office interior design agency

hey everybody. welcome to the process. on this episode of ask me anything we're goingto be talking to frank shi he's got a lot of business questions i thinkyou're going to be interested in hearing and answers that we've got. so stick around. let me try this again. i want you guys to listen to me– yeah. i design sandwiches.

my name is jose caballerand i talk about the business of design. hahahaha i talk about a lot of stuff. my name is chris doand i talk about the business of design. at the center of this operating system it'sabout underst– [cough cough] jose, can we just tell em what the show titleis? i hate you dude. you are watching, the process.

hahahaha, nice. alright so let's give everybody a little contextabout for what you are doing frank. talk to me. frank: um, so i've been given this uniqueopportunity to have a partnership with a chinese production companyand they have a lot of clients under their belt that's looking for high quality studio production. chris: mhmm frank: ...and my partner has come to me becausea lot of international brands are using china

as their main point of sales and their wantingto kinda keep that production domestic. chris: and what's your background? frank: my background is, i graduated fromotis college of art and design and the folks in digital media. chris: when did you graduate? chris: two years ago. so thats 2013? alright cool. so just two years barely.

interesting. summers almost over. alright, so let's get right into the questionsand let's see how we do. this is kinda unrehearsed so let's roll. what do you got? frank: uh so first questions what are somecommon business mistakes as entrepreneurs make in the creative field? chris: hm, common business mistakes. ok now i gotta think back to my past here.

um, some things i got right some things igot wrong. so let's start there. first is, you need to get paid upfront. a lot of designers do work and don't collectany money. and there's a lot of people out in the workthat want your creative services, want you to design them a logo, build you something,but you need to get paid first. that's how you know the job is real, causeotherwise it's just all talk and i think as creative people we get really flattered whenpeople show interest in us and they wanna talk to us about a commercial or some kindof branding film, and then you get real excited.

frank: right, right, right. chris: so let's contain the excitement andturn it into something that's very real. so what i would do is, uhh, put together aproposal or talk about a budget and get that 50% upfront. that's when you know it's real. you need to get the 50% upfront. so, get paid upfront, ok? and then about 3/4 of the way through thejob get paid another 25%. and when you deliver the project you can eitherask to get paid on delivery which is not realistic

sometimes but you can get paid the remaining25% net 30. meaning in thirty days they have to pay infull or they pay interest. and that way really what you're risking isthat 25% which should be your profit margin. so if you do it like that you should be ok. cause the last thing you need is to especiallybook a big project and for them to bankrupt and now you're stuck holding the bill. and this has happened to a lot of designersout that own studios and run companies. ok? so get paid upfront.

umm. if you're in a partnership, which you mentioned,now we're just talking about the partnership not so much with the clients, is you gottastart thinking about, unfortunately, the exit scenario. we all go in with all the hope and optimism whichis really great but we have to think about how are we gonna separate. if you can bring the conflict up front andhave that conversation out in the open, you can sleep at night not worrying if this isever–how it's going to play out when it falls apart.

cause eventually partnerships do fall apart. nothing is forever. so you have to start thinking about that. and you need to learn how to bid. so i believe you told me before that you'rea creative and you're partner's a creative. somebody needs to know how to bid. and so do you know how to bid? frank: yeah, i'm learning the process of howto bid slowly, umm. that's some of the questions i have for youalso how to bid.

he's more of an ep. creatively he doesn't really have much control. he's more about like the business and thebidding. so he's helping me kind of sell like our servicesand what–build that relationship between chinese clients and me because of course theirvalue on well what we do is a little different um compared to here. chris: ok, so executive producer when yousay ep, some people in our audience may not know what that means, excuse me. stands for executive producer there are acouple different types of executive producers.

the one type is in charge of new business,business development, sales. they really just go out and hustle and meetwith clients, potential clients and try and sell the services of the company. they typically do not sit down and break outthe excel spreadsheet and work on the bids. that's a different kinda mentality. this person is usually very outgoing, veryshort attention span, really is gregarious, extrovert, and isn't always the best on details. and you need that kind of person. cause that person's–guy or gal who's gonnago out there and get you business.

the other kind of executive producer is onewho runs your company for you. in some instances they're referred to as headof production. they do the bidding, they do the calls, theyset things up, and they close the job. closing the job requires very specific setof skills that we may or may not have time to talk about. so, that's a different kind of person. so sometimes you have a person that does both,so they're going to be a little bit weaker or stronger one than the other. and you have to kind of think about that.

