OZ DEAN

Almost a year ago, I was visiting Sydney with the thought that I would come over and work for one of the studios. I didn't think it would happen, too much was in my way - I was in the UK, pretty settled, visas were required etc etc . .but here I am a year on from then and much has happened.

I landed a job at OVEN digital as a Senior Designer and couldn't get out here fast enough - leaving friends, family and dj slots at home. OVEN was everything and more that you would want from a job, great people, perfect atmosphere and all the perks of working for a large studio.

Four months later, OVEN digital Australia was declared insolvent and the studio goes down. I was pretty shocked as to how it could have happened ? OVEN was one of the major players. I realised that you are never truly safe in this industry.

So my dream job had abruptly come to an end . . where to next was anyone's question. Most sat back and dwelled, I panicked. I contacted and visited most studios in Sydney. Most had just seen us go down along with Rush TV, Zivo, K-Grind and a few others (I forget), so the competition was out there and could be of high quality.

The panic eventually subsided and I experienced a period of happiness and relaxation, I had all the time in the world to enjoy the beach and this new city that I had not yet explored. Furthermore I now had a great deal of time to spend on personal projects, while waiting for work to come through. I'm always moaning about not having enough time to devote to personal creativity and now I had it. In the first few weeks I found that the general consensus, in Sydney, was that the industry was on its arse. Why would they want to be taking risks employing more people when they did not know where their next job was coming from ?

Early on I had a particularly bad run for a couple of days and decided there and then that I would go to the IDN Fresh Conference in Hong Kong. I am very glad that I chose to go, as mentally it was very strengthening and physically it was very restorative - I came back full of energy and bursting with ideas.
On my return, I had a run of interviews but all came to nothing. Up until now I have been headhunted from job to job and have risen up the employment ladder. So, it has been strange being rejected and each rejection has chipped away at the confidence levels. I am pretty resilient and have held up well but if I hear "we'll let you know next week" one more time, I'll scream. It is extremely frustrating and my self esteem has certainly suffered.

I suppose this is a 'survival of the fittest' type situation whereby the blaggers, dotcom money grabbers and way-high earners are being weeded out, because it is those who are skilled and creative who shall remain employed in this environment. I just have to wait until one of the above leaves a gap for me to fill (in Sydney). Funnily enough when OVEN digital went down I had my fair share of excellent offers from Europe and America but coming over to Sydney had been such a mission and I have fallen so in love with this place that I turned them down to give the industry in Sydney a while longer before giving up.

A seed has been planted - I have begun to think about making myself more employable. I find myself thinking should I be looking into games design ? Cartoons ? Print design ? Or book illustration ? Do I specialise or continue to be an all-rounder in multimedia ?

One of the hardest things has been the feeling of isolation and being the only one in this situation. I know this is not the case, the forums and boards provide a glimpse of how many people are out there looking for work. It is easy to become introspective when you find yourself on your own for a long period, if you are used to being in a busy creative studio.

The social life since we arrived here has been pretty much 24 / 7, the OVEN guys are a good bunch and I've met many other great people over the last few months. We went out a fair bit before the insolvency but now I rarely see people because of my (and their) lack of cash. This adds to the isolation factor.

Another hard thing to deal with is the constant rise and fall of your hopes. For instance, on several occasions I have had the 'you've pretty much got the job, oh. . .no you haven't' phenomenon. You've virtually been offered the job, only to get home to find an email indicating the exact opposite. Or you call in expecting to discuss details to find that the studio is suddenly no longer hiring and all your efforts were for nothing.

Financial gain is not important and has never been - I have always been in this industry for the fact that I can live my life doing something I love as an every day job (which rarely feels like a true job). My mother always told me I'd wear a suit and work 9 to 5 - I Iove the fact that she was wrong and hope it stays that way (sorry mum). Wish me luck eh =]

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - just in :
. . .my girlfriend Caroline was made redundant on Friday . . .as Peter Cunnah (D:Ream) once said 'things can only get better' . . . hehe, you'll be humming that one for the next hour . . .

oz dean

forcefeed:swede
www.forcefeedswede

DAVID JOHNSON

In early 1998, myself and a friend, Damien Cummings, started a small web design company called Dark Horizon in a run down 4 bedroom house in East Redfern, Sydney. For the first 6 months or so we were working from our respective bedrooms, waking up at midday, and generally just having a lot of fun. We wanted the big clients, but knew we did not have the cred of larger companies, so we concentrated on pushing the boundaries of traditional web design, and making a user's experience intensly graphical. During this time, Damien's girlfriend, Rebecca Voorn came on board as our Marketing/PR person, so it could get a bit tense at times, but I digress.

