Blog Posts About: beingsmall

Not everyone knows, but Common Craft is a two-person, home-based business. We're 100% independent, with zero employees or investors. While we work with specialists by contract, everything that Common Craft does comes from us and impacts only us. This has been our goal since 2006 when Sachi and I started working together and today, we're starting to really understand what it means to be a two person "couple company."

It's not all unicorns and rainbows. Along with our important video-making duties, I am one of two people in the customer support department. Sachi is our head bookkeeper. There's no one else to answer the phone, run errands or follow up on a question. We spend valuable time on things that could easily be done by others, which surely impacts our productivity. But, we are connected directly to our customers.

Work is a constant part of our lives. Business happens over dinner, on walks and off-hours. We don't ever really get away. Instead, we've learned ways to streamline our work, even when we're supposed to be traveling or on vacation. 

Perhaps most importantly, our business is difficult to scale with two people. When headcount is a constraint, fewer business models make sense. So we have to find what works for us. 

These are obviously self-imposed limits and I'm sure most business people would say that we're missing opportunities. It's true, being small means passing on many opportunities and focusing on ones that fit for us. But it also means new perspectives, perspectives that don't make as much sense outside of a couple company.  

Think for a minute about how decisions are made in many businesses. Money is obviously the driving force, which is directly connected to investor and shareholder interests. Business leaders make hard decisions every day, ones focused on increasing the health of the business. Of course, this is responsible and rational behavior.

But what if there is another perspective, one that is unique to companies like Common Craft? What if, along with money and business health, a driving force of every decision is happiness among the founders? This is how we've learned to operate - our happiness as a home-based unit is perhaps the most important thing for our business and something directly connected to long-term financial success. When we look at opportunities, we ask ourselves - will this make us happy? If this opportunity comes to fruition, will we still be able to live the life we want to live? 

Of course, it's not just happiness. This is really a strategy to prevent its evil twin, unhappiness, from rearing its head. Unhappiness, in the context of a married couple's work together, is poison. Business success wouldn't matter if we stopped enjoying our life together.

So we've been very deliberate about how we run Common Craft. We don't have employees because we don't want an HR department. Instead, we've found a business model (video licensing) that scales without employees.  We don't have an office because we love being at home and have made it our best possible workspace. We can be very low-overhead, agile and lightweight with two people. We've never required outside investment, and I think we're better for it. Investors aren't likely to enjoy a return based on our happiness. We are happily independent. 

In the end, we're designing a business that fits with our goals as a married couple. By erring on the side of happiness, we can grow in ways that create a successful business, but also ensure that we don't lose control of our day-to-day lives. And with these things in place, we hopefully have a solid formula for sustainable creativity.

Of course, things change and Common Craft may become something different down the road.  But what will always be in the front of our minds is the idea that we have a choice. Every business is different and just because your "supposed-to" do something doesn't mean you have to do it. We all have a choice, and for us the important question is - will this make us happy?

For more posts like this, see our Being Small category.

If you don't like yardwork, you have a choice.  You can hire gardeners or you can plant things that don't require much care.  

This is my way of saying that we all have a choice in how we grow. Because we want Common Craft to stay small, we look at new opportunities in terms of yardwork and ask ourselves - is this going to require gardeners in the future? If so, then maybe we should look for opportunities that are more likely to take care of themselves and allow us to focus on what really makes us excited and happy.

PS- We're signing off on this blog for a little while to spend time with family.  Happy Thanksgiving to our fellow Americans!

This is the third in a series of posts about Being Lightweight.  The first two were about Working with Clients and Tools We Use.

We are lucky to have a product that people like. Our challenge is to experiment and find the best ways to build a business around this product. To be successful we need the business to be profitable, but also work within the life we want to live.

We see this process as "business design" and as this series outlines,  being lightweight is a big priority.  Below are a number of ideas and thoughts about creating a lightweight business.

Two People - We are dedicated to being a two person company without employees. This is a fundamental constraint that guides nearly every decision. By making our size the priority, we have been forced to think hard about what is possible for two people and be prepared to focus on opportunities that work within this constraint.