so, that leads me to the next thing aboutcommon mistakes is, sales is everything, sales and marketing. with robust sales and big budget projects,you can fund any kind of company and you can run it the way you want. without those sales, without that cash flowcoming in, you're going to start to suffer severely. okay? the other thing i wanna talk about is, there'stwo ways to make money. there's one way to make money which is tobid high and produce it um–to build yourself

a cushion of profit. the other way to make money is to spend lessmoney to produce the project. and so you kind of have to think about that. sometimes people focus all on getting higherrevenue, grossing revenue and they're not thinking about how to spend that money. so if you get a million dollar job but youspend $999,999 it's really a $1 job. and so we get caught up in the idea that it'sa $1mil job, when really it's a $1 job. conversely, you can do a $100,000 job andonly spend $50k and have a gross profit of $50,000.

now if you ask somebody, would you ratherget the million dollar job or would you take the hundred thousand dollar job. most people don't think about it and theysay "i want the million dollar job". it's really at the end of the day what you'reable to keep after all expenses are paid. including paying yourself and your partnerand seeing what else there is in the profit margin. alright? umm, let's see what else i got here. so we talked about bringing the conflict upfront in negotiations.

i would do that with my clients as well. so often times i think we sit around and thinkthe client has all the power. and they have a lot of power, but they don'thave all the power. they have as much power as you're willingto give to them. so if you're concerned about certain thingslike the schedule, the budget, maybe they're asking for something that would be fairlytricky to do, given the budget, you need to address those upfront. and that way we can act like adults and professionalsand run a real business and talk about these things verses dealing with it after the factand kind of griping about it later.

there's a really great line in here from thewin without pitching manifesto, get a shot of that, by blair enns. he talks about this. he says you know a lot of times we underbidprojects. we underbid projects and later on we regretdoing that so he says in the book, think about the client when they call. are you anxious to pick up the phone? or are you grimacing and trying to avoid thatcall? and often times it is directly related tothe budget.

so a client that's asking for lots of revisionsand needs a lot of hand holding and customer service and you're feeling bad about thatrelationship is because you've charged too little. but if a client's gonna pay me a million dollarsyou can call me as much as you want and you can bug me as much as you want cause i'lltake care of it. cause it's worth the trouble. usually what happens is the lower paying clientstend to pay less and are harder to deal with. that is the tricky part. alright so let's go.

what other questions do you have? frank: um, so. the second one was how to effectively communicateyour business ideas to partners and we say "be more specific". i thought about it from what you just wassaying–talking about. how do i negotiate like fair terms betweenlike, um, ok let's can we rewind? i feel like– chris: yeah fine. it's your question man.

frank: ok, so, how do you sell your companyor your service without much experience to show? chris: ok, you're going to sell your companymostly on your confidence. believe it or not. you can have a gigantic body of work that'swon every reward but if you don't go in there representing yourself well, in terms of like,"i know what i'm doing. i can take care of this." then it won't matter at all. so there are a lot of people out there–thinkabout this if you are an executive producer

or you're a sales rep a sales agent, you don'tdo the work. you didn't do any of it. but what you do is you're managing the relationshipbetween the client and the person who can get it done. you as the head of the company aren't thatmuch different. you know, i don't know if a lot of our clientsare out there thinking that i'm the guy who's working on the box. i opened up after effects the other day andi was a little rusty. i haven't opened it up in a while.

it's coming back to me but that's not whati sell myself on. what i'm selling is i'm a problem solver. i'm a business designer. come to me with your problems, i'll help tosolve them in a way that makes sense for the parameters of what you're trying to achieve. so that's what i'm selling. i'm selling confidence and assurance. assurance not insurance. assurance, i'm going to assure you that thejob is going to get done and based on my experience

and my confidence the client's going to makea decision if i can do it or not. so you actually don't need any work. because later on if i walk away from thiscompany and for whatever reason i sell all the assets to the company including the portfolio,i'll still be able to go out there and get work. cause i'm selling who i am and what i cando. not the work. so, number one mistake there is to sell theportfolio. number two mistake is sell the process.

