Collaboration Chronicles

A foreclosed home “trashout” business employs 73 people to empty 15 houses a day, and puts it all in the dump. Look at how much good stuff they’re wasting- I’m disgusted. (Also jealous- why not stash it in some of that empty property and have an auction?)

Meanwhile, Tent cities are growing with unemployed people left in the dump by corporate america.

There could be all kinds of benefit from those destroyed goods, but nobody has a chance to collect them. The cleaning company wouldn’t pay workers to do more than blitzkrieg the houses. The banks who own them don’t care. Expensive stuff doesn’t get saved from the dump. The homeless don’t get work or help.

In cases like these, the saying “capitalism is self correcting” means “people who own the system can screw it up without correcting the problems they make”. It’s someone else’s problem.

Accountability- what a great idea.

The guy who owns the trashout business has a good idea too, too bad it only makes private benefit.

For people interested in business opportunities, stories like these make a good reminder about human costs and costs to the planet.

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As Susan Strasser noted in Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, shameless landfill-stuffing practices are a product of modern consumer society. Previous generations left room for institutions like the house-to-house rag-and-bone man (who could now be the rag-and-bone-and-ebay man), but today’s corporations would rather create mega-waste.

This reminds me of Michael Pollan’s critique of modern industrial food production. Previously, cattle fertilized crops that fed cattle that fed people. Now, on one end we pump chemical fertilizer into the ground for unsustainable monoculture to fatten sick mutant cattle. At the other end their toxic waste is killing the gulf of mexico. Workers such as migrant meat-packers suffer the harshest conditions. Consumers experience a national eating disorder with a glut of artificial food-like substances.

The loops are broken, bent into weird fragments through abstract bottom-line thinking. Crazy, huh? Smart thinkers who solve these problems will create the businesses of the future.

Here’s a cool example: At Burt’s Bees, “employees waded through two weeks of garbage and found recycling opportunities that cut the company’s waste in half while generating $25,000 in estimated annual savings.”

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I think good business means making things (or re-making things) instead of wasting things. As a dealer, that’s how I try to work. (OK… I just can’t help being a pack rat too). When I left the east coast, some industrial shelving that I salvaged free from a bankrupt business was good enough to bring 3000 miles and keep using in San Francisco. When it gets full, I make room by trading away stale stock. Today I spent a beautiful morning hitting moving sales and stocking up. Then I hauled a load of old leftovers to a swap meet, and came home with free cases of mailing supplies that I usually pay for. A trade like that just feels good.

My disgust about the house trash-out situation inspired a funny thought. Bad bank execs and people who sold phony mortgages should be required to do community service, to boost good business and repay bailouts. There could be a 1930’s WPA-style program that benefits homeless people and gives them work on foreclosed property. The execs could be their assistants, and their sentences would be over when they pay back the bailouts with sweat, counted at minimum wage. Take AIG, who got $180 billion: with federal minimum wage at $6.55, payback would only take them 27 billion man-hours.

Since this is a somewhat silly post, in conclusion:

This last weekend was another episode of Stirfry Startups.  I believe it was episode 3.  I showed up late on Saturday and Sunday but was still able to get a lot of work done.

Stirfry Startups has had a specific focus at each weekend it was hosted.  This weekend it was design.  We each took turns sitting in the “hot seat” while everyone else lambasted our website design.  In my case, I presented this site and Collab21.com, which I’m working on merging.  I finally have a plan, now I just need to execute on it.

But to get to that plan was a lot of falling on my face.  “Change the sub-heading text”, “use reflexive verbs”, “the colors on CollaborationChronicles.com suck ass, fix them”.   The best advice was from Sean.  He asked me a few questions and then said “You need to put what you just told me in writing.  I have no idea what your company is about by looking at your site for 6 seconds.  You need to explain it so that people who may be interested will stay for more than 6 seconds.”  This was paraphrased, but you get the idea.