Employees - We may work with contractors and short-term help, but we do not plan to hire employees.  In the last article in the series I talked about the heavy nature of stress and anxiety. Growing the business by hiring would add potential revenue, but also add significant stress and loss of focus on our work in order to manage those folks.

Business Model -  We ask ourselves - What business do we really want to be in?  What do we want to be doing on a day-to-day basis? Consulting? Custom Videos? Licensing? Ads? Commercial? To be lightweight, we need to bring focus to the 1-2 models that get us closer to our goals and put others on the back burner.

Scalability - We are small, but we do want to scale the business.  How? We consider business models.  The custom video model does not scale - we would have to hire employees to make more videos each month. A more scalable model is selling licensed versions of our videos in the Common Craft Store.  In this model, potential revenue is not tied directly to production time.  

Not Doing it All - When opportunity knocks, it's hard not to answer.  The problem is that we can't do it all and we've learned to say no, even if it hurts sometimes.  The key is being clear about our future goals.  If an opportunity doesn't take us there, then it's creating drag.

Marketing -  We don't spend time on brochures, fliers or ads of any traditional sort. We believe that the best marketing doesn't always come from a campaign - it comes from the users of our products.  We focus on making free versions of the videos easy to share.

Agility - About a year ago, a few companies started to become interested in our custom videos.  We literally woke up one morning and decided to focus 100% of our business on these videos. The same thing happened when we decided to focus on the Store. Our goal is to retain this freedom to react to changes and opportunities efficiently, and avoid the need to seek approval from others.  A beauty of being small and lightweight is the ability to react.

People Philosophy - We believe that people are essentially good and given limited resources, we'd rather focus attention on being open and helping them do the right things rather than trying to make the wrong things impossible.

Balance - We don't believe in working 80 hours a week, 51 weeks a year so that you can vacation when you're old.  We work more hours than most, but we're not bashful about making sure that we live a fun, interesting and balanced life. Lightweight businesses make this easier.

Investors and Partnerships - Often, these are required for business growth. The problem comes when the requirements and expectations of others become a part of the business. We've been careful not to form agreements with investors or partners because the baggage these relationships create may not balance with the benefits they provide.  It's added stress and anxiety that creates weight we would rather not have.  Advice is great, but financial relationships weight a lot.

Limited Middlemen - Each person who handles a product on the way to the consumer adds weight and removes reward.  We look for the best ways to get our product from an idea to the customer as directly as possible.  Outside of us, The Common Craft Store doesn't have salespeople, distributors, marketers or support.  We do it all, A-to-Z, using products like PayPal and e-junkie.

Contact Points - As our visibility on the web has increased, so too has our time managing communication. We recently decided to make email our most public source of contact and have removed our phone number from the web site. It's nothing personal, it just allows us to do a better job managing communications as lightweight as possible.

Supporting Two People - At the end of the day, we remember that we are two people.  Sure, our model may not enable us to dominate markets or become a Fortune 500 company, but that's not our goal.  We need our business to support us and the life we want to live.  

So, you might be wondering about the result of all these ideas.  Well, we've made a number of decisions lately.  Our future is devoted to building a library of videos for the Common Craft Store.  We are phasing out custom videos and devoting time to videos we can license to influencers and educators for use in the workplace.  This model enables us to be lightweight and 100% independent.

Ultimately, we want to wake up each morning and know we are choosing what we do that day. For us, that's lightweight.

I suppose some would say it's downright un-American, but we worked on July 4th and 5th.  It was our choice - a choice that enabled us to take the 7th and 8th and go camping without the hordes of people.  It's something we do often - work when others aren't so we can play without crowds.  It's a choice we make.

On this camping trip, we met someone whose attitude reminds us a little of our own.  She runs the tiny "Beachcomber Cafe" at Fort Flagler State Park .  Fort Flagler is situated on the Strait of Juan de Fuca - the waterway that creates the entrance to Puget Sound from the Pacific. In war time, it was a strategic location and now has decaying, 100 year old bunkers, turrets and battlements.  An interesting and beautiful place to explore.

