F… The Money, We’re in it for the Love

The purpose of this blog is for the members of Pixel Mobb to speak our mind, and that is exactly what I am about to do. The truth is, I have a confession to make, and it may sound a little crazy.

I am in this business b/c I love video production. Nothing else matters, not even money.

I have been doing video production since I was about 19 or so. Even before that, I was addicted to movies. And I mean addicted. I have watched more movies from different time periods, genres, and countries then most. I am a walking encyclopedia on film directors (though my memory is hazy now and again), and I have always wanted to make movies.

Sounds great, right? Well, believe it or not, it took me a long time to actually come to terms with this. The reason is, since I was young, every educator, friend, family member, and society in general, put an incredible value on money. That is not to say anyone was particularly greedy, just that money was an important factor in decision making. What restaurants you ate in, what clothes you wore, what sports equipment you had, what car you drove, etc. Money seemed to give all of the people who had it very nice things.

It was easy to derive from a child’s perspective that money = happiness. However, the road of life would teach me a much different story.

Hacking my Own Path in Life

Film makers, for the most part, do not make any money. They have to survive, struggle, and put it all on the line just to get a chance at making a living doing what they love. So when it came time in my junior year of high school to apply for college, I decided I would try to get into a great business school. My logic was that I can always use business skills, and if I had money I could make a movie. Even though my Father suggested going to film school, I laughed it off. ‘There is no money in film, and I can always do that later.’

Two years passed by and I got extremely sick with Crohn’s disease. This was back in 1998, so it was a rather unknown disease to the masses. I lost over 60 pounds in a few months, and had to drop out of college. In early 1999, I had surgery to remove one foot of my intestines, sew up my bladder, and remove a fistula. After this close encounter with a life changing illness, my mindset completely changed.

I realized I should not waste time doing what I thought I should do, and stick to doing what I wanted to. Life can disappear at any time, so I might as well make the most of it. I transferred from the University of Maryland business program to the School of Visual Arts in NYC to major in film, and headed down the road toward my dream.

Four great years later, I graduated with a bachelors, a thesis film, and a dream of being the next Steven Spielberg. However, I also was engaged to be married, and needed a place to live in with my wife to be.

Since I was not the next Spielberg yet (except to my family of course), no one was paying me for my talents. I did not want to do weddings, batmitsphas, etc. I wanted to create movies, but I needed money. I could not see how to make money yet with film, since I wanted to write a script first. So instead, I got a job from a friend at Jiu Jitsu doing mortgages. The market was hot, there was a lot of money to be made, and I was good at it. I figured I could get rich doing this, pay for my life, and then make a movie later on.

A few years later, the market crashed, and so did the mortgage industry. Suddenly, after chasing the money, I was back where I started, with bigger bills, trying to figure how to make money with my video skills. Luckily, right before the company collapsed, I got together with my partner Chris, and he showed me the emerging relationship between the web and video. He asked me what the hell I was doing at a mortgage company when I had this video talent, and that lead to a partnership and the creation of Pixel Mobb.

Truth was, I could not see the money with the video. All I saw was the unknown that lay down that road. How could I pay my bills? How could I make enough money?

Two years into the business, trying to make as much money as we can, and my partner and I are once again involved in the same discussion….

How can we make more money doing what we love?

We seem to have to choose between No clients and small clients, neither which alllow us to reach our full potential. What happened to the childhood equation of money = happiness. All chasing money has gotten me is more in debt, and wasted time.

Then, like lightening from the heavens above, it came down and struck me. My partner had mentioned it on many occasions, but each time we ran into a tight month, we ignored everything we said in order to make that money. However, once this thought hit me, I felt a relief like no other. It was exhilarating, like a warm truth protruding from deep in your soul to give you that incredible feeling of freedom. Sometimes, it just takes a certain way of looking at something for you to move past it and let out a giant exhilarating yell…..

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What hit me was a simple, yet fantastic thought.

‘Fuck the money, I’m in it for the love.’

It may be a bit crude, but it is so true. When I thought of my journey, I realized I had got into this to do what I love for a living. I made a decision after a life threatening illness, and somehow, years later, got lost chasing money again. Sure there were going to be tight months, rough times, and a giant struggle bigger than any I had ever taken on. The bottom line that I realized is, there were going to be all these things ANYWAY. At least I would enjoy what I was doing.

