Posts in category Work

New Office!

Oct03
2010 Kristi Written by Kristi

We’ve been in need of some office upgrades for a while.  Since I’ve been home all the time, there just isn’t a good way for both of us to work with our previous set up.  It worked for a while and then I couldn’t take my small space anymore.

See?  Clean for the pic but not practical, especially after we bought my laptop which was often sitting where that book was in the picture.  So I mentioned to Rob on Wednesday or Thursday last week that I was getting tired of having no desk space and how dark the office was.  That opened the floodgates of discussion about what we wanted, what wasn’t working, what we envisioned.  It turned out that we had a similar idea of what we wanted, a more professional space where we had room to have both computers available (we both work off laptops and desktops at the same time.. it’s crazy but it works).
Rob’s desk (shown here from last winter) took a beating this summer.  His second monitor died and we finally got a proper window covering for the window.  (We’d been using a sheet to cover it.. can you say ghetto?) But the space was dwindling for him and we needed more room for everything.

So, without further ado, the new office.

Rob’s desk and mine are the same.. frosted glass table topped desks from Ikea.   This probably cleanest his desk will ever be.

My desk.. well, part of it anyway because it’s huge!

When Tucker died, we planted some basil and used his old water bowl.  It’s thriving in the western exposure we get in here.  He would’ve knocked it over about, oh, 17 times by now.  We still miss him.

Diplomas courtesy of higher learning.  The painting was a wedding gift from our friend Jen.  We haven’t had a frame for it until now so it’s now joined the display in here.

The whole enchilada.

I’m not going to show the closet because, yanno, office supplies on a bookcase aren’t that exciting.    We are exhausted.  A drive to IKEA yesterday in Oakland followed by hauling out everything that was in here before, assembling everything, and then hauling the little stuff in took us until 11pm last night.  We were up for church at 8am, got home at 2pm and Rob decided to go to Office Depot for the final touches.  I know we are insane.  But our office is clean, tidy and feels more pulled together than it ever has.

Posted in House and Yard

Health Care

Mar23
2010 Kristi Written by Kristi

I’m not ashamed to be a Democrat.  I voted for Clinton.  Twice.  I have never voted for a Republican and so help me, I don’t ever plan on it.  I’m a church-going Christian who is pro-choice.  Where health care is concerned, I AM OVER THE MOON about this bill being passed.

We pay almost $1000 a month for health care using my COBRA benefits from my last job.  We are 2 healthy adults but I have pre-existing conditions, namely migraines, which will make it virtually impossible for me to get coverage after our current benefits are up in December.

The anger, the hyperbole, the “they’re cramming this down our throats” rhetoric that can be best traced back to the lackeys of Fox News make me silently seethe.  Why?  Because people like Glenn Beck don’t have to worry about not having health coverage.  He’s got plenty of money from his form of conservative irritainment.  And people like me?  People who run a business, who scrape by each month, who can’t afford NOT to have insurance, are left stressing about how to pay insanely high premiums and terrified that one trip to the hospital could mean thousands in medical bills that we cannot pay.  The stories of people like me don’t anger people the way Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh want. (When is he leaving the country anyway? I can arrange for some free time to help him pack.)
Don’t get me started on those receiving Medicare and how they want the federal government to leave their Medicare alone.  Seriously?  I don’t know how many people thought in 1965 that Medicare was the beginning of a communist regime in the US but today, it’s amazing how many people have bought into the bullshit propagated by conservative news and talk radio.
The question I’m left with in response to the hyperbolic vitriol?  Why don’t we deserve the same access to quality care without being bankrupted in the process?  We contribute.  We pay our own way.  We own a business.  We don’t ask for hand-outs and don’t expect them.  But come December, without this new bill, we would be left with no option but to go without health insurance, or at least without dental and vision and somehow deal with the ass rape that would be medical (if I could even get covered).

Having lived for 2 years in the UK where I had coverage for simply holding a visa, I paid nothing for a doctor visit and a whopping £6.50 (about $12) for migraine medication that without insurance costs me $150 (£100).  For 6 pills.  Yes, you read that right.  6 pills.  Yes, people bitch about the NHS, and many with good reason but the bottom line is this.  You don’t get denied coverage if you are sick, if you get sick, if you are healthier than a horse, if everyone in your family had cancer or you have some wonky blood vessels in your head that you cannot control for love or money.  Yes, there are wait lists for procedures and yes, this royally sucks ass.  But you also have the option to have private insurance, either that you pay for out of pocket or that your employer provides.  Doesn’t make it a perfect system by any stretch of the imagination but when you consider that in the US, we have over 32 million people who are without adequate health coverage and consider ourselves to be the last great superpower in the world?  It’s despicable that we would deny care to those who, through no fault of their own, are without.
So enough with the rhetoric.  Enough with the hate speech.  Enough with the talk of secession from the union and suing the federal government on my behalf.  Please don’t.  My health depends on it.

Posted in Current Events, Everyday Life

Burnout

Mar03
2010 Rob Written by Rob

Hey there. I know we haven’t been posting here much lately; some of it has just been being really busy, some of it has been being sick (I’m still recovering, Kristi’s down hard with it now), and a lot of it has been dealing with an out-of-control client drama that took a turn for the absurd.

