Like this:

This evening, while answering some interview questions from a guy named Sam McArdle, who is starting a website for Freelancers and Contractors, I somehow got into The Whole BNI Thing. It’s been hard for me to talk about this, but I’ve wanted to blog about this experience, so here goes.

Sam: What about your freelance business do you do best? The actual design work, communicating with clients, administrative aspect, etc…

Violet: I am always working on my administrative and project management skills. I am pretty good at communicating with clients, but sometimes my wimpy business radar and my need to be liked get in the way of being a better businessperson. If someone is needy, naturally I want to help them. I want to say yes to everything, and tell them I can fix all their problems, and that I can do it right away. But in fact some of their stress is just their stress, and maybe their favorite serotonin re-uptake inhibitor can’t even fix it. But I’m fascinated with people, and fall easily into the role of part shrink, part designer.

What am I best at? I’m a really good designer and illustrator, and cartoonist, and a really good writer. You’d be amazed at how little that seems to matter in some cases. I have excellent musical pitch, and I have good visual composition pitch, too. I can look at most communication art and tell you what’s wrong with it from an interactive and aesthetic standpoint. So I’m a good design teacher. When it’s something I’ve been deeply engaged with for hours and hours, though, I need a little time and distance to see it properly, from a variety of perspectives. I particularly enjoy illustration—I’ve been illustrating since I was a kid in front of the TV—and of course, writing. After being a cartoonist for many years, writing is liberating: You mean I don’t have to draw any pictures? Cool! I’m a fast, visually descriptive, copywriter—I think well on my feet. So that’s the stuff that thrills me.

I also like making do with what I’m given, as a kind of challenge; I’m the kind of person who isn’t a fantastic cook but can take a can of chickpeas and some other odds and ends and invent something really cool. (Don’t ask my son about this.)

I also need to ruminate on a project for a few days…I mean, really let it take form. This drives left-brained clients a little nuts. If I’m working with a real creative department, they get it. But when I’m working for a real estate agent or an insurance guy they can often miss the point. They don’t know what goes into it, and they expect some kind of placeholder—and placeholders are not what I do. Less visual thinkers are not able to differentiate between “good” and “bad” art…they just want something, and they want it now. I am spending more and more time making it clear to clients why a brochure can’t cost $45, or why I cannot use the 72-dpi logo they bought online for $99 on their printed business cards.

Sam: Could you give me a recent project you are particularly proud of – your best work?

Violet: Go here. I have a whole bunch of my “best work” in this video I did about branding. And the video itself isn’t bad, either, though I need to fix the music to fade out. Nothing is ever really “finished,” it could always be better. I deliver it on time, but I end up playing with my own version of it forever. Anyway,  I am really enjoying doing presentations in Keynote lately. These also output well in Powerpoint.

The Air-Sun Awnings Website worked out well, I think.  As for writing, I have some very nice copy up here. Oh! And the biggest iPhone app I’ve designed so far is here. These projects took time, but they were for clients that really appreciated the work that went into them. I am also enclosing a comic I like from when I syndicated Ask Aunt Violet. As a body of work, I am probably most proud of Ask Aunt Violet.

This is an oldie, but goodie.

Sam: Could you give me a recent project you struggled with for some reason or another and comment why it gave you so much trouble?

Violet: Why I thought you’d never ask. We Jewish girls from Queens so hate to complain, you know. The project was having joined a BNI group, which is essentially a business networking luncheon that you go to once a week. At one point I thought, “Hmmm. Therapy or BNI?” I picked BNI. I decided what I needed most was to work on my business skills, and I learned a lot from being in BNI for three years.

The way BNI is designed, there is one person representing each profession: a realtor, a mortgage broker, an insurance broker, an interior designer, a chiropractor, an estate planning lawyer. It’s a kind of simulated village, with its nice, small town aspects and its creepy underbelly as well—for at the root of every BNI is the corporation that owns it. Everyone, from the top down, is in it to make money, of course, which is fine. But inevitably, the BNI chapter favors certain people—the ones that really drink the BNI Kool-Aid and volunteer a lot of their time. Yes, I said volunteer, and yes, this is a corporation.

The idea behind BNI is “Givers Gain,” i.e., if you give out a lot of referrals to other business people, they will give referrals to you. I did my job admirably, recommending everyone I had real confidence in. And I got plenty of referrals, too. If  I didn’t like a vendor, though, I certainly didn’t recommend them to anyone. If I wasn’t crazy about them, it was generally because they had treated me as if I were special in the BNI meeting, but when I called on them between meetings they gave me no special treatment at all, which made them seem untrustworthy to me. However, I offered all BNI members one free, overflowing hour of creative consultation, and a rate that was $10 off per hour.

The realtors are the Big Cheeses of these BNI groups—they often start them—and I had done a lot of work for realtors before I ever even heard of BNI. This BNI’s realtor was interested in an e-newsletter. She asked me to “work one up.” She asked me a few times, actually, before it dawned on me that she actually, seriously wanted me to make her a sample newsletter for free, on spec. [For info on not doing spec work, go here]. I finally found a little time to do this, and rather than say, “I don’t work on spec,” like I should have, I mocked up a gorgeous e-newsletter for her.