Truth is, money does not = happiness. Society teaches us, both in words, and in example, that money = security. Security = happiness. Therefore, we can ASSume that money = happiness. This though, is the wrong order to look at things. Instead, try looking at it like this.

Happiness = Doing what you love. Doing what you love = a great job. A great job = money. Money = security. In another words, worry about your happiness first, and the rest will follow. If you worry about money (the last step), then you will never get there cause you will skip the necessary beginning steps.

A Freedom Like No Other

Since this hit me, I felt a freedom like never before. Just because someone had some work that I ‘could do’ no longer meant I ‘had to’ do it. If I didn’t enjoy doing it, I skipped it. Instead, I spent my time widdling down our services, our target market, and our focus to what we truly excelled at and enjoyed.

Now, our company’s reputation has grown because the work we have put out since is filled with love. It permeates from the production pieces we create because the joy put into the projects is recognizable by anyone. Simply put, we are having fun doing what we do and it is starting to pay off.

No more wasting valuable time chasing money that never accumulates. No more time taking whatever comes my way out of fear nothing else will. No more do whatever I can to make money, instead it’s doing whatever I can to do what I love.

Many people will tell you this is all a fairy tale. That at the end of the month, when the bills come due, doing what you love won’t matter. I can only strongly suggest, just for a little while, you put that advice to the side, and chase your dreams. Understand, you may not look like a genius for doing so for some time. You may not feel like you are taking the right path every step of the way. However, after it is all said and done, and you can finally taste the joy of doing what you love every day of your life, you will wonder why everyone else isn’t doing the same thing.

At least I did. As a matter of fact, it feels really good to say it. Fuck the money. Fuck your bills. Fuck being a slave to your debt. Simply live below your means, do what you love, and watch everything you ever imagined and more start to come your way. It’s amazing how one little change of perspective can ignite an entirely new outlook on life.

Follow Pixel Mobb on twitter, or become a fan on facebook.

New I-phone 4.0 OS coming soon!

For those that love their iphone as much as me, the new 4.0 OS is coming out and it is loaded with some amazing upgrades I think we all have been waiting for.

Some of the new features include multitasking (able to switch between apps as if they are running at the same time), a unified inbox for all your email accounts, background VOIP, the ability to create desktop folders to store more apps then ever before (up to over 2,000), a new social gaming system similar to Xbox live or the Playstation network, and the versatility to change your desktop background image.

There are a ton of other upgrades wonderfully detailed in a fantastic article from MacWorld titled “Inside iPhone 4.0′s multitasking”. It goes into much more detail about all the new features.

The new OS will be out by the summer time for the iphone, and by the fall for the new ipad.

Picking the Right Clients for Your Creative Business

Picking the right clients can be a key part of your success as a creative business. When starting out, a creative business will be tempted to take whatever work they can get. However, we have learned picking the right clients can make all the difference in your long term success.

Since Pixel Mobb was formed a few years ago, we have gone through many mini-transformations in relation to this. I feel like this is normal for a company with such versatile talent. Truth be told, we could ‘make money’ doing a lot of things, however Pixel Mobb was formed to buck the old style of thinking that businesses are successful by focusing on making money. We are focused on us.

Now that sounds kind of funny when you say it. I mean, why on Earth would people open a business if they didn’t want to focus on making money?

We believed focusing on doing what we loved with all our passion, rather than how to make money, would eventually pay off. Well, during tough times, that thinking lead to many heated discussions about personal passions, paying bills, which clients to go after, and so forth.

The problem we seemed to have was focus. We were focused on doing what we love to the best of our ability. That means doing more than the average company, and not worrying so much about profit as much as the quality of the production.

However, we were also focused on making a living, and that means earning enough profit to eat and live comfortably. After trying many different directions, and reading many great articles from Freelance Switch on the topic, we found what works best for us as a passionate creative company. Hopefully, this helps you hold out for the right clients for your creative business.

For us, it came down to a battle of small clients vs. no clients. Every big budget client who came to us was no problem. We produced, they paid, and each was more than satisfied. The issues for our creative company tended to pop up when money was tight, and the budgets were not there.

