A trip down memory lane

When I look at my experience with project calls over the years, I definitely have a bad taste in my mouth from previous “corporate” jobs. In particular, I worked over 6 years for what is now AT&T and conference calls dominated my day. Not only were there several conference calls during the day, most of them were at least an hour, and some lasted three times that long. Seriously, no one had time to get their actual work done because they had to attend a meeting about an issue or an upcoming project. Oh and the worst—having meetings about meetings. Even as I write this I can feel my blood pressure rising at the thought of how much time and money was wasted. However, reflecting on my experience there makes me realize that it wasn’t necessarily the amount of time spent on project calls that was the problem; it was how they were being managed. In fact, they weren’t being managed at all, which in turn lead to more confusion. And when there is confusion, you have to hold a meeting to get everyone on the same page.

How things have changed

It’s because of this jaded view on the value of conference calls that I am so passionate about managing projects at 45royale. All of my years of complaining about the way projects were run by my former employer gave me a laundry list of ways to run projects and meetings more efficiently. For example, here’s a list of five things that help me run an effective meeting:

• 1. Have an agenda: Planned meetings should have an agenda that is sent to all of the participants before the meeting. When you list out the items you want to cover on a call, everyone knows what is expected of them and it’s much easier to keep everyone focused.
• 2. He who calls it, runs it: Nothing is worse than attending a meeting with no leader. Whoever calls a meeting should be responsible for sending out the agenda, managing the participants, and sending out notes or action items following the meeting.
• 3. Keep it short: Most people start to lose focus after 20 minutes, so do your best to keep your project calls as short as possible. If your call needs to be longer than an hour, consider breaking it up into two calls.
• 4. Do a recap of the call before hanging up: Mentioning the key takeaways from the meeting at the end of the call will help keep the details fresh in everyone’s mind once they hang up.
• 5. Send out meeting notes to the team: Remember when I said that people lose focus during meetings? Sending out meeting notes after the call gives people who weren’t paying attention a chance to speak up if they missed something important and gives everyone something to refer back to before the next meeting.

Tone, which many people don’t properly convey in written exchanges, can more easily be identified over the phone and helps give you a better sense for how a person feels about a particular issue.

It took a lot of bad conference calls to come up with the list above. It was especially tough when we were first starting out and learning about ourselves, our clients, and who we wanted to be as a company. And turning my vision of running a perfect project into reality wasn’t as easy as it first seemed, it certainly involved a lot trial and error. But let’s face it, when you work remotely on a project (which happens most of the time in our industry) conference calls are a necessity. Don’t get me wrong, we use Basecamp and email in an attempt to keep project communication at a high level between meetings, but it’s hard to replace the value of a good old fashioned phone call. A simple call can save you hours of back and forth with your clients and colleagues. Tone, which many people don’t properly convey in written exchanges, can more easily be identified over the phone and helps give you a better sense for how a person feels about a particular issue. That knowledge may cause you to change your approach or inspire you to come up with a new solution entirely. Either way though, a quick and properly run meeting can save you time and can leave everyone feeling like they were heard; which does wonders for maintaing morale on a project.

So have I answered my own question?

Sort of. After writing this out and thinking about conference calls then and now, I have to admit they add value. But if I admit they’re valuable, why do I feel unproductive after a conference call filled day? Shouldn’t I feel the exact opposite?

I realize now that my problem stems from the fact that I wear too many hats these days. If I was just the project manager, a day full of productive calls would be considered a perfect day for me. However, since we’re a small firm, I have other roles that I have to fulfill on a daily basis. In addition to being a project manager, at different points in the day I could be playing the role of information architect, front-end developer, or even the administrative assistant. As a result, when I wear my project management hat the entire day, my other roles are neglected. That bothers me because even though I know deep down those project calls are valuable, I know that while I’m on the phone, that wireframe isn’t being completed and that page isn’t being coded.

Keeping my multiple personalities happy

In the end, I think better planning is the best way to solve this problem. We plan our project schedules and meeting agendas; now we’ll have to start doing a better job of blocking out time to make sure we have time for all our necessary “costume changes”. It will take some experimentation on our behalf, but I’m confident that we can find a solution, just like we always do. But we aren’t the only small company (web or otherwise) that put on different hats throughout the day. If you share a similar experience or have some tips about managing multiple projects/hats/etc. at once, we’d love to hear from you!