i think you should sell the people. frank: sell the people? chris: yeah, sell the people. the people are the ones who are going to makethis work. alright what's your next question man? frank: um, how do you effective–efficientlyexcuse me brand what we do and who we are? chris: how do you what? frank: effectively like, um so we can alsolook into the kit with the skool and there was a mission statement and i was having areally hard time writing one.

chris: writing one? yeah, they're really hard to write. frank: yeah because you have to kind of like–iwas looking at the jose's and he talks about it and his mission statement. i was like "wow, this is really kind of broad– chris: pretty broad. frank: yeah but it's hard for me cause i knowwho we are as a team and what we wanna do but how do we communicate that and how dowe put that in a sentence or effectively get the client to look at it and be like "oh iget what you guys do".

chris: ok. one way to look at writing your mission statementis to think about your value. what value do you provide to your customers? what do you really do for them? it's not really about you. so i know that writing a mission statementis very difficult and if you go through the exercises in the core 1.7 kit it'll help breakthat problem down to much smaller kinda bit size piece. but it's really not about you.

think about the value you provide. so the one way to do this is to profile yourcustomers to figure out who are they, are they ad agencies, are they entrepreneurs,are they startups, who are they, in china, and who's gonna need your services and whatproblem are they facing what challenges what pain points do they have? think about their job and think about theirpain points and think about which one of those pain points you can solve and start thinkingabout how to communicate who you are, based on that. k? frank: um, ok.

this is close to some of the budgeting stuffquestions like that so. chris: sure, like money stuff? frank: like money stuff. it's like an awkward topic for a lot of people. how do you budget for unexpected things thatgoes wrong in a project? so other than label costs, overhead, stufflike that, how do you budget–how do you bid for a project, ok this might be a mistakeor someone might screw up this and that. chris: it's a mistake that is caused by youand not by the client? frank: yeah so unexpected–say you hire someonewho's like a effects artist who's like super

expensive but he's like one of those dudeswho just puts stuff on a reel and doesn't really have any, you know. you kind of like, "ohhh, my god. this is really expensive but you didn't reallydo anything." and how do you budget for that and how doyou deal with that? chris: you talking about our last job? frank: no. chris: ok, hahaha. ok hiring uh "experts" that don't deliver.

it's a big problem especially in effects. the effects world is fraught with challengesbecause you come in under budget and often times the scope of the work is, well we don'tlike it so you have to just keep working on it. and so you can easily drive your company intothe ground so you have to be very careful about how you bid. there are only a handful successful visualeffects companies out there that are still doing what they do today. and why is that? because they’re under bidding projects andthey having hard time managing very expensive artists.

ok so let's first look at who you are. let's look at your company and your infrastructure. something i’ve learned is that where relativelysmall company. we don’t have dedicated departments or teamsof specialist who can do a particular job. so larger visual effects companies they havea whole department that just does modeling or does lighting, like there's a lightingtd and there are technical directors who just optimize the code for rendering. so when the models and all the lights youput in it can’t render and it can't render it under four hours a frame, which is unacceptable,they have a guy go in and or a gal, and the

code and they optimize the scene and thenall of a sudden it can render in 10 minutes. you don't have that. so what happens is you have people that comefrom that world who are moving on. either they quit or they were laid off andthey're used to working with a pipeline and a technical director and all these kinds ofpeople and then they come in and they can't produce. it's not that they're not capable of doingit or they're misrepresenting the work it's just they need a certain infrastructure. so more specifically like houdini guys needa whole team, generally speaking. i know i'm making a broad accusations herebut they need a big team to make it work because

it's a very computationally intensive thingthat they're doing. lot's of processing power. so that's one thing. what i've learned is, i would be very upfrontand this is gonna be a theme in business here, whether you're gonna be dealing with yourpartner or a client or a vendor or artist, is to be very upfront. say ya know what, we're a team of six people,we need more generalists to work on the project so if you have a problem i need you to fix it. can you do that?

and here's what we got. and they say yes and you're still not sure,i'd just be very upfront. i'm willing to try you for x number of days,and if it doesn't seem like you're gonna hit it i need to be able to move on. you need to know that upfront. are you ok with that? if you have a–you're booking with weta,i advise you to take that. because this is not that stable. just be very upfront.

