My business has failed.

I can write those words now without feeling like picking up a bottle of bourbon, though that wasn’t the case a few months ago.

The business in question was the design shop I co-operated with my friend and business partner, Adam Flissinger; Flissinger-Barlow, or FBSF. At the end of 2006, we had to shutter the doors and call it quits, after a few solid years working on some pretty cool stuff for some pretty cool clients. The reason was simple: we failed to properly develop the business. It’s a trap that many small design shops and freelancers find themselves in. We were too busy doing the creative work, and running the day to day operations. We had been so successful with finding work word of mouth that it was sort of easy to put Biz Dev on the back burner. But then something unusual happened. (It always does, right?)

The first big happening was the buyout of our biggest client – Stentor – by Philips (yes, that Philips). We weren’t alarmed much at first, as we were promised plenty of work to assist in the transition. There were tons of Stentor-branded documents and marketing collateral–not to mention a huge website–that needed to be converted to the Philips brand. While that work did keep us quite busy, it came to a grinding halt sooner than we expected.

Around this time, we started seeing the need to get more proactive about bringing in new business. What we didn’t see was how futile those efforts would turn out to be, in light of what lay ahead of us.

We did have a steady stream of small projects from small clients, enough to keep us too busy to pound the pavement looking for more work. We were also doing great work for great clients, but they were the type of projects and clients that are great for the book, but not the balance sheet. And we still had the promise of more work coming in from Hard Rock before the end of the year.

As luck would have it, we managed to land a new account by word of mouth. OrthoClear, a dental appliance company started up by Zia Chisti, an original founder of Invisalign, needed our services to launch and market their orthodontic aligners. We ended up doing a fair amount of work for them, some of it very innovative, including custom product displays, massive trade show booths, informational videos, product packaging, and so on. But that was all to be short lived. In September of ’06, Invisalign took over ownership of OrthoClear as part of a litigation settlement. It is sadly ironic that I discovered this news in the papers before the client had informed us.

As you can imagine, we had been quite busy with all that work for OrthoClear. To us, at the time, there would be no shortage of work for the distant future. We had countless assurances of the company’s viability, and that the current litigation was just the typical sort of thing common with competing spin-offs and such. Needless to say, we hadn’t been out on the street looking for more work during that time, so we didn’t have much new work coming in, which made the next big happening all the more shocking.

At the end of 2006, we were wrapping up work on the second Hard Rock Annual (for 2007). It was the interactive twin of the printed Annual from the folks at Duncan-Channon. Before the ink was even dry on the checks, we learned – again, and ironically, from the news and not the client – that Hard Rock was being sold, and the deal would be in effect by year end.

We had lost three of our largest clients in just over a year, and we didn’t have enough work from our smaller clients to pay ourselves and keep the lights on, so we decided to seek out other opportunities on our own. Adam bounced around a bit before landing at Ozone Advertising, and he started his own line of gourmet salts and rubs that has been a bit of a success. I took a short-term gig with a tech start-up that nearly drove me insane in less than six months (more on that later!) before getting to here.

Here is MTV Networks, or more specifically, Nickelodeon® Games Group, where I work as the Creative Director for the casual games websites under that umbrella.

Happy endings, and all that.