Sound Advice from Chris Ashworth

From his blog. It's a fairly long post, but very worth the read.

My Competitive Advantage: I Hire Artists
June 24, 2010 – 7:34 pm

As recently discussed in this space, I am building a small software company. I’m not going to retread the history of that company, but you can read up on it if you want.

I’m only really here to share one tip. Kinda like a stock tip, I guess. It’s a tip I am increasingly convinced should be seriously considered by a variety of business owners in America.

The tip is this:

Hire artists.

No, wait, hold on. It’s not that simple. Actually, it sort of IS that simple, but not in the way you’re thinking. You need to understand what I’m proposing here, and to understand what I’m proposing, you need to understand the following story.
The Story

In March 2010, I was in trouble. A year previously, I had released the second version of my product, QLab 2. As a product, it succeeded. It brought new customers. Many new customers. Too many new customers.

In 2008, I sent about 600 QLab support emails.

In 2009, I conservatively estimate that I sent 6000. (But that’s really low-balling it.)

There were days I’d wake up in the morning, start answering emails at 6 am, write responses until 6 pm, take a break for dinner, answer a few more that night, and go to bed with more email in the inbox than when I’d started.

Serious problem. Seriously AWESOME problem, but, you know, still a problem. I needed help.

Now, I already had some help. Meet Sean:


Hi Sean! Sean’s an awesome dude. He was a friend from college. He is an OS X developer too. The summer before, Sean and I had joined our two companies together. Aside from helping with the code, he had already become an invaluable help in answering all those emails in the months leading up to March 2010.

But it wasn’t enough. I needed another person. The time had finally come to, you know, hire someone. Not just join forces with a friend, but flat-out, does-this-mean-I’m-an-adult-now? hire someone.

Meet Luckydave


Hi Luckydave! Luckydave, in case you hadn’t noticed, goes by the name “luckydave”. In March 2010, Luckydave had already been a QLab user for years. He is a working video designer in New York. A really good one. But more than just a user, Luckydave had been a champion. And by “champion” I mean he sold our product harder than we did. Luckydave wrote posts to the QLab mailing lists that rivaled ours in their detail and helpfulness. Luckydave acted like it was his personal mission to convert the world’s theaters to QLab. Luckydave was known to announce that he’d “drunk the QLab koolaid”. Luckydave knew details about how video codecs work “in the field” in ways that we simply did not know. Because we were not in the field.

Luckydave was, in short, awesome. And I, it will not surprise you one bit to know, wanted him on our team.
What I Did

I offered Luckydave a job.

Surprise!

Well, yeah, big deal. But here’s the twist:

I offered Luckydave a job based on the needs of his life as an artist.

First, I told him we wanted him on the team. Then, I told him we would create the job based on what would work for both of us. We talked it out, and we constructed a position specifically for him, with these properties:

* He can sign up to “work support” in units as small as a single day, or as large as a full month.
* He only needs to tell me one day in advance if he’s working the next day.
* He can work the hours that fit his schedule for that day.
* When he is not working for Figure 53, he can do whatever the hell he wants. Including go make art. For a week. Or a month. Or whatever the gig requires.

We created this framework together, and then I asked LD what it would take to make this structure worth his time. He replied, “When I have been the least worried about money, I have been making X dollars a month.”

I could afford X dollars a month. I said yes.

I wrote down the above terms, put them at the end of the legal-speak from the lawyers, we signed it, and it was done.

This all happened at the end of March 2010.
What Happened Next

When someone writes to support@figure53.com, our help desk software tracks how long it takes us to respond. Now, one thing you need to appreciate is that we have customers all over the world. We get questions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There is no such thing as “standard business hours” for us. Art doesn’t take a vacation. If someone writes me a question at 10 PM, and I wake up at 7 AM to answer it, that person has waited over 500 minutes to get that answer. When your customers are in Australia and you’re in Maryland, that’s a real wait.

Keep that in mind, and then take a look at this graph of our time-to-first-response for the past 9 months:

time-to-first-response.png

There are at least two things here worth noting.

Number one: Since joining us at the end of March, Luckydave has helped us pull down our overall response times significantly.

