Your guess is as good as mine

I must admit that I take a slightly different view of this project than some, or all, of the other participants. I’m not a designer or a developer, and I have no vested interest in Mercury Grove other than they are becoming a good business partner and they seem to be really good people. Day to day I’m Andrew Milne’s biz partner (he’s blogging here somewhere!) in a new media, or interactive (take your pick), marketing company called bv02 inc.

Andrew will be leading the charge on this project from a creative, design and branding point of view. He and I have worked together on and off for about 10 years and I think he’s the best at what he does, which is good, because what pumps out of his brain largely pays my mortgage. Me? I’m really not sure what my role may be on the MG project as I’m a bit of a Swiss army knife and anything I can do others here seem to do betterJ.  That said, I want and need this project to succeed because my partner and our company is heavily involved, and we want everything we touch to be as good as it can be. Plus I’m really beginning to like the team that Scott Annan has pulled together….but therein lies the challenge….

When you are a small business like bv02, you build a lot of pretty personal relationships with clients and partners. It can’t be avoided. Because of that there is always the risk that you will do too much for someone, too often, and not really make any cash. Being liked is a wonderful thing, but if you lose money in order to be liked, your business isn’t going to be around for too long. At the same time, if you are completely money driven your business will also dry up pretty quickly….your partner or client will take their ball and go home. Experience has taught me that some of the coolest, most interesting gigs are fueled by ideas, not dollars. This is a pretty ambiguous paragraph so far……I guess I’m saying that in our business you constantly try to balance personalities and relationships, against the need to earn a profit. So I suppose, now that I write it down, my role here will be to help strike that fine balance between friendship and business partnership.  The MG guys are fun and smart. Andrew and I enjoy spending time with them on personal and business levels. We learn new things, we meet new people, we laugh a lot and it’s fun to be part of something at its birth.  But I just know that time demands will be put upon Andrew and we’ll need to make sure that we deliver for our friends and partners at Mercury Grove, but that our clients and staff, don’t suffer as a result.

 Hmm…..was this too serious? I always end up sounding like the heavy. Hey Scott, I’m not really the heavy….I just played one in a movie.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Misc.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.