Brain Dump… I came across that term sometime this week in regards to thinking your business plans out.  I think it was mentioned on one of the linkedin groups I subscribe to.  I don’t recall.  The idea is to just write everything down that you could think of regarding getting your business started, back on track, or whatever… a brain dump.  So I thought I’d do a little Friday Brain Dumping.

ENABLING - I saw a twitter this morning that directed you to a great site whose focus is on finding free commercial use fonts.  So I spent a good chunk of this morning downloading.  lol!  If you are in need of some fonts, check out Font Squirrel.  Great stuff!

After I grabbed a good amount of fonts, I didn’t want to unzip them all individually… I am lazy (just ask Jeanine)… So I came across BitZipper (free trial) that will unzip files in a batch.  I checked WinZip but didn’t see that option.  BitZipper worked like a charm.  I might just have to buy it now for all my batch unzipping. lol!

Last Friday, I spent three hours (yes 3!) weeding the front yard.  I ended up with an entire 33 gallon garbage can filled with just weeds… crazy… Today, the lawn looked pretty good and I only was out there for 30 minutes weeding.  I’m hoping to get a little time over the weekend to weed some in the back yard before they overrun my flowers.  My allergies have been crazy bad this year and I have been living on Zyrtec every day practically.  Hopefully that dependence will STOP soon!!!

What a great start to the day… lol!

I came across another twitter link to this No Spec blog post. Back in the day (and I’m talking years and years ago) when I kept up with the web design industry and was a real web designer, I was a firm believer in not doing work on spec.  And if the website was a small one, I often made the client pay 100% upfront (for a one-two page site).  I never showed a design to a client on spec. EVER.

Fast forward several years (showing my age…) in the licensing business, spec work runs rampant.  Do you or don’t you?  A year ago, when Kristy Valshan signed our first licensing contract, we asked for an advance.  That is getting much harder to do as time goes on.  Manufacturers no longer just make a product and go out and sell it.  More often than not, they pitch a digital rendition to the buyer and if there is interest, move on to the next stage and present a physical comp and if the buyer likes it then they move to the final production stage.

We have been caught both ways…. getting an advanced for specing a product that ended up with a warm fuzzy YES from the buyer only to be produced and the buyer not moving ahead with the order (thank goodness we got an advance or we would not have gotten paid for any of our work).  We have also been on the end of doing digital spec work, having it pitched and getting a warm fuzzy YES from the buyer, only to lose the order in the next physical comp stage because we wouldn’t do the physical comp without getting paid for our time. (In that case, the manufacturer did the physical comp which the buyer turned down)  It’s an incredibly fine line to walk in the licensing industry.  It seems more and more companies are looking for the designer to invest their time into a pitch (unpaid time) before they even find out if there is going to be a product at all.

I think for myself, I am starting to lean more towards providing a digital comp of a product (as we have found that it’s hard for the manufacturer to envision our designs on their own products so we have to do it for them) and then depending on the company (large vs small, art dept vs none, big deal vs small change), we might push for an advance to do the physical comp or let the company do the physical comp and hope for the best.  We have been burned both ways so I don’t have an answer for every situation.  It seems every situation is truly different and we are definitely still feeling ourselves out in this industry.

Speaking of licensing, I was fortunate to be able to participate in Jeanette Smith’s licensing workshop this week.  She offered a three day (2 hour per day) mini-camp on licensing (general, sales and contracts).  A lot of it is common sense and just doing it, but it’s still really great to listen and get re-energized and know that you really are on the right path.  I do that with Dave Ramsey too.  Even though I read his books and know the plan, it’s still nice to listen to his radio show once a week and stay on track with the plan.  Get energized!!

I am very excited to be flying out next Friday to stay with Jeanine and go to the stationery show.   Usually by now, we would have seen each other face to face - it’s been since September since I was out there.  We do “see” each other though via video - that has made things much easier for us.  When we need to show something to each other, we can just hold it up for the camera.  Lol!   We have been working like mad this week to prep for some meetings while I’m in town.  It’s been awhile since we were actively out there pushing our licensing and its been really great to get going again!

Well there you have it… my Friday Brain Dump… lol!  Hope you enjoyed it and thanks for playing.

Happy Friday!

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So “My Best Friend” Married a Sociopath was not well-received at the box office. Released in the year 2000, it grossed a total of only $500 in 50 theaters on its opening weekend, well below the $20 million it thought it was entitled to.  The film had a very mixed reception - highly praised by other sociopaths yet a strong adverse reaction from the average movie goer.

Ed Gein gave high marks to the sociopath for being “an exceptional psycho viciously trapping his victim while leaving her to grasp wildly for individuality and empowerment”.  Others have given the sociopath poor marks for its misguided ways and high opinion of itself.

As the story unfolds it becomes quickly apparent that the victim needs to get away - far away - from the sociopath.  I must give So “My Best Friend” Married a Sociopath, a whopping 11 stars, for its incredibly accurate depiction of every day life being trapped with a psycho that everyone else views as “very strange but okay”.  Until you are fully submerged in the every day dealings of the victim, you can’t begin to comprehend what life is truly like with a sociopath.  This movie was extremely eye opening, gut wrenching and an every day emotional roller coaster.  It is not something for the faint hearted.

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I’m so excited to be getting our personal finances back on track again.   A few months back, I read a post on Chrissie’s blog about how they started the Dave Ramsey plan.  Being completely ignorant, I had no idea who Dave Ramsey was.  So I googled for him and checked out his Total Money Makeover book from the library.  Read it all in one night and started creating a budget.  We have been living outside of our means for awhile - probably since I sold my hosting business back in 2004.  We never curbed our spending yet we lost a good chunk of income.  I have been feeling like we’ve been drowning financially (starting a licensing business didn’t help either).

The first part of Dave’s plan is to put $1000 away into an emergency account and create a budget and start paying cash for everything.  So that’s what we did.  Except I was fortunate enough to take it a step further (I had just come into a nice payment from KV) and create an escrow account at the same time.  I put $1500 into emergency and $1600 into escrow and made our annual life insurance payment for each of us.  That was a huge help getting us started with this plan.

I decided that I was going to start escrowing a monthly amount to cover things like - car insurance, life insurance, school fees, even Christmas - as those are items that end up being big chunks of cash when they hit.  Automatic transfer is your friend… so each month I have my accounts setup to auto transfer the escrow amounts for these items into my escrow account.  Then when the payment comes due, I just transfer the payment amount out and write the check.  Started this in January and so far so good.

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It has been so long since I’ve blogged…. or designed anything for that matter.   Contrary to popular belief I have not fallen off the face of the planet… lol!  For the past few months I have been working on renovating my two bathrooms.  I got to the point where I just had enough of their current state.  We’ve lived in this house for almost 8 years and have done nothing major to it outside of getting new siding and windows 4 years ago.  We typically don’t put money into the house and that really needs to change.

I actually had a lot of fun remodeling the bathrooms and have learned a lot in the process.  I did the majority of the work by myself (like….98%).  My husband only helped to pull out the one toilet and help demo the sink in the 2nd bathroom and take down the wall to wall mirror.

Here are some photos from the first bathroom that I re-did.  I should have just re-tiled the floor during this but at the beginning of this project, I was a bit tentative and felt tiling was a huge step.  I wanted to “practice” first in the guest bathroom. LOL!  In the 2nd bathroom, I did end up going tile crazy and will eventually come back and put in a new tile floor for this bathroom too.  Installing the floor in this bathroom will be so much easier than what I ended up doing in the 2nd bathroom (but more on that later).  For the short term solution, I just painted the floor because I had to do something about that nasty green.

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