Well, I hadn’t given it that much thought.  Now I have, and that’s important.

Since I wasn’t the only person who sat in the hot seat, Sean came up with a term to describe this process.  It’s called “group strapping”.  He ruminated on the idea overnight, and on Sunday described it to us this way: “normally you pull yourself up by the bootstraps when you start a company.  ‘Group strapping’ is everyone pulling up each other’s bootstraps.”

Once we get good at this and can prove it, we’ll be in a position to offer it as a service to other groups.

If you want to read about freelancing, self employment, or running your own business, here’s a post about my little personal niche. This is a catch-all for some general ideas that are always floating around in my ever-adapting pursuit of a living with maximum personal satisfaction. (Not maximum money, by the way.) It’s a sequel to this post, A triple strategy for staying afloat with self generated income.

I like challenges and personal rewards. There wasn’t much of that back when I was a young person working in depressed, cheap upstate NY. It led to hopping around in disposable jobs (but the variety actually became quite helpful later.) The list was pretty long- animal care, cabinet-maker’s assistant, graveyard groundskeeper, porn store clerk, kid’s summer camp counselor, co-op living/dumpster-diving salvager, flea market/antique mall dealer- none lasted more than a few months. Then I finished school, traded the flea market for selling stuff on the internet, and got to be artist at a TV animation studio for 2 years.

The long term prospects in that area were dubious so I quit to move to the San Francisco Bay Area in late ‘07. Good timing, because many of my former co-workers were hit with surprise cut-backs and lay-offs.

In that year I did creative freelancing for the first time and learned tons of new skills, mostly for hustling up work and handling finances. Half of my year’s income came from animation, and half from internet sales.

Bad things happened to the economy. In December I went from having a streak of the best animation work yet, to zero. I had an inquiry from a big movie studio recruiter, then 2 weeks later his replacement followed up with news of a hiring freeze.

In creative work the competition is fierce, and if hot work stops coming there’s a plague of locusts waiting. Take a look at this generic freelance job on an average job site: Winning bidder’s rate is $8 an hour. I don’t even bother wasting time looking at those sites. Some competitors for the same work I do – animators in India or wherever- are locked in their employer’s studios as 24-hour wage slaves, in the sense of the term coined by Karl Marx. (It’s annoying when people act like it came from suburban teenagers.) I think if foreign workers are available that cheap, they can have it- if there’s no floor, there’s no competing with them, no matter how hard you work.

I had to adapt again so I changed my home business model to an equal-paying replacement for animation pay. Meanwhile I’m benefiting from the time to polish up new skills, helped by some access to free learning.

When hard work doesn’t get you ahead, flexibility can. Some keys to flexibility:

Maximize resources – combine your means
Minimize liabilities – live within your means
Expand your skill set
Know your limits

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Maximizing resources:

1. I use the previously-posted triple strategy
2. I’m using spare time and free learning
3. Here’s a long post I made about a public service I’m lucky enough to have access to for health care. Healthy San Francisco

Minimizing liabilities:

When I moved across country in ‘07, I considered renting an expensive, crappy, gas-guzzling truck. Instead I bought a used van at the same price and moved with my own equipment, using the built-in bed too. When I got to the bay area I found that the urban neighborhoods were so dense that a big vehicle wasn’t needed to get around, and the extra parking costs were quite heavy. I sold that van at enough profit between the NY price and the bay area price to cover the cost of a 3000 mile trip. The idea of handling my internet sales on nothing but a bike was daunting (stocking up goods, and hauling crates of mail to the post office)- it’s worked out quite well. The cost of owning a big vehicle that demands to get used can greatly offset the benefit of expanding the range of my business.