that way people can't get mad at you causeyou were hiding something. and i think on the other side, if i was avendor i would appreciate that kind of level of honesty and directness versus somebodywho's like, "oh we'll book you" and then unbook you and i missed out on an opportunity or icanceled a vacation with my wife or girlfriend. that would be horrible, right? so, the thing that you also need to know isif you're a business owner is, cut your losses quick. you bring somebody in you say, “you knowwhat i'm give this x number of days.” and you stick to it and you talk to them,“we're not hitting it, the benchmarks. we're not doing it.

i'm gonna give you two more days to kindafigure this thing out. do you feel confident about that?" and, one thing that i've learned is you needto give them space to say, "no i can't do this." i think especially for guys cause you knowif effects world there's generally it's very male dominated, there's an ego issue and apride issue. i don't wanna say i can't do something. and so if you say, "can you do it" of coursei'm gonna say, "yes i'm gonna do it. so you gotta give me an out. say, “look, i can see that we're all stressedout here and”–put it on yourself to say

that, "you know what, this job's harder thani thought and our pipeline isn't there." or whatever reason there is tell them that,“so if there's a chance you don't think you can deliver i would rather shake handswith you and part ways and look at you for something else as opposed to us kind of burningthis together and maybe moving in a direction where we can't recover from this.” be very upfront and be that transparent andyou don't have to be a jerk about it. frank: and, another one talk moneywise– chris: talk money as much as you want. frank: so like if an artist cost like $1,000a day and they're like–

chris: don't hire them. frank: –like example, top of the crop likeand you have them say booked for 5 days. how do you put like a margin on their mistakesif they do screw up? chris: ok, you should not be–ok so, thisis actually to the heart of your question cause i see now what you're saying. how do you bid a job and cover for unexpecteddelays or missteps? now when we get to bidding cause i had askedyou before, do you know how to bid, and you said your ep knows how to bid. so i just shelved that whole topic all together.

but i'm just gonna give you a broad overviewok cause this is something i learned early on. so let me tell the people how you're supposedto bid and if you guys want to know more just comment below and we can do a deeper diveinto that and do it with fancy shmancy graphics ok? so how do you bid? here's how you don't bid, you calculate yourtime and you do an hourly rate and you guesstimate uh–so let's just give me a reasonable hourlyrate that somebody starting out might charge. what do you think? frank: $50.

chris: ok $50/hr so that's, 8 hour day–let'ssay for 10 hour day that's $500 cause those numbers are more round ok? so you're gonna charge $500 day so you guesstimatethat it's gonna take you 10 days. keeping number really round. so that's gonna be $5,000. so you submit that. so $5,000 is the number you submit to thejob and they say, "ok go ahead and do it." what's the problem with that model? well that's not a business.

there's not profit and there's no room forerror. the way you look at it as a business personas an entrepreneur is, how much would you have to pay someone else to do that job andthat's how you bid it, and you have to pay yourself. ok so there's things that we're missing inhere. alright let's go to the board here. can i? alright so, here we go. so you have an artist and they're $500 right,a day. that's pretty typical of a person who knowswhat they're doing, ok?

it can go much higher it can go a little bitlower, but that's about it. so you look at it as that times–so there'sa rate there, times 10 days. so your spreadsheet would look something likethat right? the name of the artist times the number ofdays. so this is days and this is rate and thisis the tile or job description, ok? and so then you would have a subtotal here. and what's the math on that frank? frank: $5,000. chris: $5,000 ok so far so good everybodyis following me, right?

ok so $5,000. like i say, if you submit the bid for $5,000you've done yourself a disservice. ok, so who's managing that artist? and what if that artist takes longer than10 days? now you're paying for the job. so the first thing you're gonna need to dois you need to mark this thing up, ok? so you can mark it up to–what rate do youthink you can mark it up to? frank: i'll say $600. chris: alright $750, i like that number.

so you're gonna mark it up to $750, ok? because artists always underestimate whatit's gonna take to do the job. so so far if you do it $750, the new numberwould be $7,500. so if all goes well, which it never does invisual effects, you'll have made an extra $2,500. you can send 10% of that to me. everybody that's watching that if you makethat money send 10% to me, alright? i'll do a paypal thing and we're all good. is everybody good?

