-)

So for me, I'd like to reframe the questions in two parts. First, from my perspective:

• What kind of people do I like and respect? Creative, generous, positive people who are trying to do something different and are willing to be a little weird.
• What are my favorite skills that can be made a productive part of their working life? It's writing, brainstorming, categorizing, explaining, analyzing, and making things make sense to me using whatever supporting media I can dream up. In the past I'd made the mistake of doing things that were not among things I enjoyed doing (straight website development, for example), and the results were disappointing.

And from the client's personal perspective:

• Are you someone that I'd like to work with? This is a matter of showing enough of myself and my personality that's relevant to a good mutual working relationship. The various tools and writing I've done become the marketing collateral; I've just got to make it easier to look through.
• What kind of things can I ask you to help me with? What kind of things can you handle for me? This becomes a statement of what I'm willing and able to do.
• Can I actually envision using your products and services to make my life better in some way? That comes down to composing a picture and telling a story.

The combination of the personal approach with the standard approach creates, for me anyway, a more well-rounded strategy for pursuing new business. You could say what I'm doing is just another way of explaining a certain kind of salesmanship and marketing. The difference, though, is that the interaction satisfies both parties in an authentic fashion: "This is me. You are you. Is there a genuine complement of skills, needs, and collaboration in the making? Let's find out."