Man, nobody likes that word, at all. It scares the ever loving out of some people and others still just avoid it all together. For the longest I was one of those people, I always waited for something to come around that I could fit myself into. Some ready made situation that had a cookie cutter part made just for me to play and it never quite worked out that way. It frustrated the mess out of my wife because she married a guy with no real current direction in his life and it was taxing to my friends to constantly be asked if there was anything they were doing that I could inject my usefulness into. Lame right?

I don’t necessarily think its a bad thing to try and be helpful but I do think there is a time that comes where you need to step out there and do your thing. For me, that time is now. At first I didnt really know what to do, I had dreams of starting a coffee shop or becoming a writer but it never really panned out. All the while I had been doing little freelance graphic work here and there over a few years but it never really hit me that I could do that for a living. Until I started reading freelance switch and realized that there were tons of people around the world that were doing it every day and making good money at it too. After a little research and some soul searching I knew that this is what I wanted to do.

My wife was thrilled. Finally, after three years and some odd months off marriage there was some direction in her husbands life. Hey its not like I had been waiting, oh I dont know, almost THIRTY YEARS for that to happen. . .jeeze.

It even worked out to where I got to work with a long time friend who was wanting to do the same. So it began, the start of responsibility which was me taking ownership of the vocational direction that my life was going to go. However there were some things that we needed to get built in order for us to start properly. What we ended up deciding to do was to hit the ground running in a months time. We wanted to have our name, we wanted to have a quick brand, a website and business cards all ready to go in a months time. So we set out a four week plan to accomplish those four needs. We figured if we had those things then we would be able to advertise ourselves adequately enough.

Week One – Name Thyself

I didn’t want to operate using my name so first things first we wanted to come up with a name for our business.  I have heard other people combining their names with someone else to come up with a name for their business. Or you can do what we did and end up going to a random name generator to come up with Falith Design. You will also need to check to make sure that the name you land on isn’t already taken by someone else. Usually any registering service like namecheap.com or godaddy.com does this for you for free. Now we didn’t technically sit around on our bums for a week and click the random name generator button but for blog structures sake this was week one.

Week Two - Create For Thyself A Logo

The next step was to find a way to make Falith memorable in the minds of potential clientele. This may sound easier than it actually is, unless you have branded something before then you realize that it can be a huge pain depending on how picky the client is. Our specific goal however was to come up with something temporary to start getting our name out there. Something that we could slap on a website and business card and then redesign at a later time if we needed to. So we did just that and eventually settled on a couple of ideas one of which landed on our business card. Which leads us to:

Week Three – Design Thyself A Business Card

Yeap, business card time. We took the concept that we both liked and put it to press. Now there are a few different ways you can go about this with either local printers in your area that give you a hand holding/personal touch experience or you can go with online solutions like Vista Print or U printing. I have heard that U Printing sometimes gives you free cards if you are awesome and popular and you give them a decent review. While we are awesome we are not so popular right now so like chumps we had to pay and pay we did. We ended up throwing our hard earned dinero at Vista Print since the local route was a little on the expensive side and quite honestly I had never heard of U printing at the time.

Week Four – Build Thyself A Website

While the cards went off to the press we needed to come up with a website so that whenever it was that we passed out the cards and people typed in www.falith.com something actually came up besides “Site Under Construction”. There are so many things involved with website construction its not even funny, things like where to register and from whom to get hosting from can be a headache and a half. So again in keeping with “keeping it simple” we actually provided our own hosting. You may not want to do this unless you have a complete genius for a business partner or are genius yourself when it comes to hosting. So we registered Falith.com and got to work doing some initial layouts for our site and finally settling on this. The layouts were sent to Nick (the genius in case you were wondering) and a few days later voila, a quick three page website that allows visiters to see what we are capable of and a that gives a means to contact us.

Bonus!

Week Five -  Pimp Thyself Out

Just because I’m feeling generous I thought I would throw out one final step. Because once you have all that awesomeness set up you need to get your name out there. With business cards in hand and hope in our hearts we set out to determine exactly how we would go about accomplishing just that. This really gets into the marketing side of things which can either be super fun or will make you run crying to your mommy. I personally think its fun. Nick and I decided that we would target small to medium churches by putting together website packages for various needs and start hitting up all the local churches in our area. This was one way of marketing, the first thing I did once I got my cards was start handing them out like popcorn on family movie night. Then I gave some to my wife so she could pass them out to her friends at work and finally I also put together a letter informing all of my friends and family nation wide what it was that I was doing that contained all my contact information and recently created website.

Conclusion

All of this was accomplished in our spare time after work or during the weekends and from all that labor we have landed our first client that needs an e-commerce website for nursing uniforms. It has served us well so far. Is the website complete? No. Will it be redesigned? Yes. But what we are landing on is that with the website we do have now shows people that we can do the job. When I hand people my business card they know that I mean business and my business means enough to me to make and official means of communication to give people.

Do you have a start up story to tell? What about some tips that you think could be added?

Let me know and share your wisdom.

Unil Next Time.