ok, i don't work for free. frank: we're good, hahaha. chris: i got two kids to raise and they goto private school so we're gonna do this the right way. alright, so now who manages this person? you have a producer coordinator, ok so youhave a producer. ok what are they a day? let's say $400, ok? and so they're gonna run that project forthe duration of it which is another 10 days.

ok so now you're gonna come out at $4,000. ok that's a number that you didn't put inthere. now whether or not you hire a producer andpay that amount isn't relevant. it needs to be in there because somebody hasto manage the project. so again, if you wind up producing the projectyourself that means you've made another $4,000 on top of the $2,500 so so far we're up $6,500. so initially you were talking about havingan artist at $500/day for 10 days. so by the math that would be $5,000 but theproblem is if you run into a problem if things are delayed or you underestimate the job,you are now gonna go into the red.

so you cannot pay the person and you cannotcharge the same amount as you're gonna pay the person. it doesn't make any sense. so there's two areas in which you can do this,one you change the rate and you can also change the number of days. but i like just working on the rate. ok because perhaps is a hard deadline andin 10 days this thing is due, so you can't just put more days in there. ok there is a way around that too.

so the difference there just by doing thisis a potential profit of $2,500. the difference being from $5,000 to $7,500. now you're going to need to add in a producer. cause somebody's gotta run the job. somebody's gotta look at the assets and managethe team. ok so the team is one person that's fine i'lljust put in their rate of $400/day. in asia you're gonna pay a lot less than thatso let's assume that's ok. so at 10 days that $4,000 now, ok. so, who's gonna direct this person, this artist?

oh, that would be you. so i'm gonna put in an art director. ok an art director what do we gonna put infor an art director? what dollar amount should we put in for theart director? frank: i mean i would say like $700 - $800. chris: $700-$800? it can't be less than this guy. so this guy's coming in at $750 i'm gonnasay like $900, ok? now we don't need to art direct this personevery single day of the job.

so you can just put in a random number there. let's say 5, ok? so let's say 5 days and it's not that you'renot working with him everyday it's just you're prorating your time across the length of thejob so there now we're up $4,500, ok? so let's say that's pretty good. now if you need more artist help i would putthat in there. so are we good yet? should we submit the bid? $7,500 plus $4kplus $4,500–it's $8,500 it's um, $15–$16k i believe.

so, right now we're at $16k. is my math right? uh my business majors? $16k? ok so we're at $16k. remember initially you were gonna come inat $5k. so this is how you do a bid, ok? what else do you need in here? are we good?

frank: um, what about overhead? utilities, rent, etc... chris: right. you can't just show that in there. frank: yeah so how do you– chris: how do you put that in there? ok well these guys they don't work on paper,they work on a machine and there's software attached to that machine so i'm gonna callit a workstation. now i can't charge for the laptop to do thebid but i can charge for the pc/3d workstation,

and i find a reasonable rental rate. what's a rental rate for a machine? you know per– frank: per day? chris: they usually do them by the week. what is it per week? just throw out a number. frank: $1,000? chris: that's too much.

$1,000 a week? let's say $500 a week. i don't even think it's that much. cause we rent computers. so $500/week times 2 weeks, right? so now you have another $1,000 in here. so this number just keeps growing. what else do you have in there? now i'm gonna roll in hardware and softwarecost cause i don't wanna delineate every single

part to the puzzle right? so let's just do a subtotal now. so now you have $17k. that's your bid now, ok? $17k. i drew that one too close to the dollar signso you guys are gonna have a hard time seeing that, $17k there. are we done? no because now as a business we need to makeprofit.

this is where we cover our overhead and ourstuff, k? so profit is gonna be anywhere between, dependingon what country and where you're from and what industry you're in, can be anywhere between10-30%. so you just mark that up. so let's just say because my math is not sogood, let's say it's 20% ok? so we'll say 20% is our markup and you justtell them, it's markup, it's our profit. everybody that runs a business understandsthat because if you paid everybody you still wouldn't make any money. so 20% of that–so 10% of that is $1,700so $3,400–so it'd be $3,400 right?

so you're gonna add that together, so nowyou're at $20,400 for this job. that's how you do a bid and that's how youstay in business, ok? there's a lot more parts and pieces to thislike a modeler, um you can charge for rendering even. cause those are things that are out of your control. does that help you understand how to do a bid? ok, so i'm gonna come back to here. alright. now, those of you that are watching and youjust saw how you did a bid, if you wind up making an extra i dunno, let's look at thisagain cause i wanna make sure this is on camera.

