There are new things to learn everyday.
And at K2M Creative Media, we have been learning a lot. As our company has grown and changed, we have had to adapt and take on new issues and challenges. Some of us are kinesthetic learners and can only learn when experiencing things ourselves. Some of us can read a blog and learn without experiencing. So, here are our lessons, our takeaways from the recent past; you can learn from them while reading or you can try to experience them yourselves…
Lesson #1: Familiarity Breeds Contentment. Sometimes it’s so fun to be creative. But even in a creative business, there have to be familiar, cut and dry systems. Invoicing needs to happen on a set date, we still have to track our to do lists, calendars have to be synched. It’s not the most exciting part of the enterprise, but if you don’t have basic operating systems that are familiar and dependable, you can’t spend enough time being creative.
Lesson #2: Sometimes Bigger IS Better, Sometimes Bigger is Just Bigger: When we add clients, and we have, there is not always economy in scale. Obtaining graphics doesn’t become less expensive and the same goes with paying for writing and web design. We can buy paper in bulk, but not labor.
Lesson #3: We Still Have to Meet: We are very adept at texting and emailing and saving things in the cloud. The downside is that we at K2M sometimes can fall into the trap of not feeling the need to meet face to face. But, we need to be in our workplace and sometimes it is not only more efficient to be literally at the same table, but it enables more creative juices to flow. That doesn’t mean that the table always has to be in the same place. This “we still have to meet” lesson also applies to our clients. More communication, ultimately, is always better for most relationships (insert joke about disliked family member here…)
Lesson #4: Marketing is still an Art Form: We would like to be able to tell our clients “If you do x, your business will grow by y”. But it just doesn’t work that way. Marketing involves study, planning and tweaking and tweaking and tweaking. We tweak the message, the method, the media and the money spent. And then the market changes again. Marketing isn’t inherently frustrating, it is inherently changing.
We pride ourselves on continuing to grow and learn and change. Our kids might have the summer off, but we don’t. We suspect, as adults, there’s no vacation for learning.
Nor should there be.