Collaboration Chronicles

It was right there on the website, beckoning me to buy. It was an item I could really use for my business. But the site wouldn’t take my order because I didn’t have an address inside the country.

This was a common problem I had been working around for some time. It’s one that benefits me, when people buy from me, but costs me when I have to buy from an alternate source or just forget it.

There are international re-mailing services. They almost all seem to work by yearly subscription, with a few you can try for a month. Nobody seemed to do remailing per item. Their customer base seems to be retired people browning their butts in the sun, sailing around on yachts and picking up mail once a month or so- far from an efficiency-based service.

“Isn’t it nice to be lazy, Myrtle? Let’s have another julep! hohoho!” – adorable retirees.

I tried one monthly service and had a comical series of accidents and failures. Some were on my part (time demands), but most were theirs. Lost email, mishandled requests, but mostly no service, no response. There was no automated process for receiving then shipping out mail- they did it all by email request (with no confirmation). I even sent them a suggestion plus .jpg sketch for how to organize it with a form, something to refer back to and keep on record for a user account. I promised that it would lead me to pay for more use if they did, and told them I know a software engineer and some designers… that usually doesn’t lead anywhere, but if it does you might have a business opportunity for each other. The failures continued. I got fed up and sent an ALL CAPS message asking, where’s my stuff? They finally responded- to demand an apology for shouting. That earned them my best write-up on the shady yet useful site, ripoffreport.com, a catch-all lint trap for disgruntlement… it mentioned people farting around in their bathrobes in front of the telly with tea and crumpets, while your mail gathers dust and your meter runs out.

I figured that my need (which was occasional and unpredictable) would best be helped by a friend in that country willing to do favors, and I would be happy to pay them. I found someone willing, but the next time I got in touch to make the deal, they had moved back to the states.

I tried posting on several forums dedicated to sellers and shippers. They responded with suspicion or indifference.

For a while, I had been successful with approaching individual sellers (as opposed to companies) to ship wares they were already selling that I wanted overseas to me, when they hadn’t enabled that option. This led to inspiration.

The next time I did this, I explained the problem and asked the seller if they could receive another package and ship both together. I asked to do these steps:
1) I pay for the item I bought from them.
2) They receive another shipment, have 2 items/1 payment, and ship both to me.
3) On receipt, I pay balance for the extra remailing postage, plus a tip for the favor.

It’s like working by contract with mutual trust- Client pays an upfront retainer, I do the labor, then I get the 2nd half payment.

Both sellers I asked were enthusiastic, problem solved. There’s risk, but a good part of it is covered. Maybe I can even get a helper to do it regularly. Just asking on forums didn’t work to make that relationship, but buying something did.

I miss making giant posts on here like the one about the abandoned storage auction. I gave up this summer because I was busy and got into other things.

That describes my commitment to Collab21 as well. I moved to San Francisco 2 years ago and had a list of needs. C21 seemed like a possible way to fill them. As a self employed animation artist and book dealer, I needed space… an occupation outside of the house… collaboration and inspiration. It seems like I have filled most of those needs on my own. I also have gotten to know a little more about the renting/owning/property situation around here and how complicated and unrealistic it is… I don’t think it’s very commercially viable for a company to rent space here without being at the top of the list as a provider of whatever service it does. Unless it’s something extremely locally based (haircuts don’t get made overseas.) It’s just so frickin’ expensive here.

I’m currently a C21 member and I want it to succeed and to move into a space. Meanwhile I’m here on a low level and watching to see if things will come together with the right opportunities.

My own personal endeavours are going great. This summer I began making an independent film which used some collaborative help to get started and now it’s all me. It’s coming along and will probably wrap around december, after which I will be promoting and sending it to film festivals and totally remaking my art portfolio website, http://patsanimation.com which I haven’t updated in a long time. If you’re reading and aren’t a facebook friend with me, Ben, Dave, etc… I encourage you to find us. http://www.facebook.com/misterfang

Collab21’s wheels have been rusted for a long time now. I just applied some WD-40 and have ordered some grease to repack the bearings.

Our renewed focus is going to be on reaching short term goals rather than our current main goal of moving into a space. Some of these short-term goals are a result of a question posed to me by a principle of the company I work for, “Say you get a space, what are you going to do in it?”

I responded, “I have a prioritized list of 1000s of things.”

“Do those.”

Ideally, I would have a prioritized list of 1000s things to do. In reality, the list is closer to 50. Some of the things on the list actually require having a space, a kitchen, whiteboards, microphones, computers, etc. So I had to eliminate most of the ideas as post-space goals. Of the ones leftover, there were a couple that really stuck out to me:

1. workshops/classes/collaborative work sessions, and
2. Video podcasting

I’ve been working on re-designing our Wordpress theme to fit with the palette of our company’s website, with the idea that it will be the primary site, but will park on top of this one. Ultimately, this will be our primary website.

One of the Wordpress Plugins I added is called Gigs Calendar, which is designed to be used for displaying a list of upcoming gigs for band websites. It was the best calendar I found for free (leave suggestions for others in the comments).

I’ve so far only set up two events. One is a learn to make beer class, the other is collaborative and will be ongoing from now on. My idea of video podcasting is to film the classes, edit them a bit and post them on the blog for free. There will be a list of all classes on a separate page. I think this will be a great benefit for Collab21.com and for the community. Most of the topics I want to have classes on are passions of mine. I’m sure these will inspire more as time goes on.

