One thing that I quickly learned after starting my own business was that you have to start small, you can think and dream big but it has to start somewhere. Just because you think you and your team can do better work than that commerial you saw on TV, doesn’t mean you’ll get to do that work. Just because you can do the work doesn’t mean you will do the work.

You’re not going to score that big client or nab those huge budgets when you first start your business. I think that’s what a lot of students or younger people realize quickly when they start out. I know I wanted to believe when I first got out of school that if I grabbed a project with Nike or Google, either on my own or working with a studio then I’d be set. But I had a lot to learn… and at the time I didn’t even realize that. By starting small you learn about your business, yourself and you get better.

If I didn’t start LooseKeys small I wouldn’t of been able to learn how to manage people efficiently. Not sure if I could of handled a team of four starting out, but a team of two I understood. Being small allowed me to take risks and test new ideas, something that’s harder to do when you’re big and worried about making sure every piece of the machine is moving correctly. At some point you’ll add people and get those bigger jobs which is what I see happening now at LooseKeys  It’s not a straight climb up by any means but sort of feels like a game of shoots and ladders. I’m working my way up and soon this small team will be a small army.

Whenever I have a spare moment I find myself trying to fill it with something. It could be waiting in line for coffee and pulling out my phone, driving in the car and listening to a podcast or sitting at the airport and trying to write a blog post. If I’m not doing something that is “productive” or helping me move forward then I feel like I need to fix that. There are very few times for me where I just stop, slow down and enjoy the moment. I know this is something about myself that drives Maeve nuts.The go go go can be exhausting. When you can’t just stop and relax for a second you have little time to reflect and make calculated decisions. Something that is extremely important when you’re running your own business. That was one of the reasons I started running last year, just to have those moments to let my mind wonder. Lately I’ve been listening to podcasts when I run… another way I found to fill that extra time. 

I don’t really have a solution for how I’m going to change this or if I really want to but I know I do need to take a moment at times just to slow down. 

Your business can change fast and there are new tools and software coming out almost everyday; it can be hard to keep up. But guess what that’s part of your job! You have to know what happening, you have to know what coming up so you can adjust and make corrections. Ignorance is bliss but you can’t run your business with blinders on because one wrong turn and you’re in trouble. You have to challenge yourself to stay on top. I work in an industry that is always changing and I have to know what’s happening otherwise it will be difficult to stay competitive.

Finding the right people to hire or even just work with is hard. How do you know if they will be right or even able to do the job. I’m sure people who do a lot of hiring have developed a better instict for this but for me I’m pretty new to that area. You just sort of hope who you picked is awesome.

Recently I was watching Adventure Time and the Business Time episode came on. First off, Adventure Time is awesome and if you’re not watching this show you need to be. With that said, this might be a bit of a spoiler for this episode so be warned. In the Business Time episode, Finn and Jake find and hire some business dudes to help them out so they can just focus on the fun stuff. Which seems about right and not a bad reason to hire someone. Letting someone else take care of the work you don’t like so you can do the work you do like.

The trouble is that in this episode the business dudes end up going mad crazy, which isn’t likely to happen with whoever you hire but they could just end up sucking. When that happens, you may end up doing a bunch of extra work trying to fix what they messed up or didn’t get done.

If you do find the right person or people for your team, they can add a ton of value. Don’t just randomly pick some people that need a job because they seem like they know what they are doing. It’s never fun having to do a job over because the person you hired couldn’t deliver what you wanted.

You can label yourself any way you want, whether it’s self-employed, a freelancer, an entrepreneur or a business owner. You’re making an independent living by yourself and from the business you’re building. I was a freelancer for awhile as I was getting LooseKeys rolling. I knew when I left Daily Planet ltd. that I didn’t want to just be a freelancer; I had already done that for a few years and knew the challenges I was going to run into.

One challenge you face as a freelancer is that you’re going to reach a point where you can’t earn any more income. You can always be working harder but there are only so many hours in the day and your rate can only be so high. Instead, I wanted to build something and to work at starting a business that one day could run itself.

Over the last couple years at LooseKeys  things have been going well and I’m very happy with the people I’m working with, the work we’re doing and the direction we’re headed.

Maybe one day you’ll decide that you too want to go beyond freelancing at a new company every week and decide to go out on your own and start a business. There are many challenges you’ll confront when making that move. 

The difficulty I faced was in that transition from a single freelancer to a business or a brand I was selling to clients. As a freelancer you may be lucky and have a dedicated number of clients who continue to call on you because they are happy with your work. I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to explain to clients that it’s not just me doing the work, that I run a business now. These previous clients who have hired you for freelance in the past know you and trust you. So they contact you for a freelance job but you have to let them know that you would be taking the job on with your team. It took at least a year to shake that freelancer idea from my past clients; you have to educate and promote your business. Work on it everyday. 