I wrote about the latter briefly a few posts back, about the long time client who has a bad habit of going off the reservation: he suddenly gets the urge to do something really stupid, and then gets pissed off when we tell him (nicely, tactfully) that it’s not a good idea. In the past, he’s eventually figured out that we were right and then come back to his senses.

About four weeks ago he subscribed to an online service that promised to automate his marketing, make him tons of money in a short time with very little work, and let him spend all his time on the golf course while his business built itself. This service is also deeply in bed with a particular online marketing guru guy who runs a media empire that’s essentially an MLM sales cult. I’d run across this particular con artist and his ilk before – he’s the last refuge of the dying small business, the final desperate move small businessmen make before shutting their doors for good. The advice he gives is nonsense, at best only relevant to a particular type of business (which our clients’ isn’t), and everything he pushes is saturated in hyperbole and logical fallacy. His schtick is selling newsletters, information products, seminars and affiliate programs: he’s basically an online Amway.

This client of ours – despite a productive yearlong relationship, successful projects and real, tangible returns – got sucked in by these guys in early February and in very short order went insane, talking in buzzwords and language that don’t really mean anything outside of this guru’s system. Getting more combative, hostile and insulting at every turn. Confounding us completely, pitching sales ideas that made absolutely no sense and that would clearly damage his business more than help it. Finally earlier this week he canceled our remaining projects and informed us that he planned to turn over the marketing of his business to The Guru’s Awesomely Great System.

Last night we finally learned what the issue really was, after some Googling of a few of these stupid buzzword terms he was throwing around. We found some of the guru’s “teachings” using these buzzwords, and discovered that in his great and holy theology, the guru brands people like us – marketing folks who aren’t on board with the Guru’s Awesomely Great System – as the Great Satan, intent on corrupting honest businessmen and stealing their money. And our client is just soaking it all in.

We’re pretty much at the end of the road now with him. I’m burnt out and tired and just don’t want to work with the guy anymore. It’s one thing to have not produced any results, but we produced really good results for him: as a result of the work we did, he was presented with a major deal with one of the nation’s largest mortgage bankers. He screwed it up by not following up, instead letting it die on the vine while he was out on the golf course.. but of course, that’s not his fault. It’s ours for not producing results, right?

The sad part is that this really will damage, if not destroy, what remains of his business. We know the kind of stuff he wants to do. We know the stuff the Great Guru pushes. We also know our client’s market, at this point probably better than he himself does. These guru guys will bleed him dry while encouraging him to thoroughly ruin himself. I suppose the upside is that he’ll end up having to do less work after all, while freeing up his time to go play golf more often; that seems to be really what he wants, anyway. That’s pretty easy to achieve when you don’t have customers.

I’m trying to wrap up late deliveries for our energy company client and a New York ad agency today. Tomorrow Kristi has a photo shoot at the Salvation Army Red Shield community center and I have a launch call for a website job with an old telecom client. Then we plan to be off to Half Moon Bay for an afternoon and sunset at the beach. We both need some salt air, a nice dinner and some restful space.

This and That

Feb13
2010 Rob Written by Rob

So we’ve had our hands full lately, which is why we haven’t been posting often here. Where to begin?

Last four weeks or so, we’ve gotten our firm together. There was some delay in getting our DBA paperwork straight, but once we had that done everything else was the steady (and rather pedantic) march of dotted lines and local regulatory compliances. But by the end of January, we had a new bank account and a business license and all that other good stuff: we officially made the leap from freelancer-and-wife to a young but functioning marketing firm.

Our name is Load Bearing Creative. We do web design, print collateral (brochures and other printed marketing items), identity (logos, stationary, etc.), etc. We’re also equipped to handle smartphone-friendly website development, email newsletter creation, general marketing copywriting and lots of other interesting things. The three of us – I, Kristi and Jen Duarte (our art director) have been steadily organizing in recent weeks to get this new operation rolling as quickly as possible.

Wanna see our new logo (designed by Jen Duarte)? Check this out:

This industry – web design, interactive marketing, whatever you want to call it – is full of people long on promises and short on delivery. Sad but true. We plan to be different, doing more than just paying lip service to relationships and being an advocate for the client. Hence the business name: we intentionally wanted to set an identity based on being the reliable underpinning, the cornerstone you don’t have to worry about. We bear the load of your business marketing. And we’re good at it.

And we’ve had our desks pretty full lately. I’ve been busy with our regular client roster, juggling projects ranging from website copy buildouts to newsletters to even a direct mail campaign or two. And together, Kristi and I have been steady progress with another big job: the Salvation Army.

This began late last year when we were recruited to tackle a major website job for the local citadel of the Salvation Army. Since then we’ve been running around, doing photo shoots (courtesy of our good friend and exceptional photographer Aaron Draper) and interviewing people and organizing information and just managing the overall process of building a quality organizational website. We’re now a few days away from launching the main website.

Good things are happening and we’re staying busy. Our new business cards are on their way, and we’re working to finish an interim Load Bearing Creative website. Exciting days. Life is good.

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