A Lesson of Roots

As Sarah often does, she got me think­ing. About roots. Not Roots. Not even Roots. Instead, the roots of the busi­ness that I’ve spent close to a year cre­at­ing and nur­tur­ing. Where I came from. What prompted me to start? What keeps me going? Where is the road lead­ing me?

Tech­nol­ogy, uni­ver­sity, and oil sands

I was sev­en­teen when I decided I wanted to be a soft­ware devel­oper. It hap­pened some­where between His­tory and Math 12. On our way to class, my then-boyfriend brought up that he wanted to major in polit­i­cal sci­ence once he got to uni­ver­sity. It didn’t really sur­prise me as he was often in the thick of polit­i­cal argu­ments and dis­cus­sions both in and out class. I hadn’t thought too long and hard about the whole uni­ver­sity thing. I fig­ured that I’d just… fig­ure it out when I got there.

At first, I thought about writ­ing and journalism.

I scrapped that. I was a good writer but I had no desire to be a starv­ing artist.

Act­ing?

Again, decent actress. Still starving.

Code? I did like code. I thought back to the times I sat with my dad as he learned Turbo Pas­cal. I cer­tainly enjoyed Visual Basic in our Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy class.

I was onto some­thing. I told him that I wanted to go into com­puter sci­ence. He was the non-reactive sort and merely raised his eye­brow at me as we walked into Math class. I told the rest of our friends that I’d decided I was going into soft­ware and would there­fore need exem­plary Math grades. Quizzi­cal glances aside, I was decided. It would be soft­ware. I would be a pro­gram­mer.

Unfor­tu­nately, the soft­ware indus­try wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Or, it wasn’t all I thought it would be. Instead of being part of a highly col­lab­o­ra­tive, intensely cre­ative team, I was often paired with lack­lus­tre stu­dents whose tal­ents ran more towards surf­ing the inter­net than the shell script­ing tasks we were assigned. Often the only female, I stuck out. Often the only one with wild fash­ion, I stuck out more. I hated polo shirts. I hated khakis. I couldn’t stand the Cor­po­rate Uni­form of almost suits.

The oil sands were unkind.

Ware­hous­ing was even worse.

And so it was that in 2008, I was fired from my first job out of uni­ver­sity. I let myself be dev­as­tated for longer than I should have. I re-enrolled in school. I took courses in inter­ac­tive design, some of which were inter­est­ing but most of which were pre­ten­tious and irri­tat­ing. I left after one semes­ter. I strug­gled. I took a job in career coun­selling. I thrived there, help­ing peo­ple real­ize their dreams and goals in a hard econ­omy; aid­ing with skills devel­op­ment and brain­storm­ing for their futures.

After only four months, I went back to unemployment.

No. Self employ­ment.

Iden­tity cri­sis meets entre­pre­neur­ship meets wild chick with a dream

After my brief stint in career coun­selling, I was back to my own lit­tle world of uncer­tainty. Mov­ing back to my old life was hard enough after a sum­mer away. I had to redis­cover liv­ing with him while try­ing to deter­mine what it was that I wanted to do. I knew that I couldn’t han­dle another job in a cubi­cle. I did my time there. I paid my dues from eigh­teen to twenty-one. Three years felt like an eternity.

No cubi­cle meant no soft­ware unless I wanted to free­lance. I did like the idea of free­lanc­ing but not for soft­ware. I’d done a few projects on rent-a-coder and I wasn’t really feel­ing the whole “rent my ser­vices” con­sul­ta­tion bid­ding process. Seemed shady. Free­lanc­ing as a code mon­key was out.

What else was I good at?

Design.

I actu­ally was a pretty good web designer. I wasn’t stel­lar but I knew that I could pro­duce some beau­ti­ful web­sites if I prac­ticed and worked hard. On Sep­tem­ber 15, 2009, vio­let­minded Design debuted its first design.

It was truly awful.

Cre­ative, yes. Wild, yes. Lack­ing an iden­tity? Definitely.

But I had an idea and a vision: I wanted to cre­ate wildly cre­ative web­sites for cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als that couldn’t oth­er­wise afford a huge design stu­dio to put their dreams together. I loved the idea of being able to help peo­ple with their web dreams. So I threw myself into it, face first.

I spent months scram­bling to find peo­ple to work with.

Kelly Diels was my first real client. Her con­tri­bu­tion to the growth of my busi­ness is, to say the very least, is invalu­able. With­out Kelly, I would prob­a­bly be where I was in Octo­ber 2009: strug­gling to fig­ure out what I was sup­posed to do with my life. She told me I was a genius and that I had real talent.

I was (and am) an adamant admirer of Ms. Diels. Those words meant every­thing to me. Absolutely everything.

On Jan­u­ary 1, 2010, she put money in my Pay­Pal as a promise for the New Year: we were going to do great things and we were going to do them together.

Solo­pre­neur­ship? Collaboration.

Col­lab­o­ra­tion trumps com­pe­ti­tion. I wrote the piece after hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with Sarah Bray about her busi­ness, which is fairly sim­i­lar to mine. Instead of back­ing into the cor­ner and bar­ing my teeth at her, I sought her out. She is a shiny, bril­liant woman with a shiny, bril­liant busi­ness. I sort of attached myself to her shine.

I’ve been taught (and hum­bled) that no one makes it on their own. You need a team of peo­ple in your life and busi­ness that push you and help you to see beyond your­self and your goals. I’ve had an incred­i­ble team of friends and fam­ily (includ­ing my amaz­ing fam­ily of clients) that have shoved me along the road. I’ve had my own bumps. I’ve fallen on my face a few times since Jan­u­ary. I’ve made a lot of mistakes.

My roots are hum­ble: an inex­pe­ri­enced youngling breaks away from cor­po­rate and starts out on her own but isn’t on her own at all.

It all started in between His­tory and Math class.

It all came to fruition on a rainy day in Vancouver.

It’s been an alto­gether wicked, crazy, cool, awe­some way to spend my twenty-third year.

Tagged as: collaboration, creativity, sarah bray, solopreneurship