PIXL Designs

It always amazes me how much people leave behind when they move on to a new job, new city or new responsibility. During the past several years we have shifted our strategy in order to keep up with our vision. But we do our best to leave nothing behind.

What does this even mean?
Leaving nothing behind needs to be thought of in terms of battle. Every branch of the military has a policy of “no man or woman left behind.” This is a core foundation of the military and needs to be a figurative core foundation of our businesses.

When starting a new business venture you have been shaped. Your past, your childhood, your experiences and even your business partners all shape who you are regardless of if those things are positive or negative. Many people want to just cling to the positive and forget the negative. And I was this way too.

This past year we established a great relationship with a group of friends and dreamed big. However, as we progressed in our business relationship to take things to the next level I began to see how much lack of attention to detail, communication and leadership there was. And it developed a negative perspective of the whole team in my mind. We separated ways and it was and still continues to be an ugly divorce on several levels.

At first, I was bitter. Then I was simply pissed off. However, now that I have processed the whole situation, I am thankful. There were so many red flags on this venture that showed up for me, yet the drive to make money kept me in it. And this was not true to my vision of helping people and being crazy generous to others as a business.

I began to realize that this experience needs to stay with me. It needs to shape me. It needs to help me be a better leader, better business partner and a better communicator. I don’t have to let a negative experience define me, but I do have to let it teach me.

So may you rise up to the challenges ahead. May you be ready and willing to put yourself out there and establish yourself as a creative, a professional and yet a personable leader, communicator, pastor, encourager, etc. And whether positive or negative, may you leave nothing behind.

It’s been awhile since our site was an active blog. But things are changing as we shift our business strategy yet again to grow forward along with the wave and momentum of the digital space.

One our favorite parts about the digital world is you can continue to reinvent yourself to keep up with the changing landscape. Now there are three things to avoid when going through this stage:

1. Avoid changing your vision
If your vision to provide a service or sell a product, don’t change that vision. Otherwise you end up alienating your current clients and force them to relearn who you are.

2. Avoid losing your passion
The digital landscape changes often and keeping up can often leave you feeling overwhelmed and inadequate. Create variety in your life in order to keep your passion. Maybe you need to take a walk, visit a national park or listen to some new music.

3. Avoid becoming complacent
It’s super easy to start making money in the digital space, especially when involved with social media strategy, business strategy, Branded Facebook Pages or iBooks like we are. When things take off or you find that niché you have been longing for, don’t become complacent. Instead, keep pushing the envelope, increasing your productivity and trying to achieve even more. But, it’s important to stay focused or you’ll head towards burnout and overworking yourself. Take breaks. Rest. And do some fun activities.

These are three areas to focus on avoiding in order to revamp your business as we are doing. We’ll be sharing more over the next few weeks and months in 2012 including a variety of topics to help you learn from our mistakes, learn from our successes and hopefully impart some advice to help you take your business to the next level!

What similarities do you notice above?

The top row everything begins with “iP” and the second row everything begins with “Mac.” Coincidence? Hardly.

The Apple brand is huge and its marketing is amazing. From cleverly crafted taglines to witty commercials, Apple pays extreme attention to detail. And thus its product line speaks loud and clear.

So how can this help your business or church? Easy.

1. Stay Consistent. Apple creates a clear message and repeats it over and over. This breeds consistency and trust.
2. Remain true to who you are. Apple was under tremendous pressure to change from it’s “iP” brand to “iS” when the iSlate become a frontrunner for its new product name. No doubt there were many who would have preferred that name over another. But ultimately they stayed true to who they were and now iPad is a noun.
3. Believe in yourself. The biggest key to Apple is their believability. When Steve Jobs takes the stage and talks about their products, you can tell he truly believes they are remarkable and magical. Oftentimes they are, but not at first. But no one cares because he sets the vision and he believes in it.

So from a business or church perspective, you need to stay consistent, remain true to who you are and ultimately believe in yourself and where you are going. This is an effective way to create a lasting impression on those around and develop not only followers, but passionate recruits that will help you further your cause.

