Starting
July 20, 2015
This project scared me at first. I didn’t think I would be able to do it. I didn’t think anyone would read it.
Over and over I continued to come up with a reason for why I can wait and don’t have to ship.
No one would have hit a home run, painted the Mona Lisa, or written Purple Cow if they didn’t start.
I’m sorry Clark, but I can’t let you work any longer.
Your work is good, and good sucks. You don’t seem to really like it at all. Your friends see it. People you work with see it. The people you save when you are living in your calling see it too. Why can’t you embrace it? What worldly threat is holding you back from living as superman all of the time?
To be Clark Kent and brush your calling to the side, is to deny yourself time spent operating as the creature you were intended to be.
It is time to sell the bullshit you bought, and start to work with what you were given. You’ve got no time to lose! Imagine a life where you wake up excited for the day and you have trouble going to sleep because your day was filled to the brim with people and experiences worth having again, and again. What does your day look like?
Hurrah! If you can search inside yourself and identify the answer, congratulations! You’ve now fertilized the catalyst of a very long journey ahead. It is going to be a very challenging several months, and there will be plenty of complications. However, it will pay off. Your body now roams the planet conscious of its one purpose: Deliver this beautiful, previously unknown part of myself into the world, and walk with it through its incredible life ahead.
Set your goals.
Conceive the dream. Carry it through its development. Release it into the world kicking, screaming, and smashing through the barriers that were put in place before its conception.
What do those barriers look like?
What must you learn along the way?
Who needs to be apart of your support circle?
Finally, set its due date! You are an excited new parent and can’t wait to meet your child.
Rejoice when it comes to fruition, breathes the air of the earth and can be remarked on by others fortunate enough to meet it.
My name is Nic Bovee. I dream of a life spent helping entities bigger than myself with a team of people who always challenge the status quo. My goal is to rely less on my position as Clark Kent, and dare to fly into the unknown as the super hero I was placed on earth to be. I love being asked questions I don’t know the answer to. I love to collaborate with a team of people who enjoy the same. It would be so refreshing to operate with a team of “A+” players who don’t allow me to stay tucked away in the safe bowels of my comfort zone. The path to living my dream comes with many adversaries. The biggest challenge being the mentality I have created for myself.
“ You cannot survive on your own!”
“You’re not smart enough! “
“You depend on other people to live! “
Pushing against those barriers until my newly achieved goal can break through them is going to be almost impossible. It’s going to take a lifestyle that permits learning, and developing new things while still functioning safely in the company. It will take me stepping out and assembling a team of people who are the best in the world at what they do. It will take my vulnerability to step out and actively look for the bigger entities that have problems that our elite team can solve for them.
My plan of action is this.
Start now. Reach out to the people in my existing circle and find out if they want to be apart of something like this. Start acting like a company, and set deadlines for the projects I’m already involved in. Learn how to pay taxes like a company. Tune in to what it is I actually do on the team, and pitch it to the people who I want to work with.
My Deadline
June 15th 2016-It is the one-year anniversary of the day I started the most important transformation of my life. I will be spending an equal portion of my time during the week meeting with my team and talking through the current challenges our firm faces. My price structure will be fully developed as a piece of art. I will have at minimum 5 projects at a time, and will be actively networking to gain at least 5 more for the next month. We will ship on time. We will ship great work. I will have learned new things from the 50+ books I add to my library. Most importantly, I will be shedding new light on my current job and hopefully applying some of the concepts from my company into the weaknesses of the one I work for. It’s not going to be easy, and I’ll need to constantly monitor the course and change as need be.
Creating all of this will be worth it. When I reach the top I will have brought along stories that either tell of the bounty of success or the lessons from a successful failure.
P.S.
At the beginning of my article, I was really leaving an opening or invitation for readers to join in and set some goals of their own. I left the door open, but never told anyone to go in. As Seth Perler pointed out, I should make a point of letting the reader know that there is an opportunity and to get the most out of my article they should take it.
Updated Plan of action- Upon Michelle’s request
Restate my goal (With meat):
I want to live a life where I work with companies that want to push themselves to a new level of greatness by helping them make decisions on the creative front. This includes:
Branding- Designing the story behind the image, then updating the image to reflect the story. I want to design a workflow that will ask the questions that need to be asked in order to discover what the company’s story is.
Logo Design- Whether it’s a redesign for branding or a start to finish creation, my goal is to be a company that takes the culture of a company, and creates a logo for them. I’ve done this for a few different people, and I’ve really enjoyed it.
Web Site Design- This is definitely an element of my structure that will require looking for a great developer who can work with me on developing a strategic method of laying out a site in order to provide an easy experience that doesn’t feel “broken”.
Customer Relationship Design- Most small companies I talk to don’t care about the actual relationship that they have with their customers. It sucks because they miss out on such an awesome opportunity to make the customer want to keep coming back for more than just the product that they sell.
