10 years ago this month, I landed my first post-college job that didn’t involve retail.
In March of 2000, a Pittsburgh company called Multimedia Training Systems (which is still in business as I type this) was looking to hire someone who had experience with video production and animation. As the lone graduate from The Art Institute of Pittsburgh’s Computer Animation & Multimedia program who also happened to take numerous video electives, I might have been the only semi-qualified applicant for the job within a 30 mile radius.
I was hired.
Although I would leave MTS five years later to forge my own way as a freelancer, the lessons I learned during that half-decade, both good and bad, have stuck with me. Now, as our global economy has prompted everyone to reconsider what’s really important at work, some of those lessons are worth revisiting.
1. Time management is the most important skill they never teach you in college.
Every project you ever work on will be made more complex by the byzantine communication and time management skills of everyone involved. And since humans express themselves poorly as a rule, you’ll always need more time to fix those miscommunicated errors than you’d ever expect.
2. Double the deadline.
If you can get something done in a week, tell the client (or your boss) it’ll be done in two. Then strive to meet your original deadline. That way, when something else comes up — and it always does — you’ll still be able to meet your declared deadline without feeling like you’ve been overstretched.
3. Next to cash flow, employee morale is king.
When employees enjoy their work, bond with their colleagues and feel comfortable in their workspace, they’re capable of producing amazing (or at least competent) work. If not, distractions and resentments can make a seemingly innocuous work environment feel oppressive.
Find ways to make sure your employees are happy, healthy and engaged; everything else (besides payroll) is a byproduct of a positive workplace culture.
4. Bonuses don’t make up for general misery (but they do help).
When business is swift, communication is clear and morale is high, bonuses are the icing on the cake of goodwill.
When business is hectic, communication is fractured and morale is unspeakably bad, bonuses are a last-ditch measure to keep the crew from jumping ship.
Either way, bonuses are appreciated — but, paradoxically, they’re appreciated more when they mean less.
5. Organize every project as though someone else will have to finish it.
Because when someone else does have to take over one of your projects, they don’t want to spend the first half of their day decoding your labyrinthine organizational structure.
At MTS, we had a general procedure to follow for most video projects, with preferred conventions for naming files and organizing them within folders and sub-folders. That way, even if various employees had to access the same files from different computers, there’d be no confusion as to which files belonged to which projects.
6. Your sales and marketing team shouldn’t be doing anything else.
MTS is a small company. I was hired as their fifth employee; they’ve never chosen to grow beyond ten full-time employees and a handful of part-time contractors.
As such, everybody works on more than just what their job description entails. Our office manager wound up doing (and still does) everything from accounts receivable and booking employee travel to shipping packages and designing the labels for the DVDs.
But sales and marketing is the lifeblood of any company, and when our marketing VP was spending the bulk of his time filming video, that meant no one else was focusing on selling and marketing the very products we were producing. Was it necessary at the time? Sure. But in hindsight, if there was one office I wouldn’t want to distract from its core duties, it would be the people responsible for making sure someone wanted to pay us.
7. Backup clearly and constantly.
When an MTS project was completed, we’d back off all related files — finished video, audio, graphics, documents, etc. — on DVD. We’d also keep a tape backup of each finished video, in case the DVDs got scratched (or in case someone needed a tape-to-tape transfer ASAP).
But while we were producing videos, we’d save our projects relentlessly. Our office was in a borough that was notorious for power outages due to thunderstorms, and it only took a new employee one fried project to learn the lesson of paranoid auto-saving. (Bonus points if you saved multiple versions of a file at once, just in case one of them became corrupted.)
8. Meetings only matter if someone’s listening.
Every once in awhile, upper management at MTS would have an executive meeting, and the outcome would almost always be the same: someone would want to change the way we did something, and someone else would explain why we couldn’t.
Maybe it was money, or time, or equipment, logic or politics. Whatever the case, change happened at a glacial pace at MTS, in part because the people responsible for making and implementing the changes were the very same people who were already stretched too thin by maintaining the status quo. There was rarely any room to implement new procedures on a trial basis because, honestly, who had time for trial and error when the next deadline was a heartbeat away?
The solution? If anybody did want to make the case for a new way of doing things, they had to implement that change on their own, privately, and then present their own results as proof that their idea could be adopted successfully. Either that, or proposals would have to be made that no one else could reject — and that approach always leaves somebody feeling marginalized.
9. Upgrading equipment isn’t always the wisest expenditure.
Nerds will always geek out over new toys, and bosses will always ask the age-old question:
“Do we need this?”
Bosses aren’t necessarily hoping you’ll say “no,” because bosses are usually more worried about what something’s capable of than what it costs. But they’re not interested in tech specs; they’re interested in how this $4,000 investment can net them $20,000 in business.
If you made every decision about new expenditures the same way a small, hungry company has to consider those same decisions, you’d buy only the new toys that your clients need you to have in order to fulfill their desires. And you’d keep a lot of vintage equipment alive much longer than it has any reason to exist, simply because you can.
10. Your clients are always people first and revenue streams second.
MTS had a habit of bending over backwards for its clients — sometimes admirably, and sometimes unnecessarily. But because the field we specialized in — safety training for the steel industry — was such a close-knit niche, it was in MTS’s best interests to monopolize the medium because losing our foothold could have resulted in a domino effect of dropped accounts.
Instead, MTS developed a reputation for going above and beyond the call of duty. And while that might have cost us money (and sanity) in the short run, it also created business relationships that remained fruitful even when the steel industry was reeling from consolidation and global downsizing.
I doubt that would have happened if we were simply seen as a line item on someone’s budget — or if everybody else was just a line item on ours.
Seeing the World Through Blue-Collared Glasses
Like anyone at any job, I had my ups and downs at MTS. But I also had the opportunity to see things, go places and meet people that I never would have thought to notice otherwise: real, hard-working, down-to-earth and kind-hearted people, whose fortunes were tied to a once-vital industry that everybody believes is now past its prime.
And as a native Pennsylvanian in a globalized world, that kind of underdog, blue-collar mentality is an asset I’d never trade.
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Tags: Business, common sense, personal, Pittsburgh, Sociology, video
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Dawn Papuga
