The Year Of The Dragon And Mine Is Still Finding His Fire

I haven’t worked in almost two months.

I mean, I’ve worked. And very hard. But not for anything that’s earned any income.

Entering the otherwise quiet month of December, I felt great heading into 2012. The second half of last year was rockin’ with commercial directing work for Dell and Yahoo!. I also started blogging for Forbes and made several trips to Detroit to screen the short for “Lemonade: Detroit.” And I took a big chunk of the directing money I made (okay, almost all the directing money I made) and paid off much of the debt that has haunted me for so long. All the things on my vision board were coming to fruition.

With January came the promise of new projects and continued momentum. In early January I was bidding for two new gigs. Ironically, both came from former bosses at their new ad agencies. And, ironically, both were directing commercials for their health care clients.

Before I go on, you must know that 2011 was a gift. The assignments from Dell and Yahoo! were single bid. I was incredibly fortunate to start my commercial directing career off the way I did. But these two new potential projects were more traditional and competitive in the way they were awarded.

Now, I’ve been in situations like this on the agency side. My partner and I would get a TV project to work on, present a bunch of ideas, and the client would narrow it down to two or three. Sometimes, they’d end up producing ours, and sometimes, they’d produce another team’s instead. The latter was always a psychological blow, but at the end of the day I’d still get a paycheck.

As a business owner, if my ideas don’t win, there’s no revenue. And as it would turn out, both of these new assignments went to another director. As did the momentum I had accumulated in 2011.

My confidence, however, has never been higher. And here’s why.

1. I learned more from not getting those assignments than I would have had they been awarded in my favor. In both instances, I had the luxury of personal relationships with the creative directors, so they were candid about why they went in another direction. And while neither had anything to do with the treatment I wrote (both said I presented the best ideas on paper), they both taught me the value ofcompetitive bidding. At the risk of oversimplifying, it really came down to which production company provided the most value. I lost one because my competitor made a case for a less elaborate production at half the cost. And I lost the other (mostly) because of a production company that could do it two weeks sooner than we could. I’m not saying either presented less worthy ideas. I’m just saying, all things being equal, logistics and budget ultimately weighed in their favor.
2. Those treatments I wrote absolutely put me in a position to bid on the agencies’ next projects. The creative directors went out of their way to tell me that if it just came down to the treatments, the jobs would have been mine. So rather than sheepishly going into the next bidding cycle, I feel confident that I’m doing that part rather well.
3. I have no business debt. All that credit I freed up in 2011? I’m looking at that as an emergency small business loan. Don’t get me wrong, I hate the idea of living off credit again. I really thought those days were behind me. But my success in 2011 allowed me the credit to fall back on in 2012.
4. There are lots of rumblings about new projects. For the aforementioned reasons, Ifeel great about my odds when they present themselves.
5. There are lots of rumblings about freelance. I still have great relationships in the agency world, and I’m keeping my portfolio fresh with new work. (Hint, hint.) It takes a while to prime the freelance pump when you’ve been busy with other work, but it has been the once constant in an otherwise unpredictable revenue stream. Consider the pump primed.
6. There are lots of rumblings about “Lemonade: Detroit” funding. Any one of a number of hot irons could decide today that they want to underwrite the whole feature-length production. In which case, I will look back on this blog one day and think, “Silly Erik. All that concern for nothing.”

“Nobody said life would be easy, they just promised it would be worth it.” -Harvey Mackay.

I love that quote. I live by that quote. Let’s do this.