Better Late Than Never

I planned this a long time ago but is like they say; bet­ter late than never. A few weeks ago, I sent an announce­ment to my friends an fam­ily to uncover the mys­ter­ies regard­ing my employ­ment sit­u­a­tion. I’m happy to say that I’ve finally started my own busi­ness. This announce­ment is the first post of the year and wel­comes a new decennium.

Dear friends (includ­ing clients) and family,

I have an announce­ment to make so that we finally clear things up and every­one is prop­erly informed. Like most of you already know, I have resigned from my posi­tion as Head of Pro­duc­tion at MARS media. From now on, I am no longer work­ing for MARS media or the Yaiks group.

Get­ting to know every­one and work­ing along­side so many bright peo­ple has been a plea­sure. I’d like to thank the Yaiks group for giv­ing me the oppor­tu­nity to come to the Nether­lands and work with what I love. Also, I want to thank MARS media for allow­ing me the free­dom to explore my pas­sion and fur­ther develop my expe­ri­ence and talent.

[…]

To explain briefly what I’ll be doing now, I have two reg­is­tered busi­nesses which I own and oper­ate full-time. The pri­mary busi­ness is my inter­ac­tive agency Nord­strom Inter­ac­tive (a.k.a. Nin­tera) where my title, if I had one, would be direc­tor and web pro­ducer. Nin­tera will occa­sion­ally work in col­lab­o­ra­tion with MARS media on projects where I will be doing the production.

Nin­tera pro­vides pro­duc­tion and con­sul­ta­tion for web projects, and tech­ni­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion (of e.g. online pres­ence) and tech­nol­ogy man­age­ment for busi­nesses and peo­ple. The long-term tar­get audi­ence is inspir­ing peo­ple within the cre­ative industry—working with artists and big-time inter­ac­tive and adver­tis­ing agencies.

An impor­tant part of the busi­ness con­cept is to develop long-term infor­mal (yet pro­fes­sional) rela­tion­ships with clients, being able to call each other friends. Some peo­ple find this negative—I don’t. The goal is to be hon­est and dis­cuss with the client to together come up with the most cost-effective solu­tion, and keep every­one smil­ing. This indus­try is known for it’s over-promising and overselling—dreadful activ­i­ties which my busi­nesses will never support.

This all seem to work out very well so far and I’m look­ing for­ward to lead a team of tal­ented peo­ple within three years time. If you would like to know more about my busi­ness activ­i­ties or con­cepts, please drop by or just send me an email and I will answer your ques­tions. I’m delighted to find that every sin­gle one of my clients so far are won­der­ful peo­ple that are great to deal with.

Fur­ther­more, I offer a 10% com­mis­sion to any­one who refers me work. If you know some­one who is in need of con­sul­ta­tion or web pro­duc­tion of any kind, please refer them to me and you’ll receive 10% of the first project fee if it goes through.

I’ve been plan­ning to start my own busi­ness for six years so this is a great expe­ri­ence. I’m learn­ing every day and devel­op­ing my knowl­edge and per­son­al­ity faster than ever. It’s cer­tainly not for every­one but I believe it runs it the fam­ily and every­one who knows me also knows that I work best when I’m in com­plete con­trol and can be as pedan­tic and pro­fes­sional as my per­fec­tion­ism tells me to be. I have my father to thank for prepar­ing me for this through­out my child­hood by rais­ing me as an entrepreneur.

[…] It is busi­ness as usual except for the fact that I’m work­ing inde­pen­dently. I will also try to help peo­ple more often through arti­cles and var­i­ous dis­cus­sion boards.

Again, it was (and is, for those of you I’m cur­rently work­ing with) a great plea­sure work­ing with you all.

I wish you a very happy holiday!

• Day 29: Review, The Prin­ci­ples of Suc­cess­ful Freelancing
• Day 24: Blog­ging For Clients
• Day 16: Free­lance Best Practices
• Day 3: Mac Time-Tracking Apps
• Day 2: Are Clients Stupid?