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Business as Unusual: Week of 3/23/2009 – Finding Balance in Your Work
March 23rd, 2009 | Author: admin

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned being a stay at home, work from home father starting my own business is to find balance in my work. By this I mean finding time for both my work for others and for my personal projects. Work for others grows business worth, personal projects grows self worth. It is a welcome break. A chance to work in your own world. A vacation. Above all else, self worth directly grows business worth.

I have found as I work on my personal projects, my inspiration and excitement towards my business work grows. Even if it is just 15 minutes a day, I set time aside for myself. It is a means for me to unwind and relax my creativity. It is a reminder of who I am and why I love design and love my job. I set goals for myself and always keep plenty of ideas in my head for the future. It keeps me fresh and ready to tackle any project.

This week has been my busiest yet. I have begun work with a company designing CMS websites. I have spent a vast amount of time training with the technology and I’m excited about its possibilities. I have decided to migrate my Duck of All Trades site over to a CMS system. I hope to have this done in the upcoming weeks. In addition, it will most likely be combined with this blog. The combined site will be put on www.duckofalltrades.com and this site as a mirror site. Nothing will change with my blog and you can still read it here, but it will be more of an integral part of Duck of All Trades. This should be a great example of personal work influencing business.

I will keep you up to date and share my experiences with the new websites I will be producing. In addition, this week should see the finishing of Stromple the puppet. He now has skin! Just not on his body. I will have a big update for him tomorrow and he should be done by the end of the week for an unveiling on Monday. Wednesday I should have a Moo-Pig update for you and Thursday Purple Fish will stop by. Of course Friday’s are always fun and exciting.

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Business as Unusual: Week of 3/16/2009
March 16th, 2009 | Author: admin

What a fun, busy and productive week it has been! Life is crazy and beautiful. I have more projects going on than I can possibly handle, which is a good thing, and lots more on the way. Have a baby on the way in June and a gallery to plan for in July. Our house addition is in full swing with my new studio in the works. I have made great new connections in the social networking world and have gotten the opportunity to work with a variety of new clients. Business is growing as word of mouth is spreading. Yes, things are chaotic with deadlines looming and new ones added everyday. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

In the coming week I hope to complete the Stromple puppet. Expect a big update on that tomorrow. I also hope to produce a dummy book for “Moo-Pig.” I’m still debating submitting it for publication.

With everything so busy and with final having the satisfaction of a tiny bit of success, I would like to share with you a secret that has helped me more than any other in the business world. It is a very simple thing that is often forgotten but just as simple things often are, it is a powerful tool: Kindness.

Being kind is one of the greatest qualities a person/company can posses and it’s a simple thing to accomplish. Here are simple ideas I recommend to do to be “kind” in business:

  • If someone contacts you, contact them back.
  • Care about the job, not the money. I have found that when I put a job first, the rest takes care of itself.
  • Be flexible.
  • My policy is advice is always free.
  • Be honest, be yourself.
  • Don’t ”nickel and dime.” Give a price and stick to it, be upfront and don’t add hidden charges.
  • Go to bat if needed.
  • Respect everyone.
  • Listen.
  • Love what you do. 
  • Follow the golden rule.
  • Be Humble.

Adding kindness to your business structure will go a long way in selling your self and services via word of mouth. It will also go a long way in being happy in what you do. Kindness is highly infectious. Go out an contaminate the world.

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Business as Unusual
March 02nd, 2009 | Author: admin

I have a business update for you this Monday, but before I get to the boring stuff, here is what is going on in family life:

I ripped my pants. One of my favorite pair of pajama pants that is. It started out as a small hole with a little draft in the seat and ended up in a good laugh. I can’t resist a good laugh! I communicated with Keeley about the the hole in a way only her and I could understand. The way married couples do. This left Samuel, my son, out of the loop on what was happening so he had no idea I knew of the hole. Keeley told Samuel as I pretended not to hear. Playing dumb comes natural to me. He was having a bad day and needed a good laugh. He waited until my back was turned and I was distracted. He gripped both sides of the hole and *RIP.* What started as a small hole was now an open gash. He couldn’t stop laughing. When he finally did, I simply replied. “you mean I have had a hole in my pants? No wonder every time I tooted I heard the sound of a flag flapping.” This sent him into more fits of laughter. I think there is a moral here. Maybe take one for the team? No. When life gives you a problem, the best cure is laughter? Maybe. No, I think what I think the moral is this: Toot jokes are super funny to a six year old.”

I have put a lot of work into my freelance design business this week, mostly by working on the website. I have optimized, socialized, prioritized, adwordatized, tednerized, designatized and etceteraized www.duckofalltrades.com with one goal in mind: Create a self maintaing site that I can easily update with new content as needed that meets the needs of my target audience. I’m hoping to get it to a point where I can focus less on the business side of DoAT and more on design. I want the site to take care of itself.

