So I almost got “Dooced” yesterday, or at least I felt like that’s where the conversation I had with my creative director was heading when he came in to my office and shut the door behind him (something that never happens). I did a follow-up piece over on my other blog about a certain automotive lobby that wasn’t outlandish or slanderous in the slightest, but for some reason, someone at the entity found the post and then went directly to the Vice President with the issue. I thought for sure a pink slip was forth coming.

Thankfully my creative director is quite possibly the coolest boss I’ve ever had. He’s done more for me in the past 2 years than anyone has done my entire career, and that’s a large part of why I have stuck it out at my current job. I owe him a mountain of thank you notes.

Basically, since I was soliciting companies to become consultation clients, my blog is a conflict of interest to my company. I kind of saw their side of the argument, but I also felt it would take a mighty big leap to say that I have endangered their business in the slightest. However, I want to keep my job because it comes with this nice paycheck every two weeks that I pretty much can’t live without, so I sat on my pride and pulled out the Splenda tactics (staying sweet and accommodating) in order to maintain my gainful employment.

The VP, who I should mention is a mountain of a man and fairly intimidating with his handlebar mustache, said that he didn’t care if I blogged as long as I didn’t solicit any clients of the company. He even complimented me on my writing, which was shocking, but a nice way to lighten the mood. I respectfully agreed to his compromise and went about my way, but not before I tore down every incriminating post on the site.

Did I sacrifice a bit of my integrity in that moment? Yeah maybe, but at least I didn’t have to come home to Leslie and tell her how much of a fuck-up I am. Now that would be painful.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Today Seth talked about the changing relationship between Canada and the US because of our deflating dollar. The Canadian dollar is no longer the second-class citizen to our currency and its time we started making adjustments. Now, instead of us going north for a good deal, the Canucks can fly south and we should embrace that because we need all the commerce we can get right now.  However, not everyone gets it.

A directive ran through the company last week. Normally we would design 2 separate covers for our magazines, one for the newsstand and one for subscribers. The newsstand version had the prototypical US/Canada pricing difference of about $2.00. This made sense a few years ago, but not anymore. So you’d think that we’d be changing our pricing to compensate the economic change in order to not alienate our frosty neighbors. Yeah, not so much.

The directive that went through the company said we will now be producing 2 separate covers for the newsstand, one for the US and one for Canada. Are we lowering the Canadian price? Nope, just deleting the US price from the cover so Canada doesn’t feel taken advantage of when the see the pricing difference. But it gets better for Canada.

Today a second directive came down for my magazine. How about a $1 increase in pricing Canada? They won’t mind. Are we raising the US price? Oh no, we couldn’t do that to our citizens. We only need to rip off those outside our borders. But it gets better.

How about we reduce the actual size of the magazine in order to save money on printing? We’re also going to cut the amount of pages as much as possible because ad revenue isn’t what it used to be. Oh, and did I mention that we’re reducing the quality of paper to something that resembles grayish toilet tissue.

Now Canada, don’t you worry about all this. With all your new found income, I’m sure you can afford the price increases. You should feel good about buying our overpriced, reduced quality magazines because we’re doing our part to prevent global warming. We recycle!

It’s almost comedy how foolish the company acts under pressure of actually making a few dollars (or a few dollars more, rather). We depend on the enthusiasts to keep buying our mags yet we do everything we can to not give them their monies worth. Thankfully I work on a magazine where quality content is the most important thing we can do, but as our pages get cut month after month, it gets harder to deliver the best stories. As the book gets thinner, so do the stories, so readers lose out even further.

I’ve written before about magazines and newspapers going the way of the Dodo, but consented that niche magazines would maintain longer because we speak to specific readers. After a conversation with a company veteran, I realized that we’ve been losing ground for years. The internet is quite possibly the single most destructive force in the demise of publishing and its getting worse every year. We still sell the same percentage of magazines, but we’re putting fewer copies out on stands. Advertisers are realizing that they’re losing money by placing ads with us, or breaking even at best, which is as good as losing. Of course these factors are apparent to the higher-ups, but instead of innovating and coming up with new ways to answer the problem, we cut pages and cut budgets and charge more for our services.

For the first time in awhile, I feel like my days as a magazine art director are numbered. What will I do when magazine publishing is dead?

I recently started reading Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start not necessarily because I was looking to start my own company, but more because I kept reading how good the book is. Part way into the book, Guy talks about bootstrapping a new startup and instead of using proven professionals who can be expensive, pick people with less experience and more exuberance. These folks don’t know what they can’t do, so they’ll try anything because they’re not as fearful of failing, or if they do fail, they’ll pick themselves up and try again.

I was a dot-bust casualty just prior to 9/11. Working for a small design studio that catered to some booming companies who eventually all went belly-up because of bad business models. When they were gone, half the staff was laid off including myself. The job market was severe, so I decided without hesitation that I was going to freelance. I was blissfully ignorant because I thought for sure I could handle it. I was wrong. I failed and eventually had to take a corporate job which I’ve been at ever since.

Talking a Good Game
I can’t even count how many times I’ve told myself I’m going to start doing more freelance consulting. I’ve repeated the process so many times, I’m beginning to think it starts with the lunar cycle. I have been making forward momentum though.