Moving across country from the least expensive city to the most expensive demanded a big stash of savings. Around the time I was thinking of moving, I considered other options. In mid-’07 the house I was renting went up for sale at mid 5 figures. I let the agent ooze a no-money-down mortgage sales pitch at me, until I said no and dodged a bullet. The people who bought it spent as much as the house cost for a new roof and remodeling, and then couldn’t find tenants. My neighbor who owned 4 houses across the street gave a nibble too, then he had to dump all of those houses at a 6-figure loss.

Expanding skill set:

Freelancing in animation or working at a small studio means wearing many hats. Unfortunately, the wider my range the less I can specialize. I like variety but don’t expect to work for a big studio without specializing. (A lot of high-end job ads ask for someone who’s expert at 17 things- a colleague is always saying, “who are these people”? Other people say they don’t exist and those ads are often formalities hiding a nepotistic crony system.) Anyways, specializing vs. diversifying is a constant balance. I decided that I was losing certain jobs without the ability to do character animation in Flash. Here’s a small partly-done animation scene I’m still working on.

Knowing limits:

This covers all of the above: know how hard you can compete, vs. how flexible you can be. Combine and live within your means. Balance specialty vs. variety. Here’s another limit: When you’re employing a freelancer, you can get the work fast, good or cheap- but usually only 2 of those.

When you’re in charge of your own living, I think you can choose variety, making lots of money, or personal satisfaction- but usually only 2 of those.

I don’t make a lot of money, but I like having freedom to do a variety of work I want to do, and doing OK in one of the most expensive and competitive cities.

A common question experienced business people will ask of new business owners is “how will you fund your business?”  This is a topic that allows for  creative solutions and requires meticulous documentation.

Money

Solutions

I can think of a few ways to fund a business: take out a loan, borrow, throw a fundraiser, use savings, steal.  But good businessmen will use their experience to add to this list and will also know how to improve what already works.

An example of this is Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library TV.  I’ve used Gary as an example before, but I can’t stop watching his video podcasts, and reading all of his twitter posts.  I’ll admit that I’m a little fanboyish.  But I guarantee that I’m not the only one.  Gary admits that WLTV wasn’t making money for at least a year.  He used his earnings from the success of building Wine Library, a liquor store in New Jersey, to fund WLTV until became sustainable.  Now he’s adding to his business in ways unthinking to him when his business was young.

Not everyone has that opportunity.  Collab21, for example, started with 7 people living paycheck to paycheck or worse.  Until I realized that we needed better focus in terms of wealth, wisdom and work, we were just hoping that our goals would come to life out of thin air.  Starting and running a business means catering to those three things simultaneously.

A bank is not going to give you money unless you can prove to them that you’ve done your homework and have goals.  Don’t confuse a desire with a goal.  Desires are those that fade, mutate, or aren’t achievable.  Winning the lottery, chocolate treats and a predictible stock market are desires.  Goals are described in a previous post.

Use your goals to think of creative ways to fund your business.  If using a bank is not an option, think about fund raising opportunities.  If you do not have time to plan or host a fund raising event, how long will it take to reach your goal by saving?  What else can you do (work) to raise funds (wealth) so that you can sustain your business to reach your goals (wisdom)?

Documentation

When capitalizing a business, it’s important that you document money coming in and going out.  I would personally recommend following GAAP.  It will get you started on the right foot, even if you’re only saving $100 a month.  The research required in setting up and keeping books with carry a lot way in your business.  Without doing the due diligence in the beginning, this topic will be ignored and could lead your business down a path of trouble.

Question

What creative decisions did you make in your business that affected it?

Collab21 has had a few changes in board members over the last year.  This is due to inexperience.  To thwart this, I’ve read to look for one or more of the following three things:

1. Wealth
2. Wisdom, or
3. Work

If you are considering adding more board members, make sure they are one of the three things.  You can test the last two by giving them tasks, or by applying their experience.

The people you ask to join the board who are willing to work, actually have to work.  The catch is that they don’t necessarily have to be doing as much work, or have as much passion as you in the beginning, but they should be totally bought into the goals and mission of the company.