Jesus teaches survivalism through parables

Finally, I’d like to announce that there will be an ongoing theme of our classes/workshops, which will be roughly related to survivalism. Call it self-sufficiency or life fundamentalism, it’s learning how to take care of your basic needs with limited or basic resources. I live in a city that’s obsessed with local food and I think that is a good thing. People are looking back at their roots. Farming is what made it possible for us to not have to hunt and gather. Our country has for too many years been separated from the things that sustain our lives. Things like water quality, food production, soil, air quality and shelter are extremely broad topics, and it’s few and far between when I meet someone who can speak to all of these things. Our goal is to learn and teach about topics that will change this.

Collab21 needs a website redesign.

Our current index page

Our path forward is to use Wordpress as a CMS, and redirect all traffic to http://collab21.com, http://collaborationchronicles.com, http://workshopwednesday.com and http://sharksinthepark.com to one site. So we need a theme and layout design for the CMS.

Rather than have one person do it for free, we thought we’d try something new. This will allow us to see how successful we are at collaboration with each other and with readers of this blog. My first task is to spend some time figuring out everything that needs to be created in terms of assets (images, color schemes, logo, etc). I can create the framework for it, and have anyone who wants to submit designs for certain assets following guidelines developed by our user experience team. Guidelines will most likely just be font selection and color palate, but may not even include that.

I got the idea from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk[1] and watching a video of data visualizations shared by a co-worker[2]. I think breaking up the work like this is interesting. However, rather that offering payment, we will have a page of contributors and links to their sites. Collab21’s plan is still to be a collaborative company and the more press we get, the more opportunity there is for sending traffic to your site through us. If you’re interested in participating, please email benhenry AT collab21 DOT com with the subject “Collab21 Mechanical Turk”.

I’ll be focusing this week on getting a list of assets that we need to generate, and will post the available work by the end of the week.

I’m really excited about our first collaborative project. I’ve got a few more ideas that should benefit all parties involved that can happen once we get a workshop, but until then we’re doing what we can to get off the ground.

[1] Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
[2] Aaron Koblin’s amazing data visualizations (sometimes) using Mechanical Turk

An invitation for your thoughts.

In the past, discussing Collab21 plans has brought up the issue of sharing personal business with collaborators who could become competitors. Have you ever been burned?

There are ways to try reducing risk (at least, in principle… ) such as non-disclosure and non-compete agreements. I was surprised when Ben, C21 president, told me that non-compete agreements aren’t valid in California. My very simple understanding is that the tech business is too interconnected to have those, without sort of unfairly “indenturing” workers.

Collaborating with confidence can take a familial level of trust.

Sometimes, relying on trust makes a tendancy towards cronyism. Have you ever felt shut out of “the club”?

Certain kinds of knowledge have traditionally been protected with guilds and apprenticeship. Personally, as a freelance animator, I find it frustrating that it’s hard to practice old school quality craft, partly because of pressure to produce fast and cheap, and partly because animation workplace apprenticeship has faded from existence. Outsourcing has been a big factor. The only ground floor workplace learning that seems to exist any more is company internships. To get one, you have to pay a school, and basically pay to work free for a company. According to gossip, exclusive internships come with paying $100k+ to go to an elite school… then there’s gossip about the club of producers with MBA’s and zero art experience… nothing specific, just the kind of frustrations that can happen with any business.

There’s a need among artists to share craft without doing “pay to play”. Collaboration could fill this need. It can also bring out the competitive tendancies.

Here’s a more specific case. Some freelance artists want to keep project files when assembling graphics in Photoshop. Delivery would a flat graphic that’s only editable by the artist. It’s a way to get a tiny advantage for securing future work. Dave, C21’s member with most business experience, believes the opposite- that openness would encourage clients to come to you.

Secure work is always a worry when competition is fierce. Freelancing brings very few benefits beyond choosing your schedule, as I found out when I had a 2-month drought after the best streak in my short experience. I recently broke the drought by negotiating work on a Flash animation web series. Many of the issues in this post came up while negotiating with an experienced producer and marketing guy who wanted artists to contribute cheaply in hopes of potential growth.

It was easy to have no freelance work for 2 months because of my other dealer business.
Today, on a dealer’s forum, I came across this hilarious post I wanted to share. It gives a nice picture of an experienced self-employed person playing with their competition:

———–

“How do estate auctions work?”

“The more experienced you get and the more the auctioneers get to know you, the less obvious your bidding becomes. I am the master of hidden bidding. I hide behind giant men, potted plants , round corners and bid with the merest nod of my head . Why such insanity you ask ? A = Because when people know you and know that you know your business they pay attention to what you are bidding on and will bid on an item just because they see me bidding on it.

So wherever possible I never let anybody see me bid and I have even had beards do my bidding for me so nobody knows I am bidding on a lot.

Don’t try this unless the auctioneer knows you and knows to look for you when certain lots come up.

I did this just yesterday and the other bidder was going beserk trying to discover who was bidding against him.”

———–

Getting freelance art jobs involves bidding, too. I can tell you it pays to scout your competition.

Can you share any experiences?

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.

—————-

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.”

—————-

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

——–

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.