“A good goal should scare you a little, and excite you a lot!” – Joe Vitale
I hate when people talk in hypotheticals, so I’ll spare you the mystery of my new little venture, which is actually more of a hobby. I’ve been making jewelry for a little over a year, for a creative outlet that doesn’t require a computer screen. I enjoy it and it saves me buying a lot of poorly made jewelry to match my wardrobe when I can make my own. And they make great gifts!
I started getting a little more serious about it last month, taking some nice photos of my pieces and posting them on Etsy just to see if there might be any interest. Immediately I realized that the process of staging the pieces, photographing and editing the photos, and then describing each piece was incredibly time consuming… and hard. How do I become my own ear model for photos? How do I name these beads? They’re blue, and I made earrings out of them! What else can be said? I felt so… inadequate. After working at the top of my work pyramid for so long, I felt strangely vulnerable not knowing more about this craft, especially if I had any hope of monetizing from it. When my cousin said she connected with a local shop owner about possibly selling my jewelry, which should have been really exciting news, I was petrified. No! I’m not ready! I’m not sure if my stuff is good enough! Why do our brains tell us these things? Perhaps a little bit of self-criticism can drive us to do our best, but in a lot of cases, it can leave us stuck in the mud going no where.
This whole process immediately brought me back to a time in my life when I was still figuring out who I was as a young professional. I remember attending networking events and choking on my words when someone asked me what I do. Web designer. Even though I’d been dabbling for a few years and just started to get serious about the business, it was still incredibly hard to say those words, let alone say them with the kind of confidence that oh-so-many super savvy techies do nowadays. Except they have way trendier titles, like digital strategists, solution architects and front-end wizards.
Of course the more I worked, the more I learned and the more confident I became. It happens. With education, experience and above all, dedication and absolutely no restful sleep. Seven years later, I am admittedly pretty rusty with CSS, but I know more than anyone should really wish to know about social networks. There’s always more to learn, and I’ve been trying to remind myself of this fact as I fumble through my little craft business concept. I cracked open some books, and a few weeks later now I know what potato pearls, bali beads and gemstone nuggets are, and I can describe them pretty swiftly now.
The trick is not letting that first feeling of “what the hell am I doing” discourage you from moving forward. I would venture to say that the same feeling presents itself within every start up, and those brave innovators decide then and there to give up in early defeat, or just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and figure it out, trying to make as few mistakes as possible. So whenever you hear that little voice telling you, No! I can’t do this!, turn down the volume, because guess what? You very likely can!
On our social network development travels, we are occasionally tasked with helping our clients research and choose a domain name. This is a serious effort, as it will represent not only the website but the over-arching business brand as well. Below are some quick guidelines on how to start this process and our general rules of thumb.
Not long after my stomach declared war on my two old friends, stress and spicy food, I started to think about how I could potentially alleviate some stressors at work by adding to our team. If you’ve ever grown a small business, you know that you start out typically by yourself, wearing all the hats, and slowing but surely begin to delegate those hats to others who can be trusted with those responsibilities. I’ve managed to make really good progress with this over the past year, so I decided to continue the trend and dive into the interviewing process to fill a new position.
One thing that makes our industry very unique is that our clients are also that, very unique. Unlike some service providers, we don’t work with the same type of vendor or business owner or consumer demographic time after time. We work with a broad range of clients, from accredited universities to established businesses to start-ups. I would say that start-ups are our most frequent type of client, but among those, we have doctors, military members, college students and small business owners to name a few. Whether this is a first website endeavor or if the client has plenty of entrepreneurial experience, there are certain qualities that we love to see in the people that we work with! 
As the blur of summer comes to a close, I have been getting ready for the fourth quarter rush. This is typically our busiest time of the year. New business is steady, but we are under pressure to launch most of our in-development projects by the end of the year. As a result I’ve reinserted myself more heavily into our processes, which I periodically do to see how we can optimize what we do and how we do it.
That was the quote of the day.
It’s been a challenging week at the office. You know what they say about opinions and everyone having one? This is a reality that we cannot escape, but it continues to be a challenge when the occasional client gives our team virtually no say in how a project takes shape. It’s like watching a hurricane gaining on you day by day, when a project takes conceptual wrong turn after wrong turn, and ultimately you know that it cannot succeed as a result.