the difference between your initial bid at$5,000 now and your new bid at $20,400 is $15,400. you can send me a check 10% of whatever thatprofit difference is cause i got kids they go to private school. somebody's gotta help me out with the bills, alright? and i don't do this for free. ok. what's next? frank: um so, how do i insure myself as likea business owner to get over that first year?

that first hump. chris: the first year, first hump? what do you mean? frank: like the–um, i've been talking toa lot of business owners they say the first few years are the hardest. so how do i play my cards right so i ya knowget over that hump and don't like crash and burn? so your question is, how do you prevent crashingand burning because you run out of runway? right so you have a cash flow issue. there's a couple things you can do.

first, you can get a line of credit if you can get one. so if you have some kind of credit historyyou can get a line of credit from your bank. right now i think we have a $400,000 lineof credit with wells fargo. it's necessary. it's how companies fill the gap against pending orders right? so if you get a new contract, say it's $100kcontract now you gotta staff up you gotta buy machines, you can usually use that andgo and take that invoice to the bank and get a line of credit. because clients don't always pay you upfront.

the good new is, if you've been listeningto this episode you have gotten $50k upfront. but before you even get that you're prettysure it's a lock you need to start getting the team ready and get things together. so you may do a little expenditure. i would rent everything i would work on cratesand boxes and buy your furniture from ikea if you can. you don't need fancy shmancy furniture andthings like that, ok? i would go to office depot and buy a $79 chairand don't worry about getting the herman miller aeron chair.

you don't need it right now. and the last thing that you wanna do is createthis cash flow expenditure that you can't manage. so run it very lean. that's why when you go to startups, you'llnotice, it can be some of the most valuable companies but they're working on milkcrateboxes with a door for a table top. do it like you would do it in college, keepyour expenses down, ok? that's how you manage that. so once the job comes in don't start spendingthat money right away. some people thing, "ok it's a $100k job.

i got $100k in my pocket i'm gonna go buya new car." don't do that. do not do that. so live within your means, ok? where you want to spend money that you don'thave is potentially because there's a staff or an artist or a designer or somebody thatyou really think you need and you need to take a little bit of an educated guess orrisk at the new work that's gonna come in and you roll the dice and that's what entrepreneurshipis about, ok? you have to take some risk.

don't be stupid about it but take some risk, k? frank: here's my follow up question to that. what's the benefit between i would say doinga startup from your home like digital nomads just kinda like everywhere scattering andmanaging that team compared to say having a small space thats kind of like very manageablelike very small space. so what's the benefit and pros and cons between the two? chris: it's a lot–ok so the question is,what's the difference between a brick and mortar company verses a–i think the term is fluid model? where you just have a very small core teamof people.

everybody else just works remotely from allover the world and you manage things remotely. well, the first thing is–you wanna comparethe benefits and the pros and cons, or just one or the other? frank: the pros and cons. chris: ok pros and cons and you know whatthe pros and cons are going to be. communication is gonna be much more difficult,you're gonna spend more time dealing with project management because you gotta get theassets out to everybody, and not everybody's working with the same version of softwareand not everything's synced up so you have to figure out some way to manage that.

and what are some of the tools that peopleuse to manage teams across the globe? they might use trello, they might use basecamp,or slack, there's a bunch of project management software that's out there that can help you do that. and they can ever use it to track time, liketime sheets, things of that nature. the benefits are, you get to work with anybody. it's a higher quality of life for those artistscause they get to work from home and do whatever they need to do as long as they do the work. it would most likely pay less because youcan work with whoever you want wherever and so you gotta look at in the u.s. or the u.k.maybe the pound or the dollar is quite high

relatively speaking cost of living's quitehigh, and so there are a lot of people in brazil, amazing artists and animators, somepeople in korea and japan or wherever else it is, i shouldn't say japan. japan isn't gonna be cheap. or in china, in your case and india wouldbe another place so you can leverage what the local economy is cost of living with thequality of the artist. now generally speaking, the best artist dogo to the biggest markets. so they're gonna come to san francisco, la,new york, the u.k. you know probably london. wherever the big effects shops are.

