Merry Christmas? Times are as hard as a granite boulder, encased in steel, painted in superglue and treated with a rare carbon compound.
Broke is what we are.
Blame a multitude of politicians and stab an accusing finger in the direction of international bankers and I will be with you, brothers and sisters. Had the former been watching the latter, we may not be in this sorry situation. Add to this negligence a patchwork government hell-bent on hobbling the voluntary and public sectors and we’re staring down the wrong end of a long, bleak winter. But again, what’s to be done? In the creative industries, can we really lighten this crushing load in any meaningful way? I feel certain we can.
In the first half of this year, I was involved in a project which involved re-branding a major UK company. The task was plagued (at least while I was involved) with a lack of IT infrastructure, poor strategy and flabby briefing. All of these things could have been put in place and properly managed without too much effort, it was simply that nobody cared enough to do so.
In the second half of the year, I have been working on the establishment of a broadcast service. The team actively attached to the project have worked tirelessly and with extraordinary dedication. However, a host of other organisations, suppliers and freelances on whom we have been depending have frequently failed to deliver on their promises. From phone calls going unreturned and meetings skipped without explanation, to work arriving late and commitments unfulfilled on the flimsiest excuses, it has all too often been an uphill struggle.
I accept there will always be flaky folk and badly run businesses, ready to put a spanner in the works, but this has been an almost daily occurrence. Our country has long been infected with a ‘can’t do’ attitude and we genuinely still have a mountain to climb when it comes to customer service, but now is not the time to indulge in either. Quite the opposite. With money thinner on the ground than rocking horse droppings, we simply cannot afford this level of ill-discipline and woolly-mindedness. Every call unreturned is a potential business opportunity squandered; every appointment dismissed in favour of a lie-in not only does the guilty party a disservice, but damages a project, account or endeavour. It’s possible I’m being paranoid, but surely we’re living through a savage era, almost designed to inspire a persecution complex in the best of us.
This doesn’t just apply to the freelance or sole trader, though. Helping a business associate develop a retail website a few weeks ago, I was astonished to discover we couldn’t take the site live immediately. This wasn’t because we hadn’t built it correctly, nor that we’d failed to establish the correct relationship with the wholesaler but because THE BANK CANNOT OFFER MERCHANT SERVICES UNTIL 2012!
That’s right. A national, well-known, high street bank had severed their relationship with the third-party provider without establishing an alternative service – thereby leaving all its business customers with no means to accept online credit card transactions. You couldn’t make it … well, you know the rest.
If there are to be winners and losers when the fog of austerity lifts, I am absolutely certain the winners will be those who redoubled their efforts, stuck to their guns and developed a metal-edged determination. The losers, I’m afraid, will lose in ways we haven’t seen for some eighty years.
It’s almost as if ‘nobody else does anything properly, so why should I bother?’ is the prevalent philosophy. The phrase ‘race to the bottom’ seems particularly appropriate here. But we don’t have to join in with this trend for plummeting. We can be effective, sharp, active and reliable. We can succeed by under over delivering, keeping our promises, doing what we say we’re going to do, surprising the cynics and dazzling the doubters.
With any luck, we’ll have won a race to the top by this time next year.
Merry Christmas!
Broke is what we are.
Blame a multitude of politicians and stab an accusing finger in the direction of international bankers and I will be with you, brothers and sisters. Had the former been watching the latter, we may not be in this sorry situation. Add to this negligence a patchwork government hell-bent on hobbling the voluntary and public sectors and we’re staring down the wrong end of a long, bleak winter. But again, what’s to be done? In the creative industries, can we really lighten this crushing load in any meaningful way? I feel certain we can.
In the first half of this year, I was involved in a project which involved re-branding a major UK company. The task was plagued (at least while I was involved) with a lack of IT infrastructure, poor strategy and flabby briefing. All of these things could have been put in place and properly managed without too much effort, it was simply that nobody cared enough to do so.
In the second half of the year, I have been working on the establishment of a broadcast service. The team actively attached to the project have worked tirelessly and with extraordinary dedication. However, a host of other organisations, suppliers and freelances on whom we have been depending have frequently failed to deliver on their promises. From phone calls going unreturned and meetings skipped without explanation, to work arriving late and commitments unfulfilled on the flimsiest excuses, it has all too often been an uphill struggle.
I accept there will always be flaky folk and badly run businesses, ready to put a spanner in the works, but this has been an almost daily occurrence. Our country has long been infected with a ‘can’t do’ attitude and we genuinely still have a mountain to climb when it comes to customer service, but now is not the time to indulge in either. Quite the opposite. With money thinner on the ground than rocking horse droppings, we simply cannot afford this level of ill-discipline and woolly-mindedness. Every call unreturned is a potential business opportunity squandered; every appointment dismissed in favour of a lie-in not only does the guilty party a disservice, but damages a project, account or endeavour. It’s possible I’m being paranoid, but surely we’re living through a savage era, almost designed to inspire a persecution complex in the best of us.
This doesn’t just apply to the freelance or sole trader, though. Helping a business associate develop a retail website a few weeks ago, I was astonished to discover we couldn’t take the site live immediately. This wasn’t because we hadn’t built it correctly, nor that we’d failed to establish the correct relationship with the wholesaler but because THE BANK CANNOT OFFER MERCHANT SERVICES UNTIL 2012!
That’s right. A national, well-known, high street bank had severed their relationship with the third-party provider without establishing an alternative service – thereby leaving all its business customers with no means to accept online credit card transactions. You couldn’t make it … well, you know the rest.
If there are to be winners and losers when the fog of austerity lifts, I am absolutely certain the winners will be those who redoubled their efforts, stuck to their guns and developed a metal-edged determination. The losers, I’m afraid, will lose in ways we haven’t seen for some eighty years.
It’s almost as if ‘nobody else does anything properly, so why should I bother?’ is the prevalent philosophy. The phrase ‘race to the bottom’ seems particularly appropriate here. But we don’t have to join in with this trend for plummeting. We can be effective, sharp, active and reliable. We can succeed by under over delivering, keeping our promises, doing what we say we’re going to do, surprising the cynics and dazzling the doubters.
With any luck, we’ll have won a race to the top by this time next year.
Merry Christmas!
