Spring Fever!

It is that time of the year when new projects begin to start coming in. This business has always had its cyclic flow up peaks and valleys. The design business dies a week before Christmas and doesn't come back to life until mid February. This has happened, it seems, for every year I can remember. I still have enough projects to usually carry me through these periods but never any new business. I always fall behind in paying bills during the cold months of January and February. Oh well. My vendors have grown to expect it after the last fifteen years. They know I'll get caught up in March. God love 'em.

Anyways, starting Monday, I am going to have a new Agent/Rep who has the sole responsibility of making me famous. Actually, her role will be to manage new biz development and marketing so that hopefully, I don't have to. It is my goal to reach a client further up the food chain as they say - the actual owners and decision makers who are in charge of design and construction management of larger-scale projects. Really, that's who I deal with mostly anyways, but recently (let's say for the last year or so), some jobs have come in way too late in the build-out process. Clients have already wasted all their money on useless architect meetings that achieve nothing and have spent the construction budget on core and shell crap that no one ever sees or cares about. Most GCs have fixed the construction budget to maximize all the profit the project can spare on stupid shit like "general conditions", "O and P", "markup" and all the other ?? crap at the bottom of the page. Owners are left with these little meager finish budgets that can't cover anything let alone something fabulous.

My rep will also be working on the fabrication school and the logistics in keeping that moving forward. The biggest hassle with the classes right now is scheduling. I just don't want to be at the shop for 15 hour days any more. So we have to work around that.

As an agent, she is going to also promote my custom product and art line. She will be making deals with other reps and galleries to carry the stuff. She has to always make me look good. She has to go with me to the art-fart functions and openings. She has to make lots of deals because her salary depends on it. The more projects, the better off we both are! Welcome to Business 101.

Am I excited? Absolutely. I can't wait to see where this could go because to be honest, I am kind of sick of the local scene here. If you read an earlier post of mine, I basically have kind of done a lot of what I want to do with the limited client base already here. Not to say there is nothing happening. The design thing is a little dead right now around here. Too much rehashing and not enough innovation in the custom market. After talking with Sonja who is in Germany right now working on her Art/Design biz, she is excited about some of the cool design in the clubs over there but the economy is so crappy in her country right now and everyone over there can't stand Bush and all that BS...The politics get in the way.
We are still talking back and forth about doing a project over there together.

I am also excited about getting excited again. Too often, creative people suffer from mid-career burnout (am I at mid career?) and maybe become just a bit jaded to the new stuff happening around them. They might not even see it. I need to feel that creative buzz again that comes from really caring about the creative process and not the economic feasibility or return on investment or project scope blah, blah grown-up stuff. Let your agent deal with that. How Super-Hollywood!