that's where they'll migrate, ok? so you probably will not be getting the samequality artist that you're used to seeing here. so more management. alright, i'm gonna give you one more questionbecause i think we're way over time. so what other question do you have? frank: um i guess, the last question wouldbe, what is good company culture and like team building? i feel like you've been talking a lot aboutmanagement and i feel like the way i have to run this thing it has to be you know digitalwhere everyone's scattered, for the initial startup.

so how do i manage the team and um you knowget them to feel positive and feel confident in me and themselves to do this work causei feel like that's very important in this kind of upsetting. chris: right, so you have multiple time zonesnow you're trying to sync everybody up right? assuming that they're not all local to you. so, first of all getting everybody on thesame page is tough. so let me just talk about company culturefirst and then we'll figure out how to do that over distance based operations like thiskind of fluid agency that we're talking about. company culture to me is one of the most importantthings that you need to focus on as a company.

you get it right at the beginning and youjust go from there, ok? so what values are important to you as anartist because you've worked at places where you are an artist and now you're gonna flipuh you're gonna go on the other side of the game, so to speak, you're gonna go on theother side of the fence. so now you gotta remember what was importantto you as a person. what attracted you to a place? now chances are when a freelancer's out thereor a person who's kinda considered taking a staff position, they're looking at everything. they're looking at how much am i getting paid,how good is the work that i'm doing, and how

do they treat me, and how do they manage theircompanies. so very likely you cannot compete on priceor the quality of the project so you gotta focus on the other two components. how do you treat them, how do you manage projects. so that's your competitive advantage to kindof level the playing field if you will. some companies, won't mention who they are,they do amazing work. their company culture is less than desirablebut they can get people to come in because the work is so good, right? so you've been there you've done that so youknow and so you kind of know what kind of

company you want to have. i kind of look at it like this, people thatcome into our company whether they are freelance or staff, i wanna make sure that their longterm career is protected and nourished as supposed to just using them up and spitting them out. because if you go at this kind of rate whereyou're working all day and night, and i've done that. i've stayed up all night i've worked all nightwith freelancers before, when the sun's come up together, right? it takes a toll on you and you can only dothat for a certain period of time. so the idea is that you wanna minimize thosemoments when you're taking those kinds of

jobs that require you to do that. where you're staying up all night. something's telling you it's wrong. you accepted a job going in knowing, thatthere's not enough time, the job is too big or complicated, and you don't have a big enough team. so that's the recipe for burning everybodyout, including yourself. i've been doing this now for almost 20 years. i'm as passionate about the work i do todayas the day i first started. cause i learned how to manage the projects,my time, and what i put into it.

so what else we wanna know about company culture? and if you haven't done so already, i wouldhighly recommend, i don't have the book here. i could go grab it but, delivering happinessby tony hsieh. definitely read that book and tony hsieh forthose people who don't know who he is, he's the founder of zappos and he sold his companyfor like a billion dollars to amazon. that's not an expression. i think it was right around a billion dollarsand he's selling shoes and he writes about how the margins are so small, the only thingthey have is culture and he's a big believer in that. so, read that book then come back to me and we'll talk.

again, if you have questions after you readthat book, happiness, i'll provide a link down below to buy the book. once you guys read it you can post questionsor we can have a little conversation about it. these are two books that i believe are reallyimportant in shaping my thinking about business. first is the win without pitching manifestoand the other one the virtual book i'll hold it up here maybe there will be a graphic thataaron can provide for us and it's called delivering happiness by tony hsieh. he sold his first company when he was in his20's for a couple hundred million dollars so he know's what he's doing.

frank: from what i heard he lives at likea trailer park. chris: he lives in a trailer park now. frank: he i was looking at a video of himlike he cherishes experiences and culture more than anything. that's something i really admire. chris: so there's one thing i read about himrecently he says everybody's talking about work life, balance, to manage those two things. he's like that's not his idea right now. his idea is about work life integration.

that if your life and your work can be thesame you're living a pretty good life and you're working in a pretty cool way, and that'swhy he lives in this park that he's asked everybody to come out and live next to him. so he's got a llama living in the desert inlas vegas so it's pretty cool work life integration. frank: is that something you– chris: i'm striving to achieve that same kind of goal. frank: yeah i mean that's most questions i have. chris: alright. well guys, thanks for tuning in for anotherepisode of ask me anything.

thanks for tuning in, see you guys next time. [music]

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