Customer Experience Design- From start to finish, I want to build the street that a customer walks down when they use that company. This has a lot to do with Seth’s Purple Cow concept, as well as tribes. It think that most companies leave the community out of it. What needs to happen is a new focus on doing things that wow the customer. Zappos had free 2 day shipping as something they did to upgrade the customer’s order from free standard shipping. Sweetwater sends smarties with musical widget they send. I want to evaluate the customer experience by having people go through the entire interaction with the company, and come up with a list of things the loved and things they disliked.
Value Development- Work on actual projects the customer is working on to offer insight on how they can add even more value to what they are offering by means of adding a few features, or simply revising the way they pitch the product. This process will rely heavily on the information we have from the strong customer relationships and using it to offer something that speaks to them.
Company Structure Design- This first came from an experience I had as general manager of a computer shop. This involves looking at the internal workflow. I want to look at what the business does internally and help them find a better way to accomplish more things, faster! I think that it’s difficult to see the inefficiency if you are used to looking at it every day. We come in and identify the top things that could change in one week that would help a company be more efficient in the way that it runs and handles itself.
Pushing against the obstacles
Who will I reach out to?
Two groups of people
Internal- People I know personally who would be a lot of help and want to be a part of this company or know people who might. The smaller goal here is to build a team of people that expand the diversity of the promises we can make to our customers. By knowing the people apart of this, we can make promises and exceed them to provide our customers with an exceptional experience
People from internal are filling certain roles of the kind of experience our group wants to create:
Web Marketing Internal Structure Education Developers Graphics Branding Value Development
Jon Dale- Close personal friend and the reason I’m aware of Seth Godin and in the altMBA
Todd A. - Web
Justin L. - Social Marketing
Andy T. – Develop the network
Josh K. – Learning materials
Kevin M. – Becoming an entrepreneur vs. a free lancer
Stephen D. – Developer connections
Jason R. – Developer connections
Brooke B. – Marketing
External- Companies that have people in them who want to make the company more than just a Car dealership. More than just a coffee shop. More than an okay place to go buy jewelry. Places that are used to dealing with pricy corporate establishments that use the same methods they have used for the last 20 years to offer a solution of one facet of the customers problem. I want to start small with people I have already worked with and know, offering new value that their company can begin to implement, until I have a method I can start to practice on a bigger company.
The PC Shop
G1 Equip
MakeExerciseEasy
Recycles
DTG
CreativeIvoryMusic
Moutain Scoops
Team TeleCycle
Jives
Why will they want to be a part of what I’m doing?
Internal- Not all of them will be a part of it directly, but they may point me in the direction of people who will want to be part of it directly. I think that if I am connected with the right people, the idea of scheduling time to collaborate and sharing contracts with people who are the best at what they do will be an attractive offer for people who may be wasting their time at a job they get nothing from.
**External-**I believe that when presented with an opportunity to invigorate the working environment and increase their exposure to people who care, as well as overall productivity and financial performance. I see it as them making the decision to hire a life coach that helps the company find what it wants just as much as it helps the employees.
What will I ask specifically?
Internal- Why do you do what you do? If their passionate I want to connect them with the companies that are passionate.
What is the project they are actually joining?
That varies based on the client. Some of my clients have wanted minimal changes to be made on one page of their site. Others have had me re design their logo and analyze their business structure.
How will I specifically act like a company?
Stephen Pressfield brought up the idea of meeting with yourself weekly. Thanks Stephen! I want to meet on a week by week basis and set goals for my “Company” as if I already had the accountability of people who were waiting for me to give them a project to do. I also want to spend time developing my whole business model, to understand what kind of company it is that I’m really describing.
List the projects that need deadlines.
Current projects that need deadlines are all web based projects. I am rotten liar to myself. I tell myself that I don’t have time to spend on the project. Wrong. I will start by setting a dead line to have a fully written Web Design questionnaire by next Wednesday.
How will I learn to pay taxes like a company?
This is one that I’m hoping I can find info on from my cohort or the altMBA family. I think it will be quite a while before I can hire a book keeper or CPA. What book can I read that will teach me how to manage an LLC in terms of taxes, and not get screwed over.
What is that you want to do? How will you pitch it?
I’m passionate about many things, but there are two things that out-weigh the rest. Design, and people.
I love to see and understand why things were created the way they were. When I can afford to do it without debt, I will go to college for design both industrial, and graphic. The thing that I really love looking at is details, and in this job I get to explore details in almost every aspect of my favorite hobby: business. I also love people. I want to create something that is as much a community as it is a company. A place for creatives. These creatives might be paying the community, or they might be getting paid. We all are passionate about building plan Z first and shipping a day early than we were expected.