Small clients

When money is tight, every job seems enticing from an accounting perspective. For example, a simple website (re)design can start at $5-6k and up for 3-4 layouts. In order for us to do the job to the best of our ability, that is the budget required to cover all the hours of work. Others may charge less, or more, but that does not matter. What matters is what WE need.

Many times a friend, or client, came to us with a budget of around $2500 for a website. When money is tight, you start to ask yourself, ‘Can we get it done for that price and still make some money?’

Of course. We do the majority of work in house, and can certainly do that and still make ‘some’ money. ‘Making some money’ is better than ‘making no money’ we assumed. When you look at it from that perspective, it seems like a no brainer. However, we learned the hard way that that is the wrong approach.

All of the clients we ‘helped out’ never took it as such. They expected the $6k+ style websites our portfolio is filled with, and why shouldn’t they? They did not think, hey, we only paid half, so we are going to give them a break. Nope, to them, they paid and we accepted to perform our service. Some would demand revision after revision, some would pay late, and some would complain about the ‘lack of service’ when we were too busy to take phone call after phone call for FREE.

After the project was done, we had earned little to no money, spent countless hours designing, developing, testing, revising, filling content, etc., and still did not have a happy client. On top of that, we also had nothing to add to our portfolio. I mean, sure the site looked awesome for the price range, but clients in this price range left us broke and aggravated, so the last thing we wanted was to get more clients like such.

Even worse, is that clients with limited budgets tend to do a lot of the stuff them self. Now, on top of running their business, they also have to find time to learn how to use their new website, about social media, link building, content writing, and how to work it all into their specific business. This can be quite a handful for a small business owner who just spent their entire monthly earnings on a simple web redesign, and has little left for promotion, upgrades, and marketing necessary for success.

No Clients

Back to our struggling times. Same situation. Money is tight, and another client with a small budget contacts us. Immediately, we get excited to get going, til we remember the last experience. Now wise with experience, we turn down the client and explain that there are better solutions for their budget range then we can offer.

You may be wondering, how it is good for a struggling business to turn down Money, or how pointing the client in a different direction helps out OUR business?

We learned the ways are endless.

From our perspective, this makes perfect sense if you look at what makes our business successful. What we did was actually turn down working for below our profit margin. We need to make a certain amount to be able to pay our bills. If we accept less, that means we make less. However, it does not mean we work less. In fact, we work just as long, if not longer, to make less.

So where our hourly rate is at $120/hour, on some past projects we calculated an income of less than $250/week as a company. On one $50k+ website we did, we earned $156.25 / week over the course of the project. So, big contract numbers can be deceiving if you focus on the sticker price. What matters is the profit margin. How much are you going to make vs. how much time you are going to spend.

From the client’s perspective, we may assume the client, or friend, will be annoyed that we can’t help them. However, if you simply explain the truth, that assumption will fly out the window.

We explain to clients, sure, we can take their money, use it as best as possible, and give them a design to be proud of. However, with the budget they have, they will have no money left over for the other necessities required to make the project a long term success. I tell clients, they would be better off finding a cheaper starting solution, such as a template, and building to our level after some time, then investing so much of their budget up front.

I have pointed clients in this direction and gotten many referrals from it. Clients, and friends, are very grateful when you show them how to get more bang for their buck. Even better, you will also be very grateful when you are not working for below minimum wage for the next month or two.

Small Clients vs. No Clients

Well, if we don’t have work, what do we do? Just sit there?

This is the other issue we ran into from time to time. Is it better to turn down work when you need money and make nothing, then invest your time in a project to at least make something?

I can only answer this from our experience. The truth is, we have found we are better off putting our time into a FREE project we can do whatever we please, then making little money working with someone else’s restrictions. Sure, we may make no money, but at least we are promoting ourselves and have a portfolio piece to be proud of.

Also, when you invest much of your time in an unworthy project, it leaves little time to focus on finding the clients with the budgets you need. We prefer spending our time marketing ourselves, perfecting our skills, and attacking challenging projects that will get us the attention needed to work with the budgets necessary to perform at our peak as a company.

Money Money Money

Business is a funny thing when you exclude money from the equation. Instead of working to earn money, try focusing on working to earn a reputation you can be proud of. The work may not pay now, but it sure pays off later. Build your confidence, find your worth, and accept nothing less. It may take some time, just like all great achievements do.

Follow Pixel Mobb on twitter or become a fan on facebook.