Screenr comes to life

During the project, we handled the front-end design and front-end development of just about everything you see in the application. The recorder, the flash player, individual pages on the main and iPhone versions of screenr.com; you name it, we did it.

However, all of our front-end work would’ve been for naught if it wasn’t for the brilliant development team at Articulate and their truly inspirational CEO, Adam Schwartz. The development team seamlessly integrated our designs into the java applet and did a phenomenal job with the Twitter integration. The whole project took several months to finish, but the end result is a sleek looking application that is extremely easy and fun to use.

Tons of Twitter buzz

Screenr officially launched on August 18th and after a tweet from Brian Clark at @copyblogger and an article about the service on Read Write Web, people quickly headed over to the app to check it out. Soon after people were recording screencasts like crazy and reviews started to pop up at places like CNET, Mashable, and the Social Media Guide. While we were impressed by how quickly Screenr caught on, we were even more impressed by the content being created by users.

Within hours of the launch, someone was recording themselves playing guitar with their webcam. A few hours later, an ABC news affiliate was doing a weather report by recording a web based radar. Every time we looked it seemed as if someone was doing something new with the application and we’re thrilled with the new ways people are finding to use Screenr each day.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your recording!

From start to finish, this project was a blast to work on. Not only did we work with a kick-ass team to produce a well-received product, but now we get to use this same tool to make our lives easier. Now we can communicate internally with ease, effortlessly create tutorials for our blog, or even provide our clients with clear, visual instructions about how to use their Content Management System. And don’t think we’re done by a long shot, no sir! We have some really cool new features coming to Screenr soon that will make it even easier to record and share your screencasts with friends, family and associates.

We hope that you enjoy using the app and welcome any feedback you might have. Go log in and give it a try!

Albert Einstein

Einstein is best known for his theories of special relativity and general relativity. And his crazy ass hair.

They are scheduled to release an album in 2009 called When Fish Ride Bicycles and are said to be working with Don Cannon on this album as well. We’ll be waiting impatiently for the new album to drop, hopefully later this year. Any Cool Kids fans out there? Let us know in the comments!

We’re not sure if it’s the feeling of our new site design or our increased presence on Twitter, but we seem to have more and more people contacting us with questions than ever before. The questions cover everything from design and development to client management and business ownership. Although we’re extremely busy and it’s hard to give every question the lengthy response it deserves, during a brainstorm session the other day we decided that some questions warranted a more in depth response. Thus, the Ask45 series was born!

Once a month we’ll take a look at all the questions we’ve received and then select a few to answer here on the site. Our hope is that we’ll be able to not only give our opinion on the topic at hand, but also open up the questions to the web community for additional perspective. Every person, firm, client, and project is different. As a result, it’s impossible for us to say what will always work best for you and your situation. We make no claims about having the “right” answers, we’re still learning and growing too, but discussion is always healthy!

Question #1: “How many rounds of design revisions do you typically account for in a proposal?”

There are a couple ways to address this issue in your proposals. One option is to explicitly call out the number of revisions you’ll give the client. After working on several projects, you’ll be able to look at your data to see how many revisions you typically do per comp. If that number averages to say, three rounds per project, you should use that as a starting point in your proposals. Probably the biggest challenge with this approach is figuring out what constitutes a round of revisions, as you and your client might have differing opinions about what constitutes a “round”.

Here’s an example: Your client asks you to change the design from a two column layout to a three column layout. Most people would consider that a round of changes, especially since there would be large layout implications to contend with. Now let’s say a few days later, after delivering the new three column layout, the client wants you to rearrange the sidebar items on that same page? The change might be quick, but since it wasn’t requested with the initial list of changes, is it still considered a round of revisions? If your limit was three rounds and you’ve already used them up, do you veto the sidebar change or request more time be added to the budget? Neither of those scenarios are likely going to make your client happy. So if you’re going to take this approach, be sure that you can effectively communicate to your client what your revision process entails. If there are any questions, address them before you enter into an agreement and start your project. That way you can refer back to that discussion if questions come up after you’ve started.