When I last left you, I realized how little time people actually spent on my site.  Most people were clicking on one page and then leaving. I set out to fix this problem by directing searchers to new front pages that are designed to draw their attention in more and be targeted to what they are looking for. The results are a success so far. On an average, people are staying 2-4 times longer and clicking through more of the pages. Traffic wise, I’m still averaging about the same as before. I’m hoping to increase this next week. I have a few ideas on how to do this. I’m trying to be creative about it. Should be fun. I am thinking it will be better to push this site and use ite as a launching pad to my other endeavors. I want to create something people care about.

I should have numbers to share with you next week. Right now it is still too early for them to be significant. I can tell that this site has been successful so far. Readership has doubled every other day! I already get more people on this site than the DoAT site. I have been using AdWords to advertise DoAT now for about two weeks. So far I have had little success. When I say little, I mean none. My click through ratios are HORRIBLE. On an average, they are .04%. What does this mean? Out of every 100 people that view my ad, only .04% click on the ad and go to my site. That isn’t even a whole person! That’s like a whole person’s pet gerbil. So out of 100 people, 1 pet gerbil goes to my site. Gerbils don’t need design or illustration. I think they just like to play with mice.

The hardest part of being an artist is knowing when to put then paintbrush down. When to stop? I thought I was at this point with Moo-pig. Apparently not. I had an idea yesterday that I just had to try out. Originally I had planned to do the book in black and white. Then it turned to black and white with a splash of blue. Yesterday I had the idea of adding in more color to see how it works; a pig color/texture for Moo-pig and only Moo-pig. The idea? In Moo-pig’s world, she seems out of place, not real. She isn’t one thing, she isn’t the other. But visually, she could be colorful and real in an otherwise black and white world. She is herself and that is what makes her real. Might work, I’m playing around with the idea. Here are two images. One with her in black and white and one with her in pig color. What do you think?

Moo-pig in color

Moo-pig in color

Moo-pig black and white

Moo-pig black and white

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Category: Business, Illustration, Life, Moo-Pig, Uncategorized  | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  | 2 Comments
Business as usual?
February 22nd, 2009 | Author: admin

I have spent an incredible amount of time lately (thanks to my partner in Design Connie sharing with me books by Seth Godin) evaluating my business. What is it? What does it need to be? Where is it going. As a stay at home father, it is crucial for me to be successful. My wife Keeley and I made the decision a year ago with the birth of our daughter that I should try to work from home and be a stay at home father. After spending 6 years working in a graphic design market as a temp, a freelancer and a contractor, it made sense. For once I would be in control of my destiny. My job security would not depend on if the company I was working for at the time had the payroll or the business. My job security would now rely on me. I was free to make of it what I could within a reasonable limit. Not to mention the thousands a year we would save in child care and the piece of mind we would have knowing that our youngest would be well taken care of and our oldest would have the help he needed with his homework.

I’m happy to say that after a year, I haven’t failed. My business has shown progress with slow and steady growth and I have successfully changed 875 diapers, 342 which have been rather unpleasant in the smell department. OK, so that’s an estimate. You don’t seriously think I keep track of diapers, right? However, I now realize that it won’t be enough to not fail. I need to thrive, to find my voice and find an audience. I have put a number of measures in place to allow this. I have been tracking stats more seriously for my site. I have it optimized and streamlined. I have started using Adwords to help promote my site and attract new visitors. Most importantly, I have realized what a SMALL window the web is. Most users I have view my site for less than 30 seconds. Most click off after one page. A quick exit. To me, this is scary. How do you sell a customer in less than 30 seconds and after a one brief glance. This is a question I have struggled with lately. It isn’t an easy thing to do. The tough thing about the web is if a viewer isn’t immediately impressed, they can look elsewhere with the click of a mouse.

My remedy for this is working on making my website more relevant. The website as we know it is dead. The web is no longer an album, such as the Beatles’ “Seargent Peppers Lonely Heart Club Band,” meant to be listened to from beginning to end. It is a streamlined collection of all their greatest hits in MP3 format and the surfer has the power to go to any song, fast forward, rewind and skipping to only the parts they want to hear. Like it or not, google and other search engines have led to this. So what works? Relevancy. Controlling what the viewer sees through that small window by using more specific keywords and giving the mythical search engine crawlers what they need: better site maps. Also, I have tailored my AdWords to point potential clients to the information they want, not to what I think they may want after they give me a chance. That way if they only give me 30 seconds of their time, it is 30 seconds dedicated to something that might interest them. I also plan to add more visuals. You can learn much more about a picture at a moments glance than a grouping of words.

So will it succeed? I can guarantee that it won’t fail, at least not in my mind. You see, I believe the only way to fail is to not learn. If you are walking along and you trip because your shoe laces are untied, have you failed? Not if you get up, realize that if you tie them, you won’t trip again and then keep them tied. When you learn from a mistake, that’s not a failure. That is a growth. Eventually you learn to tie double knots and it is smooth sailing from there. More importantly, have I succeeded? I see that answer everyday when my daughter surprises me with what she has learned in her short time on earth or when I pick my son up from school and find out he has made another 100 on his spelling test. That is all the success I need as a father to inspire the success I will need as a new business owner trying to find his way.

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