 Who has who's never been to the business track our business track? All right, so here's how this works a little bit different Business track. We're gonna have four speakers today, and this is not planned Kristin prep anything right there's no slides I Don't know what she's going to say we haven't talked beforehand Yeah, literally no one and and so I am here just to get the information that you want out of Chris's head And that's what this is about for the next two hours, so there's gonna be four presenters four speakers And we're just gonna talk and today. There's a common theme What we're gonna talk about with all the four speakers is failure And especially business failure and what the takeaways were from the from that failure And again, all we're gonna do is just chat And so if you have questions for Chris, this is interactive Chris and I are gonna chat, but if you have something specifically you want to ask Chris Let me know and and let's get that information out of her head. Can you do that? Good Chris and I have known each other for for several years. We met at Word Camp, San Francisco many many years ago And this is somebody that I've just admired and and respected for for a long long time So give a warm welcome for Chris Ford So Chris, do you want to start? Do you have any any any stories that you can think of or anything you want to tell or examples of Just times in business because you've been doing this you've been at this a long time So anything that you've maybe failed at that you want to share that you can see many things Really you I don't believe that things. I I Graduated from design school in 1996 It was coincidentally the same year that the commercial internet became a thing I started off as a print designer and got a job at a skateboard company I was supposed to be designing t-shirts and their web guy quit and So guess who was their new web girl? And so that was kind of the where I where I started my path. I worked at agencies for about 10 years And that was really like one of the first big not failures on my part, but failures on the dot-com economy Where Basically a bunch of us had been working at this great company. We were doing projects for like This guy named Steve Wynn who was gonna open up a hotel called Lureth that instead he named after himself Like it was a big awesome Superfund agency working with super smart people and we showed up for work one day and the doors were locked. Oh Yeah, and they were like so long suckers You're not getting paid either and So that's how I became a freelancer And like I would say like that was the first big disillusioning failure through no fault of my own but just kind of realizing like sometimes in bubble economies things happen and You've got to figure out how to bounce back from them and mine was okay If I can't find a job because every dot-com is closing and you can pick up an Aeron chair on the street from all The dot-coms going out of business literally on the street literally on the street like Because I don't know if anyone was around at that time But they were like hiring people and paying them a hundred thousand dollars a year to sit in a chair and not code Just so when people came through it looked like you had a really big agency And so like people were just throwing money around Fools ball tables free-sode it was awesome when you were 27 like it was the best job in the world Until you realized they'd spent all the money on foosball tables and catered lunches and free sodas And you didn't get a paycheck and the door was locked when you showed up for work So I know you're continuing to draw. I want to share something along those lines really quick I was in LA at the time. So I was in Santa Monica was where as we were located and my buddy Bill Rini He he worked at a at a large agency like you're like you're saying he quit his six-figure job To take half of his salary and go to work at E toys calm He was employee number six anybody know what E toys is remember E toys so E toys led that calm failure That was the big that was the first one that crashed and so Everybody around him. They were millionaires on paper. They all bought Mercedes or least Mercedes and expensive apartments in Santa Monica And he had the exact same experience as you he came in one day and the doors were Well the doors weren't locked, but he came in one day and literally everybody was racing out the door with an Aeron chair On their back. So that's what made me think of that when when you said that's how I got my first one gig hard drive It was like we were like our when we went back in to collect our personal things everyone was like This is my personal thing That's about how much my paycheck was Awesome, anyway go on with your story Um, and yeah, so so like the lesson I learned from that is The biggest thing about failure is learning to be resilient and bounce back from it I Was really bothered by it like it really affected me. I took it really personally And it was just an opportunity that I didn't know was an opportunity yet Because I went on to freelance for 13 years Under a variety of names as you know, I decided the last one was really really dumb and so It it took me to places. I never knew that I could go by myself Got it. All right You know you strike me you've always struck me as somebody who's got Moxie grits Gumpion you pick a word, right? And but that's what I think that that it takes some of that to go through what you went through Right and and bounce back. Yeah. Yeah, I mean you just have to There's this does everyone know who Brene Brown is I would join that woman's cult That's when I came