We camped up on a bluff and a short walk down the hill was the cold, windy beach and Beachcomber Cafe.  The first thing we noticed on the approach was the chalkboard outside that said "free wifi". 

Free wifi out here in the far reaches of the country.  Cool!  We walked in and talked a bit.

Me: So, is the wifi on during business hours?
Her: Nope, 24 hours. I'd probably forget to turn it off anyway.

Me: Is there a password?
Her: No, it's not worth keeping up with a password

Me:  It's really great that you offer it way out here
Her: Yeah, you know, it would be a pain to try to make money on it.  My little shop here may cost a little more than other places, but if you use the wifi, you might consider buying a little something.   It's up to you.

Me:  What hours are you open?
Her: 8 to 8

Me (to Sachi):  See Sachi, she even figured out how to make the hours easy.
Her:  Hah!  Now you're getting to know me!

We figured that Common Craft and the Beachcomber Cafe have some things in common.  The Beachcomber Cafe has made choices in how the business is run.  Sure, they have the potential to try to squeeze every dollar out of people who need wifi, but they don't.  They provide wifi as a worry-free service and rely on the good nature of people to support the business in other ways. 

Further, they put a priority on the lightweight choice - the wifi is always on, always free and open to everyone.  Any other way would create more hassle than she needs. The store hours are even easy to remember. 

I'm not talking about business practices, but philosophy - a philosophy that's built on shedding unneeded administration and focusing on providing opportunities that give people ways to feel good about the relationship.

The first step is realizing you have a choice.  Your business doesn't have to operate like others.  Sure, you can make 8 dollars a day on wifi, or you can smile at your customers and tell them the wifi is free and goes great with today's paper and a candy bar. 

Here's a photo set from the trip, if you're interested.

This is the second in a series of posts about being lightweight.  Our first was focused on working with clients and this installment is all about tools we use.

Tools, or the the wrong tools, become a risk when they create unnecessary drag in every day work. Often, we've found ourselves wondering if we're using a sledgehammer to drive a nail.  If so, we look for alternatives.  

In being lightweight, we also consider mental and emotional baggage that goes along with tools.  We're often willing to pay for peace of mind and look for tools that remove anxiety. Anxiety is very heavy for us and we always want to reduce it.

Here are some of the tools, services and ideas that we use to be lightweight. Your mileage may vary.

Web Site - We're fans of content management platforms like Drupal, Wordpress, etc.  We only know basic html, so when we're working with designers on a new Common Craft site, we make easy, lightweight management a big priority.  I've wasted too many hours trying to write code.  Technology often stands in the way of what I want to share on the web - and that's a shame.  

Hosted Services - We're not technical people. Maintaining our own
server sounds like hell to us.  So, we use hosting services for
everything we do. Our web site, our videos, our photos are all on
servers that are maintained by others.  Choose them well, let the specialists do their
jobs and get out of the way. 

Documents - Google Docs has had a huge impact on our workflow. We do a lot of editing together and there simply isn't a better way to work on the same document at the same time.  Attachments are too heavy.
 
Video Sharing - Often we need to share a 50mb video file with a client.  We could send a CD, we could FTP it.  Instead, we use hosts like Vimeo.com that have good privacy options.  This makes life easier on us and the client - all they need to share the video with co-workers is to share the link and password.  Plus, they can watch the video in Flash and choose to download it it too.

Social Networking - We have presence on the major social networks, but they aren't a part of our day-to-day work. We have serious questions about the time it takes to really make the networks work, especially Facebook. It seems too heavy for me to have to use multiple inboxes across the networks.  We love Twitter because it's lightweight - it's a direct line to part of our community that doesn't require clicking a link in email.