This was a challenge, but a rather enjoyable one for me. Her logo and other graphics were very unprofessional-looking. Flat Crayola green and red spot colors appeared to be stamped all over a field of lavender lettering, embellished by a pointless Photoshop-happy halo of fuzzy white—all sitting on that hackneyed photo of San Francisco taken from Alamo Square. (You know, the one with the City skyline rising up behind the Victorians?) And to make it worse, the skyline was inexplicably outlined in black. In other words, her existing branding was atrocious. But I did what I do best, which is take messes and make gorgeous graphics out of them, and I was quite proud of this one.

So she said, “That’s not bad.”

At which point I should have billed her.

Next, she and I had a 2 1/2 hour meeting in my studio so we could look at her existing newsletter—which turned out to be through her costly subscription to a glum-looking realtor marketing website which you can’t access on a Mac. In 2010! I had no idea such a lame thing still existed. So I knew I would have to use her computers to work on it.

I was disappointed but undaunted by the prospect of using Windows. I had actually taught college Photoshop and Illustrator classes in Windows, and had used it for on-site copywriting jobs. So I said, “Fine, I’ll come to your office and work on it there, it’ll be nice to get out of the trailer on a Friday.”

The following Friday I went to her tiny, cluttered office, her harried young assistant peeping out from behind a megalopolis of papers, and spent the afternoon grinding away at an ancient, overcrowded beige Microsoft Vista (or whatever) behemoth with at least 8 windows running along the bottom that I was afraid to touch. I worked patiently, only allowing myself to scream when I went out to feed the parking meter. I spent two hours spoon-feeding her branding and my editing into the realtor-marketing website’s clumsy Applephobic e-newsletter interface.

It took forever for it to digest anything, when it wasn’t cheesing up, but I stayed calm. Her instructions for where I was to obtain articles to use as content were vague at best—and brazenly dismissive of that little detail, copyright infringement—but I parsed out what it seemed like she wanted, and rewrote a bunch of existing online articles so they wouldn’t appear plagarized. Finally, I cobbled together a finished newsletter of some kind—not quite the ingenue I’d drawn up on my Mac, but I did the best I could with what I had. It was a fait accompli, and I bid her a great weekend and scurried back to my Mac in my chalk-wheeled Toyota.

But when I checked my messages, I heard she’d left me a message that said her newsletter “didn’t look any different from before.” Hmmm. While I was working, I had noticed two newsletter templates, so I called her right away and left her a message that said, “I think you’re looking at the wrong newsletter template. Try the other one.” She never called back.

I mean, really never. Week after week, I’d see her at the BNI lunch and try to explain the problem, asking her when she wanted me to come fix it for her [for free]. She gave me excuses weekly. I didn’t bill her because I was afraid to—I was scared of her because she was the chapter’s founder and realtor.

Finally, after several months of waiting to meet with her, I billed her for only two hours (so far, I’d worked six: two on the mockup, two consulting in my office and two tearing my hair out in her office), beginning with a note apologizing, of all things. I thought this was fair, I whimpered. If you need me to finish this up I’ll be happy to finish it up for you for no extra charge, I whined. She completely ignored me, while I was attended to by automated replies generated by one of her beige plastic boxes.

Next thing you know, she became President of my BNI! And guess what? All of a sudden they “opened up my category.” This is how they get away with not refunding you the rest of the year’s dues. Which is BNI-ese for dumping me. It’s like, if you’re married and your partner doesn’t say, I want a divorce, but rather, You can still be married to me, but I am going to open up your category, i.e. look for another wife. I didn’t even know that was possible without a warning unless you maybe forked someone to death in your BNI, or maybe stole money from the chapter treasury. I’d adored my BNI chapter, treating it with reverence, touting its usefulness to my friends and colleagues. I felt like the guy in the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man: As far as I knew, everything was fine…and then suddenly twenty-six people decided they didn’t want to have lunch with me.

In a subsequent poison pen letter (“take a chill pill…” she begins, before defaming my character to a small crowd of high-ranking BNI officials), she took issue with “my high prices,” which is interesting, not only because of the insanely high price of real estate in my neck of the woods ($700,000+ for a little two-bedroom, one bath), but because she never paid me a cent—and, in fact, my prices, for a designer, are very much on the moderate side, especially for BNI members. I mentally went over every single other transaction from BNI, and no one had complained . I called a few of them to make sure they were happy with my services. I looked up standard rates in the Graphic Artist’s Guild’s Pricing and Ethical Guidelines and checked design websites that listed prices, to confirm that my prices were well within the moderate price range for small businesses.

So one might say the challenge for me is that I’m not very good at business politics. I keep thinking everyone is my friend. I’m gullible that way—it’s genetic; my mother was very much that way too. But the whole thing makes me ever more determined. When my graphic novel is finished, they’ll hear me in the car on the way to their BNI meeting, being interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air.

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