up with I would join that woman's For those who don't know tell it she is a shame and vulnerability Researcher which sounds like a really horrible thing to read books about but she wrote this book called rising strong And it's all about people who are resilient versus people who aren't and I mean, I've been knocked down so many times that That sometimes I wonder how I kept getting back up sure And it's just what's what's the alternate? My dad and my mom were divorced when I was about 16 years old and to the end of his life He was still bitter about it and angry about it and kind of never got over what happened And it just kind of struck me like I don't want to live my life as Someone who takes this one thing that happened to him 20 years ago or 10 years ago or five years ago And lets it control their life like that's not the person I want to be and so I think Cultivating you know reading about how to be more resilient and bounce back from those things Like that's the biggest lesson of failure is no matter how many times you get kicked in the teeth get back up You know the only other option is to lay down and you don't get anywhere when you do that And I think something else we have in common because my parents were divorced at five, right? And I think you know the people that I know that came from divorced parents have a certain Independence right they are able to kind of Figure things out on their own, you know be on their own be comfortable on their own Because it's part of part of your upbringing. Yeah, you feel like you have that that same Yeah Well, and I was 16 and my parents were both like whoo-hoo they got married when they were like 17 18 years old So they went off to live their life So I just kind of went to feral at 16, which you know, it's not a really good time for a kid to be without supervision I have no idea what you're talking about And so it was you're you're absolutely right like you have to learn to figure things out On my 18th birthday my dad was like here's the one ads find yourself an apartment And so it was it was like just kind of like I have to figure it out because there's no real safety net there like there is no There is no lay down because there's really no one to come up behind you and pick you up Got it. All right I'm gonna keep going even less anybody's got yes, Sam has a question for Chris Hi, Sam So I'm gonna I'm just gonna repeat kind of repeat the question for the for the for the for the video, right? So that I'm gonna paraphrase because it was really well-spoken and I'm not gonna be that well-spoken But What do you what do you do right once once once you've experienced that failure or you've been knocked down, right? What do you what do you do in the short term to pick yourself back up? Well like the first week? I cry and beat myself up and tell myself how terrible. I am and I'm not gonna lie like yeah, I spend a good solid week, but what I do is I set a timeline I'm like, okay your pity party ends on Friday You can go ahead and feel all these feelings for this week or day or depending on like the magnitude of the failure how long I've allowed myself and Then I try to do I don't know if everyone here knows I'm pretty open about it but about seven years ago I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder which got me into therapy which was awesome and So I give myself that time and then I get back into doing healthy things for myself I don't wallow I get back on a schedule even if I don't feel like it. I force myself to get out of bed I force myself to take a shower and get dressed I force myself to restart Brené Brown books so that I can start like putting those positive words She has this thing where she's talking about shame and there's a difference between shame and and I can't remember what the other One is off the top of my head, but shame is telling yourself that you're a bad person and You're not a bad person something bad happened to you and so those are the kind of things like I rely on books and Being around people who remind me that no you don't suck and and having a good support system like having people around you who you trust to tell you when maybe you know You did something wrong to cause the failure and the lessons you can learn from it So that you know that they're not blowing smoke when they're telling you that no this You're not Worthless, you know, here's how great you are here are the things you accomplished and Here are here are the things that you can do with that now It's interesting because you took me a long time to Embrace therapy as well, right? You know up until probably 40. Yeah, I thought okay therapies for losers Right, ours was you don't show you dirty laundry with other people, right? It's just That was part of my belief system until I started actually going right and it does help one of things It might take away you said something interesting, right? You said it's not it's you know, it's not that's your bad person something bad happened to you You might take that even a step further and say something happened to you right without putting a label of good or bad on it Right, this just this thing happened. Yeah, right and it's another way of just relabeling and say okay now I'm gonna move on to the next thing so I Thought it's under their hand Okay One of the other things that you said, you know because you've been doing this you've been at this a long time, right? And you've been Under many different labels, you know, you've had to reinvent yourself Right, so let's talk about that a little bit. What does that process look like for you? um So I've had my skill set