Most of the questions I got were “Now you’re working with other people?” “Can your old clients trust these people?” “Can they do the same work that they see in your portfolio?” 

Speaking of a portfolio; when you do transition to running your own business, you have to build your new businesses portfolio from scratch. More than likely you can’t show any work you did at your previous employment because that’s not your new businesses work, that’s work you did at another company. Depending on where the work was done, you might be a able to work out a deal but usually company X isn’t going to like to see that your new company is saying they did that work. It’s a Catch-22; you can’t get clients without a portfolio and you can’t build a portfolio if you don’t have any clients. 

I’m sure the same thing happened when you first entered the working world. What did you do to build your name and promote yourself before? You sold your skills and created your own projects. You have to do the same for this new business with your team of people. You need to be getting these jobs and then have your team work on them. Sell, then delegate the work that comes in. Jump in when you can but you’re not a freelancer anymore, you have people working for you who want to do the work. Give them work to do. If you love doing the work too, then hire someone to sell. You have to be delegating the work in order to grow and build a business. 

These are different challenges than being a freelancer but nothing that’s too complicated to overcome. It takes time and I still get emails and calls asking me to freelance on jobs. I make it clear that me and my team at LooseKeys can do this yes, but it’s a team, it’s a WE not an I anymore.

If you’re interested or thinking about making the move from the freelancing life then start by getting a few bigger projects and out-sourcing some of work. See how you like managing a project rather than just being the one doing the entire project. 

Pricing is always a struggle and everyone is also trying to figuring out where to price their work. I feel like after most of my time freelancing I found a spot that works for me. 

What I’m trying to figure out now is where to price the business. It’s a little different than just figuring out how much you need to pay bills and your employees. Which is the most important piece. You also need to figure out where to position you business in the marketplace. 

Do you want your business to be like a McDonalds with lots of customers and lower prices where you do lots of work and grow fast? Or do you want to be an Alinea with less customers and higher prices. Allowing you to focus on a small amount of work but at the higher price. I would think it might be nice just to focus on one project for a long time and get paid a ton. However, when you’re starting out you have to build the name right? You can’t just set up shop and charge a ton. You have to get people in the door, prove your value and make them want to pay more because you’re the best. 

Price is a struggle and is something for me that’s always a moving target. You have to keep an eye on the market and learn how to stay one step ahead otherwise you might end up having to close up shop before you even get started. 

The simple answer is because everyday I get to learn, experiment and play just like the day before. What could possibly be better than waking up everyday to a new adventure?

We’re now a week into everyone’s New Years resolutions and I’m sure there are a handful of people who have already given up on their goals. I’m still working on mine but I know it’s going to be harder as everyone get’s back to their “normal” routines this week. 

When New Years hits it’s easy to get caught up with the feeling of needing to achieve self improvement. Whether it’s to be happier, lose weight, or find a better job. The trouble with these resolutions is that they often leave us in a constant scenario of wants and then you’re never going to be happy. Rather than setting a bar so high that it’s out of reach, what about just improving off something you’re already good at. You can try to build on something you are already good at or at least decent at. For me this has been illustrating. Illustration is something I feel like I’m decent at but I’ve never been too great at drawing with a pen and paper. Sure I can get my illustrations working when I’m in Illustrator or After Effects but when I have a sketchbook in front of me everything tends to look the same. 

Here I am building on a strength and not starting from scratch. I’m sure we all have a strength that is tied to another weakness. Knowing what your strengths are is important and can help you get far but you also have to identify your weaknesses. Don’t be afraid of them, we are all bad at something. 

You’re most satisfied working a job that allows you to do what you’re good at doing. When you’re in a working environment where you can continue to develop skills that improve your weaknesses you are never going to be bored. 

One of my weaknesses is not only the poor physical drawing skills but it has been handling budgets. I’ve become better at it over the last couple years having my own business. Which building the business has been something of a strength for me but there are parts that need improvement. I’m still not the best with the financial side of the business but it’s a weakness that I know I can delegate to someone else when the time is right. Which will allow me to get back to my strengths. Taking the time to identify your strengths and weaknesses will help you set better goals then just to get rich or lose 20 pounds.

Everyone seems to want to give you advice on how to run your business or your life. I’m all for hearing other people’s opinions and thoughts. Sometimes they are great and give you insight that you might not have thought about. Sometimes the advice is not too helpful; people just want to tell you how they think it should be done. Now I get this a lot with running LooseKeys. Even though I’m 30 I think I come off young and because of that people think they need to tell me how it should be done or what I should be doing. I enjoy hearing other peoples stories and thoughts on life and business. Of course what may work for one kind of business does not always apply to every business; you may not know my business. 

That’s really the only time unsolicited advice can bug me; it’s not so much the advice or the opinions on what someone else thinks I should be doing. It’s the advice that people offer who aren’t in my industry and don’t understand my business or aren’t aware that not everything can be covered under such broad blanket advice. 

