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Speaking for Yourself
I get a lot of notes from people who are starting out doing speaking gigs for money. It’s something I’ve done a fair number of times, and I know how hard it can be to get it right. Not just at first, but really for as long as you choose to do it.
Personally, the speaking stuff is far from difficult for me; but, pretty much everything before and after the gig can be nothing short of a black art.
So, while this thing started as a short email to a friend asking for advice—what the heck. In the interest of saving myself some future typing—and maybe potentially helping people learn what I wish I’d known starting out—here’s one fella’s incredibly opinionated guide to getting a smarter start in speaking for dough.
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Great episode of back to work this week. After much talk of apple products and computer stuff, they get on to the topic of preserving your company’s culture.
Back to work Episode 59: Brains all the way down
As the head of a small but growing company I fight with the issue of keeping the culture of invention, enthusiasm, customer service and quality as we add employees, increase our administrative burden and start dealing with bigger projects and customers.
For example we are half way through our first large scale costume making project for a big budget feature film - it’s awesome, terrifying and rewarding… but has also resulted in the sudden need to colaborate with another company, outside designers, outside suppliers, and have all staff on deck while simultaneously trying to meet our regular customers’ expectations. Not easy.
But the rewards will be felt by more than just us. The business will be more secure with a bit more money in the bank so we should be less prone to going out of business (bonus if you like our stuff!). Our customers will also get access to all the amazing technological innovations that we’ve been forced to put together to make this project fly. Finally, we’ll come out the back end of this project with a better system in place to absorb this sort of sudden workload without disrupting our normal work flow - so there will be less chance of orders being delayed down the road.
So the timing of the podcast could not be better, since we’re definitely adding people to our community and culture, and I’ve been given a good framework to think about that from the episode.
It’s an exciting time, and anyone who is at all involved in running a project or business should be listening to the back to work podcast. It certainly makes for a LOT of learning and thought provoking while I keep my hands busy making the latex stuffs.
Also… it was great that Merlin could not help but put a little cameo by Razzledazzle in at 1:12:45 - I jingled my keys a little (in my head) for him.