When the iPad was introduced, Amazon’s Kindle faced immediate extinction in the eyes of many. Interest in the Kindle dropped nearly 40% and buyers began to hold off to see if the iPad would be the better investment.

Amazon had a problem.

Life presents many challenges. It’s how you, your church, or your business respond to those challenges that separate you apart from others. So let’s look at what Amazon did:

First they recognized the problem. It was hard to miss with sales declining and publishers demanding more control over their pricing.

Second they began to work towards a solution to the problem. Sure they were hurt by Apple’s move and frustrated. But they couldn’t stop it so they had to work towards a solution.

Third they created a solution that wowed many and I think rivals Apple’s own iBookstore on the iPad!

So what can this teach us? Amazon recognized the problem, began to work toward a solution and then created a solution that went above and beyond the problem, presenting it with new opportunities and renewed interest.

Don’t just settle for solving problems. Create solutions that present new opportunities that can create momentum in life and business. This is true success and that is the real way to problem solve.

1. Don’t believe in yourself.
2. Don’t seek accountability in life.
3. Slip into depression often and stay there.
4. Don’t pursue an active lifestyle.
5. Don’t stay true to who you are.
6. Don’t make goals or plans of action.
7. Don’t strategize.
8. Don’t be creative and unique.
9. Don’t take risks.
10. Don’t help anyone else along the way.

Anger. Jealousy. Fatigue.
These are a few of the emotions that appear when life is out of balance. Oftentimes, however, we know what the emotions are but we don’t know what we can do to counteract them. Here are my tips on how to deal with these three emotions:

Anger
Have you ever noticed yourself starting to get short with your friends, family, children or spouse during a stressful time? Placing more importance on making money than spending time enjoying life with people you care about the most will create anger. When the smallest things begin to set you off for no apparent reason, it may be time to reign in your anger. Start by recognizing that life is out of balance. Shut off the computer, leave early from work or find another way to unplug for a while. Spend that time doing something fun instead. Play a board game, go for a walk, work out with friends or take a short trip to a state park. I find that escaping the pressures of the world and finding release through fun and nature are the two biggest ways to neutralize the emotion of anger.

Jealousy
This is one emotion that I continue to struggle with, especially when people around me are seemingly working less and making more money. It irks me because I have a strong work ethic from growing up on a farm. And yet I seem to lag far behind some of my peers. Or so I think.

The problem with jealousy is it often onsets when you have an unrealistic expectation for yourself.

Your peers are your friends that care about your business’ success. They are not online companies with Fortune 500 clients that write a blog you subscribe to. They are not people that live celebrity-style lives. Make a point to create clear expectations for life and business. Don’t create a fantasy reality or you will easily fall into the trap of jealousy. In 2010 I finally redefined our focus at PIXL Designs. I began to say no to projects that fell outside of this focus. I lost clients, but I gained confidence. Now I don’t have to be jealous, I have to be me. And I like it this way.

Fatigue
When life is speeding recklessly forward, fatigue often sets in. When you begin to do work that falls outside your focus and passion, you’ll begin to work slower. You may become angrier, less patient, and irritable. And you’ll definitely become fatigued. This often sets in on me when I am doing too much at once, saying yes to everything, trying to be all things to all people and giving 110% all the time.

This is unhealthy and unsustainable.

I am naturally a hard worker and it is really easy for me to give 110% to my work and business and have nothing left when I get home. This is not healthy and not conducive to keeping life in balance. So how do I deal with fatigue?

1. When I become fatigued, I finish my projects at hand and take a break for a while. Any new opportunities I put on hold until I can restore my life balance.
2. When I find it hard to get started on a project, I schedule out my brainstorming time on my calendar. Laying aside a specific time creates the sense of a deadline, and let’s face it, we all work better under pressure.
3. When I am overly tired I know I am not giving my best. So to counteract this, I not only make sure I take a break and schedule specific times to be productive, I also use this time to refocus. Taking time to remember why you are doing what you are doing helps you to define your purpose. Knowing who you are and what you believe helps you to get things in balance. You don’t need extra sleep, you are usually just overworking yourself because you haven’t set defined boundaries. Now is a good time to do this.

