Collaboration Chronicles

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.

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.

I had an idea after watching a TED video with Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture for Humanity.  His TED wish was to create a database of design and architecture ideas so that areas without access to good design can build and be inspired from it.  One thing he mentioned was to put workshops “in ever favela”.  This struck near to my heart.

What could Collab21 do, if we got things running in San Francisco, to help contribute to this idea?  Wouldn’t it be something to put wood and metal workshops and training in every slum in the world?  These people put houses together from scrap, image if they had proper tools and training.

Glass Factory in Italy

So this idea is just a seed.  I’d like to explore it further and possibly do some research before I continue with it or add it as a goal to our Mission101.

Any feedback, advice or direction in this regard?

I went to a leadership meeting today at my day job ( http://www.moto.com/).  One of the things that was taught was “Managing Performance”.  I can’t find where the chart we were given came from on the internet, so I drew it using MS Paint.  This cycle is relevant for management, designing, building and everything related to work.  For Collab21, it’s relevant because we’re in the process of setting most of our long term goals.

This cycle starts with Setting goals.  Once the goals are set and dates are applied, it’s important to monitor performance.  Depending on how things are going, the feedback will be in line with that.  The team should evaluate how to proceed and act based on the direction of the feedback.  New goals can be set if things didn’t go as expected the first time around.

Tips for setting goals were also discussed in this meeting.  Goals should be all of the following to be effective:

1. Specific
2. Measurable
3. Achievable
4. Relevant
5. Time-bound

When setting goals, re-evaluate each goal by making sure it doesn’t fail any of these criteria.  Goals drive performance.  How are the Mission101 goals for the Collab21 members progressing?

I was writing an article for our blog @ Collaboration Chronicles. The article talks about using WordPress to manage websites and I wanted to show people, using a screencast, how to install WordPress. I came up with the idea for One Minute WordPress as a novel idea to show off the power and speed of deploying a WordPress install. In my attempts to speed through my installation, my best time was around 3 minutes. I needed to get rid of some of the inefficiencies in my method of installing.

I remembered an article on Hackaday called WordPress 2.7 upgrade in one line.

I read through the article and liked the curl method much better than the wget approach I was going to use.

So taking from the Chris Finke’s Twitter post I modified it to suit my One Minute WordPress Installation.

Open the Terminal and ssh into your server:

ssh username yourserver.com
then type:

curl http://wordpress.org/latest.zip -o “wp.zip” && unzip wp.zip

This will download and unpack the latest WordPress release. We’ll use the web based config tool to create your wp-config.php file.

O.K., so I solved the big issue, which eliminated my local computer from the equation and allowed me to download and unpack straight to the server. This shaved a huge chunk of time that was wasted on redundancy. I am still working on a solution so you can use a php script on your server to create the mysql database without needing to log in to your host’s webpanel. I’ll update the site oneminutewordpress.com as soon as I finish up on that side of things, but for now you can revel in the glory of a one minute manual WordPress Install. Here’s a link to the site:

and the step by step instructions.

Beth was asked today by her coworker about the possibility of having some of us at Fog City Gardens to help with planning and implementing a vegetable garden at her father’s house while he’s away on vacation.

Anders in Fog City's 'LakeShore' Garden

While the six of us currently involved are not experts, we have had some success with planting.  I’m seriously looking forward to helping someone in the community plant more veggies (I asked for fruits, flowers and shrubs for bees, too).

Our goals at Fog City Gardens is to promote community through garden planning, implementation, seed sharing and other things related to gardening.  Secondary to this is giving back to the community is another way.  Ideas we have are to provide a personal CSA, give extras to the community or schools or to host a frequent dinner party with things we’ve grown.  I like the last one best, because it gives everyone in the community a chance to see what their neighbors are up to “back there”.

If I pull off this bee hive thing, there will be some community honey to share with people that I’m really looking forward to.  I may have to stick with beer, cheese and veggies for now.

I’ve been playing around with WordPress for about two years now.

I started off using it for typical blog posting, del.icio.us bookmark posting, and a host of other blog/social media type solutions.  I began looking into using it to deploy multiple users and blogs for a side-project I was working on with William Hodges call Resellr (private for now).  We checked out WordPress MU.  It allows for multiple users and blogs to be installed either as subdomains i.e.,  rob.collaborationchronicles.com or as directories within the domain i.e., collaborationchronicles.com/rob .  This is a great tool as it allows the domain admin to control any aspect of the WordPress install, such as themes, plugins, etc., all from within the WordPress MU admin screen. This was a great solution for allowing multiple users to login and post items, photos, etc. More recently I’ve been using WordPress to act as a stand alone website with all the functionality of a blog (time relevant post, heirarchy, tags, categories), but with the functionality of a website (newsletter, contact us, flickr photos).  We can use the power of WordPress as a dynamic webapp that can pull content from a variety of social media sources.  With the extensibilty of WordPress paired with the community of developers creating wonderful solutions WordPress really is a great fit for websites. I’ll give you a case example of how I used WordPress to create a fully function website on the cheap and in a hurry.