Number two: Those little green bars for the last few months? Those show that our median time-to-first-response since adding Luckydave to the team has been around 20 minutes.

20 minutes. 7 days a week. 24 hours a day.
NOTE TO SKIMMERS: HERE IS WHERE SHIT GETS REAL

So far the story has been pretty good. I found a wonderful teammate. We made a job for him. It measurably helped the company. Life is good.

But I’m hiding one stunning fact from you, and it is this:

Barely a few weeks into Luckydave’s new job with Figure 53, he got a call.

A call from a temp agency. The temp agency he used in the past, to fill his free time between gigs.

Because, you know, that’s what working artists usually have to do. It’s hard to make a complete living in the arts.

And yet people do it. People like Luckydave, who are passionate about what they make, they do it. They temp if they must, but they do it. Because that is the drive of these people. They care. They care very, very much.

And so they temp. And so Luckydave temped. And Luckydave temped for a financial agency in New York. And he learned to operate financial…software of some kind. I’ve never fully understood what. But something tricky to use. Something important to fancy financy-type people.

And Luckydave, it turns out, is really fucking good at this financial software.

Not just a little good. Best-in-the-world good. He is fast. He is efficient. He is really. Fucking. Good.

Which? Is not actually so surprising! Luckydave is the kind of guy that uses QLab like a musical instrument. I couldn’t keep up with him if I tried. He makes things in QLab I didn’t even know were possible. AND I WROTE IT.

So the temp agency calls to say, weeks after Luckydave accepted my offer, that by golly, the financial company would like to hire him to drive THEIR software. Full-time.

With a starting salary of 80,000 dollars a year.

Kapow.

Ka.

Pow.

Now it is not my business to share what Figure 53 is paying Luckdyave, but I will tell you this: it is not 80,000 dollars a year. Not, I am afraid to say, even close. I wish it were. But we are not fancy financy-type people, and we don’t have that kind of cash at the moment.

So by all rights, that graph up there? That graph up there should have started going back up in May.

But I note to you that it did not.

I note to you that Luckydave thought over that offer for a few minutes, and then?

He said no.

I want you to let that soak in for a second. I’ll wait.
{he waits}

Pretty crazy, huh.

Well, pretty crazy if you just focus on the money. But for many (all?) of the best people in the world, money stops mattering once you have enough to not worry about it.

Is 80,000 dollars enough for Luckydave to give up his life as an artist? Turns out, no. Turns out, robbing him of his life’s passion costs more than that. Turns out, I can’t afford to pay him nearly so much, but I can support him as a creative human being who doesn’t fit in a 9-to-5 structure. Turns out, what I get for that support is one of the most dedicated, cheerful, creative, committed, hard-working teammates I could possibly ask for. Turns out, his battery is charged by being him more than it is by counting dollars.

So here’s the thing, here is my tip, and here is what I want the business owners of America to think about very hard:

Artists, as a species, are amazing people. And America, as a general rule, does not fully get this. Show me a good artist and I will show you a highly educated, highly creative, highly passionate, highly driven human being. If they’re a performing artist, I will show you someone who breathes teamwork. I will show you someone who eats healthy critiques for breakfast and grows an inch that day because of it. I will show you a communicator, and a thinker.

I will show you someone you want to hire.

And all you have to do, is not destroy the whole reason you want to hire them.

All you have to do, in short, is create jobs built for artists. The result? Instant competitive advantage.
I think this is a big deal.

I’m sorry it took me so long to get to the point here, but I didn’t know how to do it any more compactly and get the depth of this point across.

I think this is a really big deal. I think the failure to employ artists is an inefficiency in the system. I think it doesn’t need to be this way. I think there’s no reason we can’t collectively set up the same kind of win-win situations that Figure 53 found with Luckydave. I think we should do it.

I’m going to continue working to build my little company. With luck, and work, and grace from the unknown, we’re going to keep making things, and grow enough to make things we couldn’t make before. It won’t be about getting big, but it will be about getting big enough, and every person will count. I don’t have a ton of money to make this happen. But I have enough money, and I have the good sense to give people things more valuable than money.

My tip to you is that you, too, have things more valuable than money. All you have to do is be smart enough and willing enough to give them.