become obsolete during my career probably five times You know like I coded HTML I started as a print designer that was my education and Then I fell in love with the web because one of my professors was moving on to work at wired magazine And he really encouraged me to get into it. He thought I'd enjoy it And so I started, you know doing HTML with tables and spacer gifts and frame sets and all of that and Then flash came along and that's what everyone did awesome You know what I was actually looking at a flash archive like the history of the web Miss like I don't miss the inaccessibility and stuff of flash, but it was so fun Oh, like as a designer like being able it was almost like being in video and not the web Yeah, really like I enjoyed that was one of my favorite parts of my career was doing that because it was so creative And then flash died and I went back into print for a while I was a professional scrapbooker for several years. I art directed a series of crafting books I was the first openly gay scrapbooker, which caused a lot of kerfuffle back in like There were a lot of people who weren't too happy about that at one point a magazine Accepted one of my submissions and called me back and said we actually can't use it The editors said that they can't put this in the magazine because it's a picture of you and your wife being affectionate and We think that our audience would really be upset about that and the last thing I ever had published in a magazine was in a June wedding issue of our marriage in Canada when it became legal So it was kind of one of those things where you know, I Kind of broke down some barriers in there and that was a really interesting learning experience It didn't end well, but it was an interesting career We can talk about that one later. It's probably So in each of these During each of these transitions was it was it conscious? Did you make a conscious decision? This is what I'm gonna do. Did you try a bunch? Did you throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what stuck but how did it work for you? I was always kind of like looking ahead like when I saw flash coming out I made it a point to learn it because I I just had a gut feeling it was gonna be a big thing so I've always just kind of looked at like I get bored really easily and So when I do something for a certain period of time and it becomes routine, I Start looking around for something else to do So either looking ahead to what new technologies are coming out or I'm really bored and how do I not be bored? And then some things have just been random opportunities like that whole scrapbooking thing. I had gone To a craft conference to go look at paper and and hang out with one of my friends who is in the industry I met some random guy and we started talking about the difference between Charles Anderson and Charles T. Anderson Which if you're not a designer, he would not know about but it was a very spirited like hour-long conversation And a week later. I left my job making Rainbird timer Demos in flash which was holaciously boring rain rain bird like the sprinkler Okay, I would like draw 3d things and like animate them in flash to show you how to program your spring okay for years Wow And so it was just this random opportunity like hey, how would you like to? Our designer of this series of books is leaving. Would you like to art direct them? And so it was just like yeah, I'd like to do that And it was actually at this time where We were transitioning to CSS and I wasn't really comfortable with it and this opportunity came along So it was like okay. I don't have to learn that I know print and it sounds interesting So I just randomly picked a path So yesterday you were giving a discussion about project management Process right do you find that of all these things that you've done you've carried certain skills with you through all of them Oh, totally. I was saying in the thing yesterday that my project management philosophy is I want to be the project manager that I wish I had when I was a designer or working for brands or and a lot of what I've learned just working at agencies and working as a freelancer with clients doing project management and a lot of the UX and UI skills I learned and like iterative Thinking and all of that design thinking that that everyone talks about like I totally inform I'm designing experiences for our clients right now and so everything I do I think about through the lens of my user experience brain Or it's like how can I improve this experience? How can I iterate on it to make it better and so I do that for both our clients and our internal team? Like they have a user experience on it, too so Everything has definitely like in addition to the failures, but just like the hard skills I've learned over the course of the years have informed every new position. I've taken cool Questions you're nailing it They have absolutely no questions for you So of all the client experiences that you've had all the clients that you've dealt with over the since 1996 All right all those interactions with internal clients and external clients Everything has always gone a hundred percent perfect. Yeah, totally great. I'm awesome questions for Chris Tell me yeah, actually no, I was kidding. Give me one second. Give me give me one second Mike So tell me about a Project that that that you can remember because I know there's the one right that just completely blew up Whether it was in your control or out of your control. Oh God So you don't have to name names That's weird. I can think about like off the top of my head. I'm thinking about terrible clients