1/11 Welcome 2011
I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m still suffering from a joy hangover. Ever since the clock struck midnight and 2010 was behind us, I’ve been positively skipping with glee. It’s scary to be so optimistic but I think 2011 is going to be a great year - especially if we define great as not being as hard as 2010.
Not that hard is not good. It’s just hard. 2010 will turn out to be a great year – in hindsight. It’s the whole “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” bit. It was also, as it turns out, the year for happy accidents.
Six Pony Hitch, as most of you know, came as a surprise. The business we all used to belong to closed and suddenly there we were. Those of us who became Six Pony Hitch made an instant commitment to head off together in a new, unchartered direction driven only by the desire to be the company we all wanted to be – which at the time was still a work in progress.
It has, frankly, taken some time to figure out how to be the business that we want to be. Luckily, we have a super talented team and we love what we do so it’s been a relatively seamless process for our clients but internally, we have had some challenges. How, for example, do creative people learn to successfully run a business without running themselves into the ground? And how, does a team of people used to doing things the way the old business did them, turn around and do them completely differently? This is how I will always remember 2010: Four little swimmers jumped off the back of a cruise ship that had lost power and was adrift in the middle of the ocean, turned the darned thing around and kicked it back to shore while jumping back on board now and then to play captain, steward, bartender, cruise director, etc. Whew! Exhausting.
The good news is that we did it. It took hard work, a little luck, perseverance, happenstance, an open eye for opportunity, and a few tears - but we did it.
The first breakthrough came barreling in by chance. In the course of working with one of our favorite clients we discovered that there was a need to get some different perspectives on their brand. So, with their blessing, we ventured out and tried some new things and came up with a new method that we got pretty excited about. Then we put our heads together, did some more beta runs for willing clients, talked to lots of really smart people, got excellent feedback and ultimately, arrived at the Six Pony Hitch Brand Diagnostic and Impact Assessment. It’s a cool (and proprietary) method of examining an organization’s total communications strategy to ensure that it is in line with strategic goals and that it is an honest reflection of the organization’s brand. We’re pretty psyched about it and we’re totally enjoying doing the work for our clients. Frankly, we’re also a little amazed that we were able to develop it in the midst of all the chaos of kicking our cruise ship back to the harbor but, again, happy accidents.
The second breakthrough came when we decided to take care of ourselves and our business by taking a sabbatical from December 17th until January 17th. It was a risky move but we realized that we were all going to burn out without the promise of some relief. We notified all our clients, developed our schedules accordingly, and busted our you-know-what’s to get everything active finished by our deadline. As I write this, Alisa is off snowboarding and Erin has her computer locked in a closet. Mike and I stayed on to keep things running although we’re still taking random mornings or afternoons away to snowboard or cross-country ski in this glorious snow we’ve been having, or just to walk our dogs or work out or read a book. It’s been surprisingly busy at the office (note to self: there is no good time to take a vacation) but we’ve still had time to work out the final details of powering up the ship for our next voyage. The message here is to set aside time to recharge and to think. I can’t tell you how much we’ve accomplished by doing just that.
The next big thing we did was to embrace systems. Amita Patel (MCDC) gave me a book last spring called The E-Myth Revisited, which is all about the difference between working on your business and working in your business. In short, it’s about how creating systems can actually give you more freedom to be creative. I didn’t really get it when I read it back then but I get it now. We made lots of mistakes last year. We did a good job of tracking our time but we needed more detailed time codes. We had some ambiguity in our contracts – which led to us not charging for things we should have been charging for simply because we didn’t feel things had been clear enough up front. We weren’t firm with our clients about the schedules we set for them. We worked lots of overtime but didn’t get paid for any overtime. Bad business things.
But we made beautiful and effective products.
The book Amita gave me was all about a pie maker who made the best pies but almost went out of business because she made a bad business. Oops.
Luckily, in the midst of our overtime, we found more overtime to hammer out our process. Erin got great at making schedules. Mike taught us all to love spreadsheets. Alisa helped define exactly what constitutes a revision. We redid our time codes and made a commitment to keep tracking things fastidiously. Heather, Norm, and Megan at Anderson ZurMuehlen helped us make an efficient bookkeeping system. Shane and all the great folks at Reely Law helped us create good, tight, explicit contracts for everything. Our friends, Susan Estep and David Weber at Estep, Hope, and Weber, knocked some business sense into us. And, of course, Amita and David Glaser at MCDC have been the best friends a business could have.
So here we are, six months later, having done the very hard work of shrugging off old habits and making very difficult choices. We’ve taken a look at our core competencies, our policies, the things that make us happy, the things that don’t, our company values and, most importantly, what we’ve heard from our clients in terms of our strengths and their needs and we’ve acted accordingly.
Now we are taking one more big step. As of 2011, we are narrowing the scope of what we provide. We will be focusing on just four main service areas:
- The Six Pony Hitch Brand Diagnostic and Impact Assessment (BDIA)
- Web design and development – including social media and SEO/SEM
- Graphic Design
- Copywriting
We will go into each of these service categories in subsequent blogs, but the point for today is that we have let go of some of the services that we used to provide because we have made a conscious choice to stay small, nimble, and consistent. This choice didn’t come easily. When you have skills in an area and people want to pay you for them it seems crazy not to let them. But when you do that, you can be good but you can’t be great. We have decided that we want to be great or not be at all.
We’re also changing our model for vendor management. The old advertising model is to find a vendor, mark up the prices, charge the client and pay the vendor while pocketing the markup. We don’t want to do that. We want our clients to pay our vendors directly with no mark up. If you’d like our help managing the vendor, we’re happy to do that but only at our hourly rate. No mark up. It’s simple. It’s honest. And it’s less checks being written all the way around.
Finally, we’ve committed to continue playing to one of our biggest strengths: honesty. For example, we are committed to telling the truth at all times, even if that means we don’t get a job. This means that if you ask us for something we don’t think you need or that is just plain wrong for your brand, we’ll say no. And we’ll tell you why. And we’ll give you our opinion of what you should do. And then, if you agree, we’ll work with you through a super clear process so that you walk away not only understanding your business better, but ours as well. And if you don’t agree, we’ll say thanks for considering us and here are some people that might be able to help you.
It also means that if your logo is working for you, we’ll tell you to leave it alone. Or, if your website is user friendly and just needs a facelift, we’ll tell you that too. We’ll even let you know if we think your design is fine and you just need some copy changes. And, if you choose to work with us through our BDIA, we’ll tell you all of this and more - plus what is working, what isn’t, and in which order you should address it all.
Honesty also means that we will continue to try to share everything with you here - our flubs as well as our triumphs. It’s much more interesting that way isn’t it?
So, yes, bring on 2011!
If you’d like to know more about our new direction and some of our new policies, give us a call. In the meantime, Happy New Year. We mean it.
- Posted by Spider McKnight
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