Over the years, we’ve found that instead of calling out a set number of rounds, it’s better to estimate the number of hours a comp will take to complete, including revisions.

Over the years, we’ve found that instead of calling out a set number of rounds, it’s better to estimate the number of hours a comp will take to complete, including revisions. With this approach, if you estimate that an initial comp will take you 6 hours and revisions will take you roughly 4 hours, you’d indicate that the comp will take you 10 hours from start to finish. In a sense, the total hour count here works in the same way that the number of rounds does in the first approach we discussed. It gives you and the client a cap to work towards, but the advantage is that you don’t have to explain what type of changes make up a round. However, while we do prefer this approach, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to set expectations with your client. You still need to set expectations and do your best to keep revisions to a minimum. It really comes down to effective communication between you and your client and it’s up to you to keep them advised of the current hour count and educate them on what revisions make the most sense.

The bottom line is if you’re having to do round after round of revisions, something is probably wrong.  Either you don’t have a firm grasp of what your client is looking for, they’re not communicating requirements properly or are just being extremely picky! At that point you need to isolate the underlying issue and bring it to the client’s attention as soon as possible so that the situation can be resolved before losing the client or your reputation.

Question #2: “When doing a quote for a client, do you disclose your hourly rate?”

We typically base most of our proposals on our hourly rate, even if we’re submitting a proposed budget for an entire project. I wouldn’t say we do many flat fee projects, but whatever price we come up with, it’s always based on how many man hours we estimate the work is going to take us. This allows us to not only come up with a price, but also estimate the project schedule; which is critical when you’re working on multiple projects at once.

When we prepare our proposals, we don’t always disclose the hourly rate up front, but we do show the estimated number of hours per task and the proposed project budget. So even if we don’t have our hourly rate on the proposal, the client can do the math. Of course, we always disclose our hourly rate for consulting projects because that’s typically work done by the hour and the payment rate should be established in the agreement before you start.

This kind of ties back into the first question above, but whether or not you decide to disclose your hourly rate, we feel that it’s a good idea to disclose the number of hours per deliverable in your estimates. That will let the client get a sense for how much work is actually involved, plus it gives you a number to reference when they start requesting more and more deliverables that could potentially push you over budget.

Send us your questions

We hope that this article answered some of the questions you sent us and we’re looking forward to answering more of them in the future. We’re really excited about the new Ask45 series and we hope to receive more of your questions in the coming weeks. Feel free to send us your questions via our contact form, email us directly at info@45royale.com, or send your questions to @45royale on Twitter. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the questions presented today too, so please don’t hesitate to join the conversation!

In the past, we’ve tried a number of branding initiatives, with nothing really sticking around for more than a year or so. However, after setting a few goals for ourselves this year and moving in to a new office space, we’ve finally figured out what we we’ve been looking for in a brand and created something that we’re really happy with. So without further ado, we’d like to officially introduce you to the new 45royale identity.

New 45royale Identity

A long, but insightful road

It took a while to get there, but we are extremely happy with the result. We took several cues from our previous identity (seen below) including the shape and color palette, crafting something that we felt was just as bold and recognizable. We also added the first three characters of our name to the logo to create an instant association between the mark and our company.

Old vs. New

From vision to reality

Of course, one of the underlying reasons for our identity refresh was the move to the new office space. Before, we were both huddled up inside our home office caves with little to no interaction with the outside world. Now that we’re out among the living, it’s important that we have a brand that creates awareness in the community. Business cards and letterhead were first on the list and we teamed up with our friends at Doss Printing in Downtown Canton to get those printed and distributed. The cards ended up looking great and we were really happy with the results.

45royale business card — Front

45royale business card — Back

Now it’s your turn

So that’s a brief summary of the new 45royale logo mark and how it came to fruition. We hope after reading this article that we have inspired you to take ownership of your own brand. Whether it’s business or personal, branding and legacy on the web is more important now than ever. We’d love to hear your thoughts on our rebranding as well as what you’re doing right now to promote awareness of your own brand.