Who would scream at me and you know terrible clients who wouldn't pay me? And I'm like oh I I was working on one project with a Horrible project management system. I did not know what I was doing yet Like it was all spreadsheets and Google Docs and I had binders With my information in it. That's like that bad Yeah, and and it was beyond like there were project management tools I didn't have to have binders with printouts and Everything went wrong like bad client communication and We would scream at each other on the phone like he would literally call you in the client The client would call me up and just like verbally abuse me and apparently he did it to his employees too And and none of us really talked about it, but just not a very nice guy and it was just The most horrible experience miss deadlines There was another project I worked on one time at an agency That through no fault of our own didn't launch for three years. I only work there for a year. Wow Yeah, I worked there for a year I did all the design and like every six months I check in I'm like I wonder if that thing's gone live yet and three years later the same design Which was totally outdated finally went up. I was like, I'm so glad I didn't stay and work on that for three years Wow, that's some good. I think that's like the longest one that ever Ever went on. That's some serious slippage Mike It's my question for you So over over the years as you've been working for agencies, but also working freelance by yourself As you're changing your skill set and changing things around Do you find that when you're working as a freelancer that you know the the freedom that comes with that and the flexibility? versus the Stability of working with an agency. Do you kind of go back and forth between those? It's like, oh, you know, I kind of missed that flexibility and start to lean more one way or the other Like what are you? What do you feel about that and as a follow-up? Is there stability working for an agency? There is definitely more stability working for an agency Health insurance is awesome Vacations that someone like pays you for are awesome I'm really really fortunate about four years ago. I think it was that long my friend Chris Called me up and he said I want to talk to you about something don't hang up the phone Great way to start all of our conversations to please don't hang up on me And I was like, okay, and he said an opportunity has come up It is totally not what you do, but I think you'd be really good at it Would you like to come and be a project manager at crowd favorite? And so I said, yeah, you know I I had kind of gotten to a point where I felt like I had gone as far as I could as a freelancer Like there was kind of a cap on the projects I could take unless I wanted to become my own agency I am very not Like I'm not really good at forcing myself to do things I'm the person who has a freelancer is like let's go to target this afternoon that sounds fun And then I stay up till four o'clock in the morning catching up on work So I was really burned out on just the constant grind and so I was like, yeah, sure that sounds like fun If it you know isn't a fit it isn't a fit so I went and got a crash course in project management and After about a year. I was like, well, I don't know man Relance like maybe I should give it one more shot like I was I was having this crisis where I Being a designer. I felt like wasn't my job It was really a core part of who I am like that was a really important part of me That's how I self identified and so I was like I I'm not sure if I'm ready to give that up entirely like I Feel like maybe I should give it another shot and see if it's gonna work out and it didn't and I was doing support for a tool called design palette pro. I started my WordPress career off Building Genesis themes while it was studio first it was revolution and then it was studio press and then Genesis came out So I did the earliest kind of female focused Theme there and so there was an opportunity to do some support It was some steady work, which was nice it filled in the freelance gaps And then the two partners Josh and Andrew Norcross Josh Eaton and Andrew Norcross Lemus stole Norcross away and No, he gave Andrew a great opportunity and he's super happy there I like the way you described it the first time They needed a project manager because they were starting to grow and I had randomly made a comment in Slack about Project management earlier in the day like no idea why it was just like well Have you tried this tool and Josh was like, oh, hey, you actually have a background in this Would you be interested in coming on and because it's a fully distributed company? I I am one of the very very fortunate people who has a full-time job with a great team Everyone's worked there like we've had no one leave in the two years. I've been there So it's a really tight cohesive team we all love working together like everyone there is great and And so if you can find something like that like I find that when I'm accountable to people other than myself I'm much more disciplined Like it's much it's much harder for me to blow something off when someone else is waiting on it I don't like disappointing people. So it's great for me. Like it's a good structure for me to Stay disciplined and get things done and But it's really like what works for you I personally I could never commute again like the idea of having to get in a car and spend 45 minutes going someplace to Talk to people on Slack all day. I just I can't do it Well, I think we'll end there. Thank you very much big round of applause for Chris Ford