Fling Media

Monday, April 07, 2008

I'm Leaving Blue Flavor

I think one of the exciting things about life is the chance to press the reset button and start over. I believe that any time is the right time to change your life. I’ve been married for twelve years to my lovely wife Cyndi, so that aspect of my personal life has always been a rock. My professional life has been …well an interesting journey to say the least, probably having hit the reset button a little too often.

Today, I embark on the next leg of my journey, leaving Blue Flavor, the incredible agency I co-founded in 2005, to reboot my consultancy, Fling Media.

Why leave such a successful agency and start over? Three reasons: to focus more on mobile, to build more products like Leaflets, but mostly to spend more time with my family.

Reason 1. A Focus on Mobile

For the past two years I have been focused on running a business. As Blue Flavor has grown, so have my duties, taking me further away from doing real work. I want to get back to designing stuff myself.

Now traditionally mobile projects have a steep cost curve. So unless you are attracting the really big players, it is hard to do mobile work exclusively. But the iPhone is changing that. The demand for mobile websites and mobile web apps is increasing quickly. The medium seems to finally be taken seriously by the masses.

I stand behind my principle that mobile work shouldn’t cost a premium, it should be accessible to companies of all shapes and budgets. But as an agency, you are forced to only consider projects on a certain budget. As an individual, this isn’t quite the case. So it is for this reason that going out on my own has become increasingly attractive.

I will still be doing desktop web work, but it’s my hope that I will be able to transition the majority of my client work to mobile later this year. By providing programs like my iPhone Site in 5 days for $5k and iPhone Web Apps in 10 days for $10k I think it kick start the mobile aspect of my business.

Reason 2. Build More Products

When we built Leaflets last year, it was a huge rush. Not only was it incredibly fun, but after so much client work, it was an amazing experience to be able to call something your own. I want more! I have a new product idea at least once a week, just no time to build it. And building products within an agency isn’t easy, in fact being able to prioritize product work over billable work is damn hard!

I’m hoping that by being on my own I will be able to balance billable and non-billable a little easier. Closing doors to new projects to do one to two week sprints, rapidly building something and seeing what sticks. I’ve even taken upon myself to try and publicly build six products in the next year. An insane goal to try and keep me on track and keep non-billable a priority.

Whether I succeed or fail, it should be an interesting ride and I’m sure I will learn a lot.

Reason 3. Spend more time with my family

But the final and most important reason I’m leaving Blue Flavor is my family. Since early 2006, my wife Cyndi has also worked at Blue Flavor as our Office Manager. We’ve always been able to work well together, but the demands of a small business can be fairly overwhelming and often crossed over into our personal life.

Being the only parents at Blue Flavor, we feared that our commitment to Blue Flavor was leaving us exhausted, drained, and unable to spend as much quality time with our daughter PJ as we would like. When we started Blue Flavor she was only two, but as she is about to enter Kindergarten, we’ve realized that we need to be more attentive parents and not leave her feeling like she grew up competing with a company for our time.

Having enjoyed the flexibility that being a business owner has allowed us, Cyndi and I have set up office in the garage of our Queen Anne home, to stay close to home in spirit. We have no plans to ever be any bigger than the two of us. Our goal is to find that oh so elusive balance between work and life, something we think we can do by being smaller.

Saying goodbye

So it is with a heavy heart that I say goodbye to my business partners Nick and Keith. Having gone through so much together, we’ve become like brothers (making them brothers #7 & #8 for me). And to all of our amazing employees, Kevin, Tom, Garrett, Jeff and Tiffani, for whom each of them I have a deep respect and admiration for.

I’ve never been more proud of a collection of people as I am the people of Blue Flavor.

But I hardly think they are rid of me yet. Cyndi and I live just a short walk to the Blue Flavor office, and we plan to continue to work and collaborate with our extended family of Blue Flavor for many years to come.

Open for Business

So as one door closes another one opens, making Fling Media officially open for business, providing web and mobile design services. Check out our brand new site at flingmedia.com or drop us a line and say hello.

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