With my blog I try not to give advice on how things should be done for everyone but I try and let you know what I did and how I got here. You need to learn and figure things out on your own. Every business is different. There are some tried and true business fundamentals that can be applied to every business or even in life. Specifically thoughts on negotiation techniques and plenty of other great advice out there. I read a lot of books by respected entrepreneurs and successful businessmen in the hopes to gain insight. However, not everything applies to me and my business. So not every piece of advice that is offered by others will apply to you; you need to discover and sort through what will, learn from it and then disregard the rest. 

You really can’t go wrong watching a classic Bill Murray movie; you’re going to get some great one liners and even a few business lessons. I’ve seen the movie Ghostbusters a number of times but never thought about how great the Ghostbusters were at their business. The city loved them and there was no one else you were going to call if something supernatural was going on. 

The Ghostbusters built their business and brand from nothing. They found a niche market and cornered it. They cornered it not only by doing great work that no one else could do but also by knowing everything about their business. 

In business, knowledge is power and you should always try to gather as much information as possible to assist with your decisions. When you know your business so well you’ll even know when you need to do the impossible, like crossing streams. 

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you’re making an explainer video. Often one of these videos comes in at around two minutes. Two minutes is a long time. If you have friends or colleagues working in advertising, they are typically working on things that are 30 seconds or 60 seconds. You’re making something that’s two or four times as long as them and you’re trying to explain a new service or a product. In no way am I saying that when you’re making an explainer video for a business you’re doing more work than someone creating an elaborate ad spot. It’s just different and the time and energy I’ve seen my friends put into five seconds of animation let alone 30 seconds of animation is amazing.

But whether it’s 30 seconds or two minutes, you need to think of the project the same way in order to not overwhelm yourself. My favorite way to look at a project is with baby steps. Yep that’s right baby steps.

When you’re working on an explainer video you’ve likely already storyboarded the video out. When you first start the animation just worry about one scene in the storyboard at a time. Don’t think about how you’re going to get to the next frame. Just animate that one scene and make it look great. Then move onto the next one and do the same thing. Soon you’ll have every scene done. By doing a single scene at a time you’re able to focus your time and energy on that one piece rather than worrying about that scene at the end that you still need to do. When you’re able to really focus like this you’re able to make a better animated video. Once you have all those scenes from your storyboard animated then you can go back and think about those transitions from one scene to the next.

I’ve been using this very idea on a holiday short that we just started at LooseKeys. It’s a three minute animation that we’re trying to finish before Christmas. Three minutes is a lot but each day we’re focused on one scene and I have a feeling it’s all going to come together.

The whole point of a blog is to update your audience on what you or your business is doing. It’s a lot easier to make sure your personal blog has a personal touch. You’re sharing information about yourself and how you are handling things. When you start blogging for and about your business it is often tricky to make sure the posts are personal and helpful. To humanize your business don’t just post content about your company; it shouldn’t come off as a press release every time you post.

With the LooseKeys blog (which I don’t update nearly as much as my personal blog), I try to include not only our success but also what music we’re listening to during office hours, great places to eat and industry news.

The goal with your blog is to maintain engagement between you and your audience. The more that audience sees a personal connection with you and your business, the more engaged they are going to be.   

It’s Thanksgiving! Its not just about all the tasty food we get to eat but also its the time of year we all take to reflect and think about what we’re thankful for. Here are a few people and opportunities I’m thankful for this past year.

First off is my amazing wife, Maeve.  Still after just two months it seems odd to call her my wife. Maeve is one of the most caring, helpful and amazing people I’ve ever met. I don’t think I could have done what I have without her by my side helping along the way. I can’t wait to see what else we do together and what our family becomes. 

I’m also thankful that I’ve been given the opportunity to run and grow my own business, LooseKeys. It’s amazing what you can do with the internet and hustle these days. I’ve been able to find a niche market and place myself at the front of it. I’m thankful that I’ve worked with so many amazing people. Running your own business challenges you and I’m thankful for that because it’s easy to get bored at work. With LooseKeys I’m able to do what I want and have fun doing it. 

I’m thankful that Jake Williams was able to join LooseKeys this past year. Doing work you love doing and having fun doing it is important but when you’re able to work with people who you like being around it’s even better. Jake has been able to help push the business forward quicker then I would have been able to do alone and is helping to define how we take the next crucial steps. It’s great to have someone there to help take some of the weight off your shoulders and when they see your vision for the future of the company as clearly as you do, its even better.

These are just a few things I’m grateful for, I’m so fortunate to have so much and its often easy to take it for granted when you don’t reflect on what you have. I hope you’re able to take a second away from the holiday weekend and think about all the people you have in your life and all you have to be thankful for.