Back to Basics

I’ve been pontificating about graphic communications here for the last couple of entries, taking a stab at getting clients (and potential clients) to read the blog. This, however, does not seem to be happening. So, while I’ll be talking a bit about business, I’ve decided to revert to making this a location for friends and family to keep tabs on what I’m up to these days.

The business has begun to take off. My billable hours have been increasing slowly each month, and I’ve even made the first of my quarterly income tax payments. And while still far from being a burgeoning fount of plenty, running my own business is turning out to be a very interesting experience. The biggest challenge is keeping motivated at marketing and finding ways of advertising myself that are cost-effective (that is to say, nearly free) and that produce results in the form of new clients.

Primeval Redwood Forest at Elks Prairie

I’ve got my Facebook page up and I’m adding to it. I’m only eight “likes” away from having metrics added to it, which will allow me to keep track of visits and such. It’s kind of a long-haul thing, and I don’t expect to have the complete knack of this social network marketing for quite a while. Included on the page here are the three different “flavors” of cover pictures for the page. I swap them out every week or so to keep things looking fresh. I also have a Photoshop template I can use to take more of my own photographs and turn them into cover shots for the page.

I have subscribed to AdWords on Google, which puts me up front thousands of times a week when someone in my area googles things such as “graphic designer.” The placement is free, but if someone clicks on the ad, then I get billed. In the 10 days since signing up, I’ve gotten almost 60 clicks (which sends people to my website) and four actual calls or e-mails asking about my service. So far, none of those has turned into an actual job.

Central courtyard of the Louvre in Paris

Steve kept pushing me to get onto Angie’s List, so I signed up there and got Pearce Plastics to post about how nicely I’ve done for them. Yesterday, I got a call from a woman who looked me up on Angie’s List and wanted help getting a website uploaded onto a new host server. I was honest and told her she could do this herself and she replied, “Yes, I know, but I don’t want to.” So this afternoon I’m going to drive to her house in Alhambra and upload her website (actually for a nonprofit corporation called International Music Initiative, or something like that) and get her set up on the new server.

If someone would have told me in college that I would spend the afternoon uploading a website to the Internet, I would have said, “Do what to what on the what?” I took computer programming classes in college, but we put the programs and data sets on punchcards and left stacks of them, bound with rubber bands, in piles in the computer lab. They got fed through the monster IBM computer at school and a printout issued at the other end, usually with several fatal errors in the coding, which required fishing individual cards out of the stack for corrections; then the whole thing would get a new rubber band and go back into the pile. You were lucky is you saw your results in two days.

Now I’ve got a computer sitting on my desk here and a laptop I use for client meetings in the field, each of which far outstrips that old IBM monster in power, speed and capacity. Of course, that was thirty-some years ago.

A cloudy day at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen in Wisconsin

Tomorrow, I’ll be getting my hair cut and pitching a website to the salon owner at the same time. Madeleine, one of Steve’s at work, found out her hairdresser was thinking of putting up a website, and she suggested me. I called the guy a couple of times, but he was always too busy to talk, so I made an appointment for a haircut, figuring we’d have to talk, and my mop top is getting a little shaggy in any case.

I had a meeting yesterday with a gentleman who wants to redesign some packaging for his business. It’s not a huge job, but one that might extend, if his product catches on. I had arranged to meet with him at 4 p.m., and I was on my cell phone talking with the woman who I’ll be meeting with today when the office phone rang. I had to put her on hold while I answered the office phone and adjusted the meeting time for that afternoon to 4:15.

It was such as rush to actually have two phone calls going simultaneously, like a presage of a busy business a few months down the road.

Steve’s doing well. His job runs from mundane to insane, depending on what’s happening on any given day. He’s only a couple years away from retirement, and I think he looks forward to being able to gear back, take a part-time job and enjoy life a little more. My goal is to have a solid studio running with a healthy income by the time he hits retirement, and I think that viable and possible. From what I’ve heard at chamber meetings and mixers, the first year of a business is the toughest. After that, you start getting a sense of the pace and flow of your work, and word starts to get around about what you have to offer.

One problem I’m having is trying to connect with other designers in the area. The few that belong to the chamber of commerce were pleasant enough, but one woman was downright paranoid when I approached her. I’m not sure whether they think I’m going to steal customers or take trade secrets or something, but I think it would be great to have a group where we could discuss what works for you, what doesn’t work for you, and experiences with clients in general. Let’s just say no one has been enthusiastic about the concept when I’ve brought it up.

Whatever. I figure there’s plenty of work out there for good designers, especially those who know web design as well as print. And even though there’s a lot of do-it-yourself design sites online (see my previous entry titled “The Tyranny of Themes and Templates”), I think most savvy business owners know that putting out the money for a professional designer is worth it. And, even on my first meeting with a potential client, one of the items I focus on is ways to save money while getting good, comprehensive design for their dollar.

So I continue. Running your own business really is a day-by-day thing. But, then, so is life.