Starting Your Own Business – Prologue
I am going into the second month of my home business just outside of the DFW Metroplex. I am a 15yr veteran graphic designer and interactive media professional who saw an opportunity to leave my 10-to-12 hour a day “job” and go 100% freelance working for myself. This action has been brewing for months and it has been my desire to make a go of self-employment for years. So it was only a matter of time.
One of the things that spurred me to move forward recently was the unspoken advice of a member of my family – a cousin of mine with whom I grew up with literally from day one!
He took a different road than I did after we both graduated high school. I tried my stake at college and soon found myself in over my head. My family was strapped to pay for my chosen institution of higher learning, and I soon found the reasons I decided to attend that particular college were seriously misplaced on the shoulders of a high-school sweetheart and not on my own goals and ambitions. I gave up pursuit of both the girl and the degree and moved back home.
That was a hard lesson to swallow and I carry the scars with me even today.
After I washed my hands of that bad scenario, I entered the work force under the tutelage of my father who had a well-paying and satisfying career with a local manufacturing business. The business was on the move and growing, and I soon found myself at the center of a whirlwind adventure that carried me through every practically every department, half-way across the country, and eventually into the conference rooms of middle management. I loved my job with the company, but ultimately we parted ways after over 12yrs of service.
Throughout my time with my first career, I enjoyed the benefits of a rewarding salary that allowed me to dabble in several hobbies and sideline projects. Along the way, I picked back up where I had left off with my love for art and computers. The Internet was exploding into every nook and cranny of our lives and I enjoyed a fun and rewarding hobby as a freelance website designer. During this time, I also participated in an aggressive start up retail computer sales business with some friends.
As my first career was drawing to an end, I began to take note of how graphic arts and interactive media were beginning to take off. I vividly remember the first time I sat in my living room watching TV and I commented to my wife how not too far in the future, TV commercials would be more about advertisers trying to get you to visit their websites rather than trying to get you to purchase their products. It made perfect sense to me, even back then, that a website was online 24hrs a day and 7 days a week, but you had to pay for television slots in 30sec chunks!
So I had sat my eyes on my second career – interactive media!
When I made the switch, it involved a drastic move back across the country to my hometown. This was not because I thought that central Texas was going to be the hotbed for interactive media for the next 10yrs, but it was where I had family and security, and I knew I could buy my time until opportunities were available. And buy time is what I did. I finally landed my dream job working for a small star up media company that a friend of mine had been lucky enough to get on board with. Through his recommendation, the powers in charge made a gutsy call to bring me on board even though I had no formal training and practically all of my working portfolio had been small sideline projects from over 1,000 miles away!
These guys were serious and they handled large accounts and flirted with large projects. One of my most memorable projects with them where I played an instrumental role was for this small company that you might have heard of, Gillette (you know, that little disposable razor company). Needless to say, I thought I was right in the thick of where I wanted to be.
But small media design companies live and die by the projects they handle. When the sales staff is riding the wave of success from a large project, they tend to forget to pick up as many small projects as they can to keep the boat afloat between the crests and swells. So as the major projects finished up, over staffing grounded the ship. Small companies with too many employees and not enough work will quickly run out of money.
Luckily, I was able to locate a life preserver in the form of a good paying job with a well established company that just happened to have a graphic arts department. They had layout artists and typographers but they didn’t have website designers or computer technicians. So I flexed some computer-know-how muscle (another hobby of mine was building high-end computer systems in my spare time) and slipped on board as an webmaster & “computer fix-it guy”. A couple years later, and a half-dozen websites plus some custom application development (yea, I know a few computer programming languages…don’t we all?) I found myself with a fancy title on a fancy business business card ~ “Director of Digital Design”. Damn, that’s hot!
Skip forward a couple more years, and this small company is ready to launch a new division. By slightly altering their internal structure, moving a few people around, investing with an international franchise, buying some new equipment, repainting a couple walls, and hanging huge signs on the outside of the building, I found myself as the manager over a brand new, first in a soon to be network, of print-on-demand graphic design and print shops.
While I was enjoying the life as a working stiff, my aforementioned cousin was still going to college. Years…upon years…of college. We stayed in touch, and he came back to our hometown from time to time between semesters and for holidays. But essentially, he was a career student the entire time I was out here in the real world. Just before we launched our print shop, while I was still just the head of our art department with a sexy job title, my finally satisfied his laundry list of courses, graduated with who knows how many degrees and diplomas, entered the world of corporate America.
This is where I started to really see the light. Pretty soon after my cousin hit the ground running, he was pretty much absorbed by the same frustrations that we all feel in our day-to-day working environments. Managers place high demands on workers, while workers feel that the managers are getting by easy. Grunts do all the work but the managers take all the credit, except when something goes wrong and in that case whoever is lowest on the totem pole without the benefit of plausible deniability takes the blame. It’s a cutthroat world, but what surprised even me was that apparently it’s like that everywhere you go – to some extent or another – regardless of how much education you have or how long you have been with a particular organization.
I spent allot of time listening to my cousin speak out about the exact same problems that I was having and the exact same feelings that I was experiencing, the exact same levels of frustration, the exact same countless long hours with little or no recognition and appreciation. Everything he was experiencing with fresh eyes, I could look back on through my volumes of workplace experience and find similar circumstances, similar complaints, and similar frustrations.
For me, the ultimate goal, the next step in the evolution, the obvious solution…has always been to work for yourself. The only way you can ever be satisfied that your hard work is being appreciated is when you work for yourself and are successful. When the customer is ~your~ customer and not “the company’s customer” you can see the appreciation on their faces, you can hear the appreciation in their voices, and you have the power to affect the situation if there is a problem. There’s no one looking over your shoulder to approve or disapprove of your actions. You can do what you feel is right, and that’s the best you can do and at the end of the day you know in your heart that it was a good day because of it.
So even if my cousin doesn’t know it, he has been very influential in confirming my decision to go into business for myself. In my next chapter, I will detail some of the steps I took in preparation for making the leap of faith to start my own business and be my own boss.
–mwnorris
