=a-vacant-suit

Rightio!

After not touching this log for several months now (and several months before that) I am finally deciding to update it. I know that no one will probably be riveted by what I will be writing about, as it will be mainly discovery type stuff and reflections on our studio, which at the moment is all about making it more business-like.

We've been pretty busy these last 12 months, with a huge shake up of how we work. We've started to develop working systems for handling projects, clients and suppliers, as well as systems for handling our own operations. These are things we always talked about but never developed. Now that we have however, we have control and measures both of which are important. With control we worked on how we do things; what stage projects are at; what tasks people are responsible for and deadlines for such. All we do now is approached with a sense of purpose. We also developed systems of measurement as without measures we cannot determine effectiveness and success: When will we know that what we've done has been successful? How do we do it again?

We set up these systems to painfully track and audit the things we do and determining their success or failure we have been able to see major weaknesses in our studio. So far we've been so much better for it.

We found weaknesses. Oh there were many. Our lack of experience in the industry for one. Although it was expected we were lacking in experience, we had no idea about how much we didn't know. Now we do know what we don't know and my lord is it a lot. Enough to make the realisation of the fact to send chills down my spine. Our lack of connections is also directly related to experience which also puts us in a difficult spot. we also lack resources in many areas, which makes the initial turning of the wheel ever so slow. We do however, still have the adaptive minds and capable characters that led me to believe we could do this in the first place (as foolish as that notion was).

So. With knowledge of these weaknesses we decided to take action.

Lack of experience was countered with a mentor. A cousin of mine in the same business who started off like us but is know heading a branding and communications consultancy in Singapore. We've just recently created an affiliation with them to leverage resources, work-flow and quite possibly image.

Lack of connections was countered by digging up old friends we had met along the way to where we are. Uni friends, school friends, friends of friends, family friends etc. We dug up our memory reserves of who did what in which industry and re-contacted them, except with a focus on developing business contacts. We definitely should have done this step ages ago.

Resources. Well theres not much we can do about this one, as you can't create something out of nothing. We did however find that a lot of our connections having seen our work became impressed enough with it to tell their friends, with some work filtering through. Work leads to income, income leads to investment opportunities.

And that's how we got to where we are now!

We've spent the last 6 months actively addressing these issues while working on projects for clients and ourselves.

I'm sitting in a little studio on a busy corner in a quite (not quiet) attractive part of town. We have list of projects to work on and theres more work on the cards. It's been big steps towards bigger things and a shift of focus and goals.

As a result this log will probably be updated more with events and project logs as such as part of an active part of the business. It will help me to keep track of thoughts, events and changing attitudes from here on in.

Hopefully the size of the post doesn't scare you away XD

Peace!