Hopefully this short list can help you fight the emotions that arise in life. Keeping balance is important for a variety of reasons. Tomorrow I’ll talk about a personal example of when I let work and business take priority in my life and how that affected those I cared for the most.

One of the biggest questions I have to continue to force myself to ask is “Do I have a healthy balance between work, life and business?” We recently saw the importance of this when Tiger Woods spoke about life getting out of balance.

As a freelancer, this question needs to be constantly on your mind.

I have experienced the ups and downs in this category. So to start this week, I want to share a few tips on how to recognize that your priorities are out of balance.

1. Anger: This emotion is the most consistent for surfacing when life is out of balance. Small things will set me off. Things that don’t even matter will give me fodder for angry comments.
2. Jealousy: When things are out of balance, it’s easy to look at others’ lives and businesses and become jealous for what they seemingly achieve without working very hard. It’s easy to forget that they have pressures and struggles just like I do, and they had to work hard to get where they are at today.
3. Fatigue: When you are firing on all cylinders all the time it’s easy to get tired emotionally and physically. This not only makes it even harder to regain balance, but your quality of life/work suffers.

Tomorrow we’ll be exploring how to counteract these three mental and physical emotions. Keep in mind again that this is not an exhaustive list. Instead, it’s a few of the more common emotions that I believe can surface when life gets out of balance.

Watching several athletes take tumbles in the Olympics lately has reminded me of something that is a rule in sports and business: let the momentum carry you.

When you take a tumble in sports you can’t tense up. You have to let the momentum carry you or you will otherwise get hurt. You have to be aware of your surroundings and how you are falling and let the momentum carry you. That’s the only way you can walk away from a fall without injury.

Momentum is a strange thing. On the one hand in business terms it defines you. On the other hand, you cannot manufacture it—you have to let it carry you. You can’t do momentum, you have to gain momentum. If you try to force momentum, you’ll only hurt yourself.

So as a freelance business we have learned to simply do what we do best and when momentum around a design, an idea or a project begins. Let is carry us forward to our destination.

One of the biggest things we have to do with running our business is trim the fat. We simply cannot waste time. It is important when there is work to be done, to do it. And when there is none, to spend time together as a family.

I will carve out specific time to work on the Web site, hone my skills or even reach out to some customers. But family is essential. That is why I trim the fat.

As a freelancer it is easy to get into a pattern of reading site after site looking for all the answers you seek on what makes good design and how to increase your design prowess. However, if you don’t learn to trim the fat you will waste your time. Trimming the fat is all about:

• increasing productivity
• maximizing free time
• creating efficiency

Focus only on things that make you productive. Don’t worry about ready every single article in the world. Read a few, find inspiration and accomplish the goals you set. Maximize your free time by cutting out the things you don’t need. If you don’t have knowledge on a subject and it is really hard for you to grasp, go on to another subject. Keep your time wasters to a minimum. This will help you in creating efficiency. Every business has time wasters, but if you can work hard to reduce these you can create efficiency. This not only helps your workflow process but it allows you time to be creative and dream.

Creativity and originality are always on the forefront of a freelancers mind. It is imperative that we don’t let it bog us down, but rather let it move us forward.

We often hear the phrase, “less is more,” but what exactly does it mean? 37signals explored this in a blog post that resonated with me. I think it does imply that more is better, when the opposite is often true—that less is better. I think we need to apply this concept to our designs. Quit worrying about trying to achieve perfection, worry about trying to do better with less. The problem with “less” is many people interpret this as “I can work less and make more money.”

This is not what we’re saying.

You have to work hard in order to make money. So why complicate your work by doing things you don’t understand or don’t have the skillsets to achieve. I’ve often heard that you should never turn down a design project because you can outsource to someone who can do the things you cannot. This is crap. How can I uphold my design distinction and brand if I’m outsourcing?

Now, before you jump on me about how outsourcing is a great way to grow your business, keep in mind the focus of PIXL Designs. We aren’t growing a million dollar company. We have a mission and a vision that is about relationships and integrity. Working full-time in addition to running a freelance business doesn’t enable us to branch out wide and try to have this huge company so many want. To us, less is more. The less distractions and nuances we have, the better we can become by focusing on our strengths.