So there I was, sitting in the living room, laptop fired up, reading copy for the issue you hold now. It was about 9 p.m., and sadly, in an all-too-common situation, my wife and I were both working on magazine projects. Like I said, I was reading, and she was doing design and production on a freelance project that required her to operate in a program she was unfamiliar with.
It was hard to concentrate because it meant ignoring the screaming and swearing coming from the general direction of the area where my wife was sitting. Note that I did not say the screaming and swearing were coming from her, just that they were emanating from that general direction. (Hey, I've been married for 18 years; I have learned something along the way.) What she was trying to do was pretty simple. She was just trying to make some text wrap around a photo–a simple process that she has done thousands of times before. Except she was using another tool, a different layout program, to do it. She tried all the tricks she could think of. We asked people familiar with the program. At one point, we were both looking in a stack of books for the answer.
Things got quiet as she gave up on it for a while and moved on to something else. Sometime later, while doing something else, she got a formatting dialog box on screen and there, at the bottom of the box, were three little words and a check box that changed everything. The words were "Ignore Text Wrap," and the fateful box was checked.
Turns out she was doing everything right all along, but as long as that box was checked, it just didn't matter. She had to find that little piece of crucial info before anything else would work.
If you have been reading my stuff for any length of time, you know that my mind does not work in a normal matter, so, of course, this set me to thinking about the importance of good information. For example, I was road-testing a piece of gear for this issue, a vocal processor that I really liked. One of the inputs on the back was labeled "Voice," so I assumed that meant there was a mic-pre built in and that I could jack a mic straight into it. But then, I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't do anything until I read the manual and discovered that the "Voice" label referred to the type of processing on that input, not the presence of a mic-pre.
And anyone out there who claims to have never done something similar is–how do I put this nicely?–lying their ass off.
It is one thing to have this happen with a piece of gear. It's embarrassing, but rarely does lasting damage (unless we're talking about power distro, in which case all bets are off ). It is quite another thing to be running your business based on incomplete or faulty info.
I know plenty of local and even regional soundcos who operate totally by the seat of their pants. No business plan, no growth forecasts, just a truck and some gear and a "let's get 'er done" work ethic.
That work ethic is a good–no, an essential– part of success in this business. But the difference between the guys who work and sweat and really try and end up just scraping by, and the guy who looks like he isn't really trying all that hard but gets the good gigs and makes the real money is often those business basics.
Recently, a company owner I was talking to bemoaned the fact that he was having a hard time finding a lighting contractor/vendor he could count on for the growing number of full-production gigs he was getting. I asked what was wrong with the guy he was using, and the answer was, "He's too cheap to hire anyone who is any good. He has a bunch of big-hearted guys who are all pretty useless." Ask the lighting guy, and I am sure he will tell you that he is paying a fair wage. But his idea of fair and what is being paid in the rest of the local market can't match up, or he would not have such a problem getting good people. That may be cheap or he may just be working with bad, outdated or incomplete information.
Like that Ignore Text Wrap checkbox, not being able to identify where your company has been over the past several years, how it has grown, how that compares to overall population and economic growth on your home turf and what you expect to see happen in terms of number and types of gigs may have you working very hard and not accomplishing a whole lot. You may even get away with it for a period of time, enjoying great gigs and real growth. But if your information about the market is bad or incomplete, how do you even know what gear to buy and in what order? What do you do when you have tapped the credit line for $100K worth of line array, only to discover that what you really needed to stay competitive was a digital console?
It comes down to making sure the business of your business is taken care of. If you are not the kind of person who is good at, or can stand doing, the biz basics, then hire someone who can. If you don't, you may find yourself out on fewer gigs and stuck in an office doing work you can't stand because, well, someone has to do it. If that's gonna be the case, you might as well be an accountant. And isn't not having to be stuck in an office doing boring, soul-killing work the reason we all got into this in the first place?