Claremont Food not Lawns is a local community organization that help to spread awareness about food sources and help people convert their lawns into wonderful gardens.  I met them at a Wednesday night Green Market in Claremont.  They said they needed help to get a website up and running, as the site that they currently had was unfinished.  They had one of the vital components to making a sucessful website: content.  I met with Mary Beth and Todd to determine their budget and what they needed done.  As a community organization they were going to need the following:

• Monthly Newsletter
• Email contact page
• An events page
• Photos
• A news page (this is where the newsletter content will come from)
• Various information pages (how to volunteer, articles, etc.)
• A Youtube video post
• A link roll, resources, friends, etc.
• A way track traffic
• A way to automate the monthly newsletter

I determined that WordPress would be a great solution for their needs and began creating the framework for how the site would function.  I compiled a list of the plugins I would require to accomplish this task.

In term of functionality here are the plugins that I use to handle my needs.

Askimet – For comment spam, it comes installed with WordPress, simply active the plugin and enter your API key from WordPress.com

Google Ultimate Analytics – Google tracking for websites.  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ultimate-google-analytics/
Tan Tan Noodle Toolkit – For handling remote Flickr set as  albums on the site.  http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/photo-album/

Example: Claremont Food not Lawns Photos

Photos Claremont Food Not Lawns via kwout

Google XML sitemap plugin- To create XML sitemaps and auto submit to search engines: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

Example: Claremont Food not Lawns Sitemap
Contact Form- To handle emailing from a form on the site: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/

Example: Claremont Food not Lawns Contact Us

Google Calendar- To pull events from a shared Google Calendar: http://code.google.com/p/wpng-calendar/

Example: Claremont Food Not Lawns Events Calendar

I met with some friends on the tail end of their once a month three day long Stirfry Startups and gleened a couple things from following and following through with collaboration here.

1. Send invitations.  People you think have similar goals as you (e.g. Build a successful business, raise bees, etc).
2. When working together, you have to have a plan.  This weekend was planned.  There was time to cook, time to review/reflect, time to work.   Things to review and work on were already described before anyone showed up.
3. Provide food, plugs for computers, music, drinks and open communication.  These are all important things that you find in any successful office, too.
4. Mutual benefit of people involved.  The ultimate goal of collaboration, like most activities, is for personal advancement.  By helping other people, you’re helping yourself.  You’re learning, growing, making connections, building relationships and generating potential traffic for collaborators.

The Goal of our Workshop Wednesday is to provide this same environment for people in our community.  There are three artists and three programmers in Collab21, but everyone is a mix of both.  There are gardeners, movie buffs, music maniacs, minimalists and people into Dungeons and Dragons.  The one thing we know we have in common is that we’re working to build a business.  The cool thing is, everyone is invited.

Website

Some of the Collab21 folks and I are going to be working on redoing our web presence.  We have a few sites set up right now:  Sharks in the Park, Collab21 and this site.  We want to consolidate our business use and public face with a standard design and access it all from one site.  We’re going to sit down next Thursday after our jobs and crank out as much work as we possibly can.  Hopefully it will carry into the weekend so we can have something by the following Monday.

Collaboration

I think this is what collaboration is all about.  Get together as a group, come up with 100s of fantastic ideas, get a few of them started, then buckle down and focus the better ones.  We’re finally at a point where we can start to focus on business.  It took a while, but I’m ready to start exploring new experiences and growing and sharing collectively.

Someone asked me today what the vision of Collaboration Chronicles was.  What is the purpose?  I found myself stuttering.  I started to explain that we’re using to blog about collaboration.  But then I realized that we haven’t really blogged about collaborating between all of the members of the group.  There are some posts about this topic, but the majority of our posts are about individual passions.  Therefore, I’d like to modify my response to include the following five things:

1. Collaboration – working together to solve problems
2. Inspiration – we are inspired in order to inspire others someday
3. Contribution – actually doing the work
4. Communication – transparency in projects and business and open feedback policies
5. Vision – understanding goals and realizing them

Collab21

We’ve met almost every Wednesday since October 2007.  We’ve missed maybe three of the Wednesdays.  We haven’t always had a formal meeting.  It started out with me emailing everyone I thought could contribute and may be interested in this idea I had of mashing The Tech Shop in Menlo Park idea with Hat Factory.  We organized and filed for an LLC, drew up some ByLaws, had some shuffling of members, attracted the attention of a member of Hat Factory to give us some guidance, sold snowcones in Dolores Park on a cold day and brainstormed down to our spinal columns.

What is the result of this?  We have some money in the bank.  We don’t have enough to get into any type of Industrial or Commercial space in the city.  None of the members really need the space to do their work anymore.  But we’re all still very passionate about having some space to do projects in, and potentially use for freelance work.

We have a mailing list with more than 50 people on it, but only two or three have actually shown up to events we hosted in the past.  We wanted to keep hustling this, but got discouraged and started doing other things.

Then I had an idea that we would host mini workshops in my apartment instead of having meetings every Wednesday.  I thought I would called them “Workshop Wednesday”, and the premise is the same as any coworking place: bring your laptop, drink some coffee, get your damn work done.  A couple people showed up to these as well, but nothing really significant.  We don’t have any drawing power.  The experience isn’t really there.  We’re still really just a group of friends who have big dreams and no capital to even being to realize them.

I’ve been inspired since the first to do greater things with business.  We’re going to rebuild our site and our brands and start invisioning our futures better.  We know what we can do, now let’s do it!

The first thing we’ve discussed is hosting real workshops with a real marketing campaign.  There’s a lot of prep we’d need to do to get this going.  The website redesign is the first step.  Keep reading if you’re interested, because we’re not done yet.