Over the past year, I’ve tried to ingest as much knowledge as possible because stepping away from the table for a few years left me a bit out of practice, especially when it came to new technology. I’ve read numerous books and subscribed to countless blogs. I’ve learned a lot but I realized I also became a bit more gun-shy about venturing out on my own because here are all these people that are smarter than me and doing it better. I sometimes feel like I can’t compete with these other pros.

Before I Knew You
The upside to blogging is building relationships with some really amazing folks, and in the marketing arena, it seems like there’s a lot of cohesion and support for one another. This is great, but the more I talk to them, the less confident I feel about my abilities. Then came Guy Kawasaki and another poignant lesson. With his comments about working with folks that “don’t know what they don’t know”, I realized that my problem was my lack of ignorance.

Before I knew any of these other marketers, I felt like I had what it takes to be a successful consultant. Now I’m more knowledgeable and better equipped, but less likely to make the jump. How screwy is that? If I had a therapist, he might say I just had a breakthrough. Now I just have to remember what its like to be ignorant without actually being ignorant.

The funny thing about breakthroughs is that they aren’t a fix, but rather just a realization that you’re somehow broken. The fixing takes time. Thankfully I have a few people I’m working with that are extremely appreciative of my work and advice. Without them, I’d probably still be second guessing myself instead of finally making plans to build a business.

Thanks to them and thanks to those fellow marketing geniuses that have helped me, directly or indirectly. Even though I’ll be pretending to be ignorant, I won’t forget you when I’m nationwide.

Ideas are so cool! I love how ideas progress from thoughts to preoccupations to mantras to a way of life. Have you ever had one of those moments where you were thinking about some good idea and then let it slip your mind only to be smacked in the face with it again by some unrelated circumstance? That happened to me tonight.

A few days ago, I started realizing that I had a lot of little projects stacking up and it was about time I started getting working on them or soon enough I would be in a world of hurt. Tonight after our meal at the local Thai restaurant, I cracked open my fortune cookie only to be greeted with, “It’s time to help out a friend in need”, which just happens to be the idea behind almost all the projects I’m facing.

On the walk back home, a persistent thought kept running through my head, “If you rest, you fail.” I repeated it a few times and decided to post it on the face of my laptop to be reminded of it daily. I also added to it, “Work Now, Sleep Later.” It was a great idea, but I let it slip away when I got home because of some BS we’re dealing with at home that really isn’t worth mentioning except that it distracted me from my intention. Then I read Naomi’s latest.

Read the whole post about dealing with fear and you’ll come a point where she says, “I’m afraid if I rest, I will fail.” I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried. I don’t know Naomi sans a few email exchanges, but I’m certain she plays a role somehow because there have been way to many parallels to ignore. Regardless, I’m off my proverbial ass and working on stuff… right after I finish this post.

On a somewhat related note, I received two exceptional compliments today from people I’ve given advice to recently. Getting honest unsolicited testimonials is quite possibly the best thing in the world for a “consultant”. I use that term very loosely because sometimes I feel I’m a hack just faking it for the cameras. Thankfully I have folks like Naomi and Sean to kick me in the ass occasionally so I don’t pity myself for too long. Coincidentally, they’re both Canadian, or at least both in Canada. Maybe it’s the fresh air and clean living.

So what the hell is your point, Dave?

Glad you asked. My point is that I’m going to be redesigning this site once again. Why? To accommodate my venture into an honest entrepreneurial effort. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome me into the ranks of marketers flying by the seat of their pants in an effort to help others grow their business. I can only pray I make the rest of y’all proud.

It’s Labor Day. Leslie and I just got back from three days at my parent’s vacation home in Indio. For those not familiar, Indio is just East of Palm Springs. We were invited to come out at the last minute to join my mom and since we were already driving out that way on Saturday for a birthday party, we decided to make a short trip out of the event. The only downside was the 112 degree heat, but we cured that by staying inside the air conditioned home for nearly the entire time. Ok, so not a very exciting vacation, but we did get to relax.

When my mom isn’t designing interiors for the well-to-do of South Orange County, she’s putting paintbrushes to canvas, something I’ve been inspired to do myself lately. In fact, I did this piece just last week. It didn’t come out as abstract as I had hoped, but not bad for a first attempt, don’t you think? This one is entitled Derrick #1 Island White #1 (I just found out that this island has a name). It’s my interpretation of the oil derrick that sits in the water just off Bluff Park in Long Beach. My plan is to create 3 similar pieces and hang them together.

Mom is stoked, Leslie is stoked and I’m really pumped about doing more. I really enjoy the painting. If I could do this for a living, I’d be set. Of course that’s every “artists” dream, right? So I plug away at a new piece and have ideas for my next few. The interesting part is that when I started this piece, I had no idea where it was going. I was stuck for a muse, but the vision came to me finally and I ran with it. Now I’ve got all kinds of ideas for new paintings, a lot more than I have canvases to paint on. I’ll need to sell a few if I want to make another trip to the art supply store.

So overall, it was a really creative weekend. Mom painted, I painted and even Leslie collaborated on a piece with my mother. It took a little bit to get her started, but she reluctantly joined in and surprisingly had a good time. Hopefully she will do it some more and we’ll be the couple that paints together. Maybe we can even get Freckles into the mix. Perhaps a bit much, but that dog hair looks just like some of my brushes.