Ron Lindeboom
2
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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The most logical one is the Adobe Flash forum as that is the forum that most users of Swift 3D frequent.
Best,
Ron Lindeboom
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No, I just looked in there and it looks as if the guys at Total Training weren’t answering any of the questions and so in keeping with Creative COW policy, we have turned the forum off.
Thanks for the heads up, John.
Ron Lindeboom
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This is such a complicated field, one that which when done wrong will wipe out any chance of recovery, and so we recommend leaving it to the experts.
We are a professional’s site, one wherein most of the people here work with these tools for a living, and so we do not recommend free data recovery tools — nor do we wish to open a “Gamblers Data Recovery” forum.
Real data recovery is expensive but when your fanny is on the line, you cannot afford to gamble.
There are free sites out there for this kind of thing; we are not one of them.
Sorry.
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
– Antoine de Saint Exupéry -
Like Walter, I have found that our most successful internships have “walked in the door” and not come from a school.
The only students we ever interned were there keeping the seat warm and were such a pathetic waste of time that I grew so tired of them that I dropped the program.
On the other hand, we once had a kid get hold of us wanting to learn about this industry and I think he was about 15 or so at the time. He was driven and we taught him motion graphics, compositing, desktop publishing, and the web. He was awesome.
So we eventually hired him.
His name is Abraham and he is now our perpetually self-educating technical director.
:o)
Ron Lindeboom
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[Tim Kolb] “Honestly I wouldn’t still be doing this after 20+ years if i didn’t understand that the objective is to solve the client’s problem.”
That, and a whole lot of other things that you have likely learned in the last 20 years, Tim. ;o)
I’d agree that successful businesses are built on relationships and solving a client’s problems. Unfortunately, finding people you can work with that appreciate the value of relationships, is not always a given. It isn’t automatic and so, when people send the kinds of signs that shows us that they place little value on relationships, we cut them loose. We toss ’em into the Grinder File — that receptacle wherein you place things that need to be composted or taken out to the dumpster.
Some businesspeople feel that they have to tolerate everyone and anything in business. We don’t. We have a standard in our business and when people fall outside that standard, they need to find someone else to work with. It is why there are many service providers in every industry.
Over the years, Kathlyn and I strove to work with the kind of people that understand what we bring to the projects on which we work — fortunately, we have won many more times that we have lost, and in doing so have formed many wonderful business relationships. Most have lasted for years.
But you don’t always win and we once had a company negotiate a contract with us and then within four months, we watched as they broke each and every one of the four major points of the contract. Their word proved absolutely useless.
Did we keep them? No, there is no point to that in my opinion. Some would argue that you have to kiss some backsides to get along in business, me I have found that real clients neither kiss posteriors nor do they want you to kiss theirs. The ones that do, they are customers that belong to someone else.
But fortunately, we have been successful more times than not and it continues to afford us opportunities to explore expansions to our way of doing business — such as the new record company we are launching. So far, the artists that we have signed are shocked at the pay-scales and contracts that we are giving them. Once again, we are breaking with industry norms.
We work with a music attorney that used to be the head lawyer with Sony Digital Music and she was delighted when we told her how we wanted our contracts worded, how the percentages were to be set up, and how the publishing rights should be handled. She told us that we were breaking all the rules and that she loved it. “Too many people only think of themselves,” she said.
We heard the same kinds of things from publishers when we made our DVD series the highest paying commission in the market — easily three to four-times the industry standard and tradition — but as you say, we want to solve a problem and build a solution. The problem is that few publishers want their people to make much money from them. The solution? Money.
We have seen a recurring problem over and over in the COW. That is music licensing. And so one of the mid-term goals of our new music company will be to assist producers and directors, etc., to conveniently and quickly license scores and music that is original and fresh.
Bessie never quits growing and changing, and we are always adding new things and removing things that proved to be failed experiments, or that became too costly or onerous to continue.
Business is an experiment and you have to know where to build and where to do a little demolition and renovation to allow something far more fruitful to come along.
[Tim Kolb] “I’ve turned down plenty of projects where the client wanted my service to solve his/her problem and it wasn’t going to…they needed something else.”
Hear, hear! You really do have to know when and where things do not really line-up, and where the match up just really is not a match up. Busy is not always profits, as I have said here many times. You have to find the things wherein things allow for mutual benefit. That is something that not many businesspeople learn easily. We all have hard heads but hopefully we learn it eventually.
Ron Lindeboom
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[Nick Griffin] “FedEx has no record of the package even existing after it arrived in Memphis. Nothing. Nadda. Client didn’t have his stuff and fortunately for us accepted that FedEx, not us, had dropped the ball. I’m thinking our package is on some desert island with Tom Hanks.”
Nick fails to mention that the staff at Griffin Communications now refers to the whole episode as “The Wilson Event.” Office water-cooler banter at Griffcom usually ends up with something akin to “I think we can cast away any hope of ever seeing that package again, eh?”
Sorry.
In our experience, we have found FedEx to be far more reliable than either UPS or the US Post Office.
Your mileage may vary,
Ron Lindeboom
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Man, this is exactly how I got started in both radio and television. And like Tim says, I jumped at the chance and used it to get every ounce of experience to end up doing other things that paid.
They used to call it “apprenticing” but now we call it exploitation. But for those, to quote Grinner Hester, who just have to do this because they wouldn’t want to do anything else, it’s a ladder.
If you don’t want the job, don’t take it.
Ron Lindeboom
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Milton,
I don’t think anyone is truly “trashing the book without reading it.”
What some of us responded to, was your comment that it teaches you how to follow-up 10 times in two months to close the deal.
You later said that was wrong but that the point was to follow up.
On that we agree.
But when you yourself exaggerated the methodology espoused in the book, pardon us if we take exception to something that you helped foment with the points that you yourself stated.
If your original premise had been true, I was going to suggest the writer change the title to “Stalking Your Prey: How to Draw Blood When Dealing With the Elusive Buyer.” Or something equally appropriate.
Pardon us if we misunderstood you.
Ron Lindeboom
PS: But as I also said in one of the comments I made in one of my posts in this thread, “But hey, ideas are always valuable and there is no perfect answer to this subject, so the more arrows you have in your quiver, the better.”
Translation: Buy the book, it likely has something of value.
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[Milton Hockman] “The other aspect that helped me was the idea of “following up.” Often times as new business owners we don’t follow up with contacts that gave us a sign that they were not interested. The book talks about how a man followed up 10 times with a prospect over 2 month period before he got the deal. That’s advice I needed to hear!”
Like Mark, I would take GREAT offense at this, and if someone did this to me, I would be less than courteous to them and would ask “How dense is your skull? I ask as it seems that scientists may be wrong that Neanderthal Man is extinct” — or some such retort.
But hey, ideas are always valuable and there is no perfect answer to this subject, so the more arrows you have in your quiver, the better.
After all, an art like sales is that, an art. But when you understand more of the science that can be applied to it, the better.
Just don’t become Neanderthal in the process…
Ron Lindeboom
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Quite impressive, Mike.
It would look even fancier with one of those color-coded Bella keyboards.
Now this is what I call multi-tasking.
Ron Lindeboom