After many years of running 45royale from top-secret, undisclosed remote locations, we decided to finally bite the bullet and get ourselves our own office space! It took us a few months of looking around, but we’ve set up shop on the top floor of an old building in beautiful downtown Canton, GA. Our office sits perched upon the top floor of the same building that houses The Downtown Kitchen, a local Canton restaurant/bar/landmark. The easiest way to get to our “penthouse” space is via the street entrance, which leads to a not-so-quick elevator ride up to the third floor. We have plenty of space, beautiful 100 year old brick walls, and 12 foot ceilings that really fit the aesthetic we were looking for. But I know what you’re thinking: “This all sounds great, but do you really need the overhead that comes along with having an office?”. We hear you, dear reader. We’ll try to make sense of it as the story unfolds.

In the beginning…

When we first formed 45royale, we both felt lucky to be able to work for ourselves from the comfort of our own homes. After years of working for “the man” and sitting in some of the nation’s worst traffic, it felt great to roll out of bed and get to work without all the rigamarole. Early on, the only things we needed to run 45 smoothly were our phones, computers and caffeine. We were living the dream! No commute, no pointless conversations with that guy from Accounting that always talked sports in the elevator, no germ infestations from the people at work whose kid’s brought home the swine flu—none of that. Since most of our clients were in other states, it didn’t matter that we didn’t have an actual office. We could be just as productive as other firms with occasional visits to each other’s homes and screen-sharing via iChat. Things were great. Or so they seemed.

Needing to try something new

Although working from home was fantastic, we noticed a few drawbacks beginning to surface after our second full year at home. Probably the biggest issue that we both faced was that there was little separation between work life and home life. It seemed like we were constantly “on”. We’re not the type of people that ever truly shut off, but over time, we noticed our personal batteries slowly losing their charge. We also found that it was becoming harder and harder to find daily inspiration since we never left our homes. It’s seems strange, but after a few years working from home you forget how much you miss simple day-to-day human interaction. Although we talked to each other and clients all day via phone, email, and IM, it just wasn’t the same as being able to share a laugh or collaborate on something in person. But even with all of these drawbacks, it was still really hard to justify the added expense an office would bring. We debated on the topic for many months, but after crunching all the numbers and discussing all the intangibles, it was clear that the timing was right and we were ready for a change.

Our goals for the office

Over the past three years we’ve been fortunate to work with some great companies from all over the world. We wouldn’t trade our clients or the experience for anything. However, with the exception of a client or two, we really haven’t done that much work with local companies. Most people think this is strange, and believe us, we know—it’s just the way things worked out. Since one of our goals for 2009 was to get more involved with the web community (and local community as well), we’re really looking forward to the opportunity of forming relationships with a more local client base. This is probably the most significant factor in our decision to get an office in Downtown Canton. Having a home base of operations gives us a chance to get involved with locally, host open houses with business owners or setup meet-ups with other Atlanta-based designers and developers. After it’s all said and done, that’s the really exciting part of all this and we’re looking forward to seeing what comes from this new community focus. It’s more than just new business leads for us, it’s about giving back and trying to spread the word about web standards, good design, and great customer service.

Excited for the future

We’re extremely glad we made the move and can’t wait to see how everything plays out around us. We’re still getting used to the routine and new location, but we’ve been lucky to have fantastic families, friends and clients that have shown great patience and excitement for us during this transition. In the long run, we’re hopeful that this new space will breed new opportunities, not only for 45royale, but for the local business and web communities around us. Since moving in to the new office space we’ve already been welcomed by our neighbors and we can’t wait to see what the future holds for 45. If you’re ever in the area, please feel free to stop by and say hello. We promise we won’t bite, and neither will our newest team member (she’s a big softy).

P.S. We’re working on a short office video too and we hope to have that up soon. We’ll keep you posted!

If you aren’t familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk, this video is a great place to start because you can really get a true sense of Gary’s passion and his perspective on business. If you’d like to learn more and you have some time to kill, Gary also gave a great talk at SXSW last month. The video quality isn’t the greatest, but you don’t even notice after first new minutes. Enjoy!

If you’re interested in hearing the entire mixtape, you can check out more tracks here and then download the entire thing for free! Also, check out a full review of the mixtape from the Hip Hop Ruckus site where they give the effort a 9 out of 10 rating.

I think GOOD Music is pumping out some, well, good music lately and I’d love to hear your thoughts on the song and mixtape. Please feel free to leave a comment below!