The Paradox of Face Time

My business is pretty much 100 percent Internet-enabled. I do all my “paid” work from a small, cheap office in an equally small and cheap town in the high West Texas desert, about 400 miles West of Austin. It’s the frugal, Highland Scots in me - I abhor expensive overhead expenses.

Though most of what I do is about monetizing the cartoons I draw online, I still need to regularly visit with clients, customers and allies. Like any sales rep will tell you, there’s no substitute for face time.

But from out here in west Texas, it pretty much takes a full day’s travel to get anywhere, often more. Seven hours to drive to Austin. A four-hour drive to the El Paso Airport. A three-hour drive to the Midland-Odessa airport. Then all the hassle of catching a plane to London, New York, Miami, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Paris, maybe with an overnight stop-over (just to mention a few of the places my work has taken me recently). Add the cost of hotels, cocktail bars, restaurants, jet lag, taxicabs and all the other stuff we’re all too familiar with, and it starts adding up. My business is tiny, compared to what it costs me to do my thing here in West Texas, the “burn rate” is off the scale.

And then there’s productivity. Sure, when I travel I can e-mail folk on my Blackberry, present a PowerPoint or two, but the REAL WORK I do, the drawings, can only really be done from my office in West Texas. Simply put, my work dictates that I have LOTS of time to think. I personally find that hard to achieve in a taxicab between La Guardia and downtown Manhattan.

There’s a certain paradox to face time. Any college freshman can see the value of it, its actual economics continually confound the smartest minds on the planet.

So how do I handle it? Short Answer: brutal honesty. I tell my people, look, I can travel only one week a month, and that’s it. The remaining 3 weeks I HAVE TO BE back here in West Texas, to give me enough time and mental space in order to do my job. If you and I can’t work around this limitation, then I’m afraid I’m not really the person for you.

I’m fortunate that most clients are cool with this. They can relate, as with all ambitious people over the age of fourteen these days, they’re over-extended in their own way as well. And the ones who aren’t cool with it, I immediately tag them as “Intellectually Dishonest,” and drop them quickly.

The other part of the equation is knowing when face time will actually pay off. Sure, it’s nice to go visit Mr. Fabulous Client up in New York and have a great conversation over a fine, wine-enabled, three-course meal, but will that actually justify the cost, in terms of both travel expenses and lost productivity? Sometimes yes, but all too often, it sadly will not.

So I try to limit my face time to ONLY WHEN I have something very tangible to offer, something that can either deepen the relationship, and/or evolve the actual work we’re doing together. Or yeah, something tangible to actually sell. For money. I may be an “artiste,” but I still have a business to run.

This is no different than any other business. You have to make stuff to get paid, you have to sell stuff to get paid. How do you achieve the balance? How do you find the sweet spot between “Make” and “Sell”? Trial and error, and perhaps a bit of luck. But no amount of gee-whiz, hyper-connected technology is going make that sweet spot appear any less elusive.

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Comments (4)

by burunggereja / January 2, 2009

Hi Hugh,

Really good and inspiring insight, very direct and to the point!

thanks for sharing…

Cheers,
Ryan
by David H Deans / January 2, 2009

Hugh, perhaps you could really benefit from the improved quality of video communication. Granted it’s not the same as real face-to-face interaction — with one exception, Telepresence video communication. The Telepresence experience is far superior to traditional videoconferencing. You have to see it to fully appreciate the difference.

The full-size systems are expensive, for many small business budgets. However, there are networks of shared Telepresence rooms being built by both communication service providers and hotel chains. More details are here (also see comments) — http://business-technology-roundtable.blogspot.com/2008/09/small-businesses-your-telepresence-room.html
by gzlatin / January 2, 2009

David,

Your comment sounds like some kind of futuristic alternative to our everyday reality. If “telepresence video communication” is that great, then why aren’t more people using it? Sounds like a glorified web cam to me…