Coloured Meat

I come from a background of working in the agency side, now in my current role I’ve had the chance to select a new agency for a project. The current company we were working with was a shocker, charging through the roof, pissing around and not knowing the definition of a deadline.

I went out on the hunt for companies through Google, industry bodies and asked for recommendations on LinkedIn. Eventually I ended up seeing 5 companies, which was quite a badly surprising experience with:

• Barely any preparation from some
• Obvious nerves from the people we were meeting
• Absolutely boring - some of them wanked on about things that really weren’t relevant

It got me to realise that I was once someone unprepared, nervous and boring. Glad to be gone from that side of the table I say.

We ended up choosing the smallest company from the bunch, without the blue chip client list and high profile portfolio - but they had “it”. 2 months down the track, they met the tight deadline and hit the budget and now we have myambition.

Key things that made these guys stand out and perform from the other guys was:

• No fat in the company structure - it’s ridiculous when a company of 18 has a CEO, 5 account managers, 3 in the project team with  50% doing any real work. It really costs the customer time to right through the many people
• First point of contact that knew their stuff - Account managers in web agencies are monkeys, they pull in someone with a tiny bit of sales experience who’s willing to accept a piss poor salary and in a multi-choice question would not know what HTML stood for
• No scheduling - We got a dedicated resource for the course of two months, one design, one developer - both with enough experience to handle it on their own. There wasn’t issues of having one week here and there to fit in with a ton of other clients
• Variable priced contract - Corporates love a fixed price contract, but they end up screwing over both parties. The agency puts a buffer in the budget to make sure they make money, expecting clients to make “unreasonable” changes and push out the man hours. What I’ve always seen happen is that, because it’s a fixed price the agency actually has to work harder in the planning phase to make sure everyone knows what they’re getting. It doesn’t work because it is so unflexible. Sure you need planning - and a lot of it but things will always change along the course of a web project, the beauty of the web is how easy to you can change, I don’t know why everyone takes the fixed priced options.

I don’t think I could ever go back to the agency world. Apart from the guys at Known who I’ve been working with, every agency I’ve seen is too small/unexperienced to put out a great website, or too big that it becomes a bigger project than it really is to pay a CEO salary, while the underpaid oompa-loompas on the floor do a rubbish job.

It’s as bad as the kid in school who writes a speach about speaches, so I apologise in advance for blogging about blogging.

I’m soon going to attempt to get a number of blogs setup at work - but of course I’m going to face challenges getting people into it. I’m confident I can make it work, but if I’m slack myself - how do I expect others to get into it?

There’s one reason why I’m slack. I started the blog to help myself get a job. I got a job, I stopped. Which leads me to the conclusion:

To be motivated to blog - you need to get something out of it in the short term.

It’s easy to say you get the best out of it in the long term - but it’s much easier said than done.

I was lucky enough to get a Mac in my last job, but now I’ve finally bought my own.

After using a Mac I grew fond of it all, but now I understand the true satisfaction to actually own one. As lame as I sound, part of the elite.

Apple do a hell of a lot to ensure post-purchase satisfaction with nice extras like Apple branded polishing cloths. Everything inside the package, right down to the polystyrene is ‘cool’. Only Apple could pull off ‘cool’ polystyrene.

I took this photo today at a local superette.

It’s not exactly the friendliest welcome when you have to take off your spike boots, put them into your gym bag and leave it outside on the ground with your bike. Ridiculous.

It feels good to finally get rid of the default “Hello World” post from WordPress and get on with things, my way.

The first thing I want to explain, as before even posting anything a lot of people ask me why the stupid name? My name is Joel Pinkham, and when explaining how to spell my last name it seems to work well by saying “like the colour and the meat”. This is where I got the idea from, why I wanted to call my blog that though? I guess a different and distinguishable name is what I was after. Seeing as someone stole JoelPinkham.com I was forced to com up with something else.

The posts soon to come may be of varying quality, but I promise the odd good point. I’m going to focus on anything in the world of online marketing, but I often will give my two cents on traditional marketing and advertising and probably a much of other things that will certainly be off topic.

While I’ve given you nothing to read for now, you can start out reading a bit about me and subscribe to my RSS feed.