Bookkeeping - When I started Common Craft in 2003, I bought Quickbooks because I thought was what you're supposed to do. It was a way, way too much for me.  Even today, we are more than happy using spreadsheets to track our books (Sachi is a spreadsheet ninja). For many small businesses, Quickbooks (and similar programs) are often a heavy, cumbersome way to deal with the books. Do you need all that?

Home Network - We have all our computers, printers and music system hooked together wirelessly. We used to have to take a laptop to the printer in another room to print.  We used to have to get up to change the music.  It's a small thing, but a nice home network (run by Apple's Airport Extreme and Express) makes life a bit nicer.

Home Environment - We spend a lot of time at home. Because we're here so much, we've agreed that we will invest in making home like we want it - comfortable and easy. Home should not feel heavy or cause anxiety. If you can't make home like you want it, what can you do?

Back Ups - Like most, we are horrible about remembering to back up our files.  The thing is, we shouldn't have to remember - this is stress that has a cure.  We use Mozy that keeps everything backed up automatically. Peace of mind is lightweight.

Selling Digital Downloads - We have been very impressed with e-junkie as a means for selling digital downloads.  You upload a file and e-junkie provides an "add to cart" button that works on almost any web page and a flash-based shopping cart.  It's a perfect solution for The Common Craft Store - e-junkie handles everything and provides the right tools for managing customers.  

Mowing the Lawn - Yes, it's true.  We recently purchased a rechargeable electric mower called a Neuton.  We've gone through a dirty, loud mower every couple of years and those things are a PAIN.  Our new mower is perfect - it starts immediately, mows for an hour on a charge, is clean and so quite you can hear the blades being chopped.

Reading -  I'll write more about this later, but I recently bought a Kindle - Amazon's e-reader. It's poorly designed in some ways, but it makes books and especially newspapers feel heavy, cumbersome and wasteful. I am a big fan.

Future - I'm currently lobbying Sachi to get a scooter.  I think we can get rid of one of our vehicles and replace it with a scooter over time.  Scooters are lightweight in so many ways - gas, parking, convenience.

So, this concludes the tools part of the series. I hope that you will look at the tools you use every day and think about the alternatives - and don't forget about anxiety - what could be the heaviest thing of all. 

Next Up - Being Lightweight: Business Design

It's a question we ask each other all the time - what is the most lightweight way we can do this?



We are a small company who is trying to do big things. In order to be
successful, we need to reduce drag - to remove the processes,
bureaucracies and commitments that slow us down and don't pay off. 

Today we're kicking off a series of posts called "Being Lightweight" that will relate what lightweight means to us and hopefully help you think differently about how you focus your attention.

Working with Clients

Over the past year, we've evolved in how we manage our work with clients on custom videos.  Here are a few things that we do that helps us move quickly and stay lightweight.

Face-to-Face Not Required - We've never met the vast majority of our clients face-to-face.  I'm sure it would be nice, but we don't think it's required to produce a video.  What it does do, is cost both sides a lot money and take a lot of time that could be used for creativity.

Project Pricing - In terms of the time it take to create a client video, our projects are similar. To keep ongoing billing and at a bare minimum, we price by the project.  For us, billing by the hour would create another process that would create drag and introduce a time limitation that may impact the quality of the end product.  

Video Development - We apply the 37 Signals concept of "getting real " to developing custom videos. We involve the client at nearly every step along the way, starting with the script.  This lowers the risk that big changes will come late in the process and waste time on both sides.

Expectation Setting - Early in the relationship, we take a leadership role in outlining our system for completing the project.  We've found that it helps everyone to have structure. We set an expectation about response times and work to make sure that the project lead owns as many decisions as possible.

Single Point of Contact - We ask that we have a single point of contact on the client side. This person is our contact, but also a filter for input from their organization.

Of course our business is somewhat unique and every project is different.  However, I think that many projects get behind or off track because they are burdened with overhead, processes and bureaucracy that add weight without adding productivity.  Being lightweight in client relationships requires setting expectations, shedding as much weight as you can and focusing on what really matters.

Next up - Being Lightweight: Tools We Use