Sometime after moving to a grand old house in Newtown in 1999, we realised that we had some cash flow problems, and we could not sustain any sort of real growth. We were stagnant. We could not justify charging as much as our competitors due to our relatively low overheads, but what we were charging wasn't enough, we increased our prices and took on 2 people. At this time I was broadening my skill base, and learning how to develop dynamic sites in ASP and Cold Fusion. Being young and full of life, we had a lot of ideas - most of them were stupid, but a few of them were, and still are, ahead of their time. During a client meeting in January or February of 1999, I noticed that our client, despite their client base, had corporate presentations that were of a very poor standard. I then spotted a niche market in developing a dynamic multimedia application, whereby an office shit kicker could easily generate spiffy Flash presentations from a template file, by simply filling out a web based form - enter X2 Showcase, built on ASP and Flash Technology, this was going to be the product which was going to make us rich.

Around this time the whole dot com boom was just starting to happen, and we knew that people were being given millions upon millions of dollars, simply because they had an idea, and no proven track record. Perfect for us! By then we did have a track record, and we were gaining a name for ourselves within the industry (or so we thought - our judgment was most likely blinded by our egos). We then sort about schmoozing with some venture capitalists at functions like First Tuesday, but without success. Then one day, out of the blue, we received an email telling us that a mining company from Perth was interested in investing in technology start ups, and taking them to an IPO stage within 12-24 months.

Everyone we talked to were simply blown away by our age, vision, skill and intelligence - it didn't take much to convince them that we were the right choice. X2 Showcase was at a stage where it could be used for demonstration purposes, and our vision for E-Brochure - our second product which integrated dynamically generated multimedia with mass email capabilities - was set in stone. I was amazed by how much I learnt about big business/law during the negotiation stages - often I felt like I was drowning in a sea of legal and business jargon, but I knew if I wanted to cover my own arse I would have to keep my head above water.

Several months of negotiation later and we had the money! $500,000. A measly sum by the dot com standards, but it was what we needed to expand our business to a stage where we could eventually drop our web services division, and concentrate solely on our email marketing software.

We found a nice office in Glebe, hired a new designer, a business development manager, 2 project managers, a developer and a receptionist. Which took our staff levels from 5 to 11. As directors, we did not pay ourselves exorbitant wages - 70k was more than I could've ever have hopped to earn in my life, considering my father is a truckie and my mum is a part time bookkeeper - and we kept staff wages relatively low. Despite keeping our feet on the ground, at times our egos did tend to lead us astray - often causing conflicts between ourselves and current clients.

I worked on E-Brochure solely for about 3 months, and got it to a stage where we could send around 3.7 million emails a day over a 1mb link, which was one of the fastest rates around, even with our rather inferior server infrastructure. I was not one to manage the books, and I rarely looked at our cash flow situation, so I wasn't worried. 9 months of 14+ hour days started taking its toll on me - the stress of trying to manage 2 designers, 2 developers and a Systems Administrator, spoon feed 2 Project Managers and 2 Biz Dev managers was unbelievable. Not to mention trying to do 3 projects at once, keep them on the specified timeline, and deal with clients. One day we were so stressed, we just took some time out and went down to the pub for a beer, and a serious talk about our personal lives, and the direction in which we wanted to take Dark Horizon. I was nearly on the verge of tears, and said "I want to sell, I just want to get out of it. I don't want to deal with this anymore, I don't like what I have become and what this business has done to me." We all agreed that it was time to suck some corporate cock and sell out.

Around this time, the NASDAQ crash had occurred, the effects of which did not filter through to Australia for about 2 months afterwards, and there was a hell of a lot of interest in our E-Brochure product, as well as our staff. There was talk of deals between 1 and 10 million dollars, but due to the NASDAQ crash, the Olympic Games, and the introduction of Australia's new tax system, the response was invariably the same "We'll make a decision next year." We couldn't wait until next year (2001), we only had a few months cashflow left, so it came time to do what we really did not have the stomach for - "downsizing". It was so hard to do, we had to sack one guy, who had immigrated from China with his wife and 2 children, as well as several others, just before christmas. I felt like such a scumbag. Never before had the responsibilities of being an employer been so evident, I was holding peoples livelihoods in my hands, and it was something I couldn't stomach at 22. Eventually the team dwindled to 4 - 3 directors and a designer, Lee. At this stage, 1 client was going to be our saving grace - a dot com - retrospectively it was wishful thinking, and we really should've shut up shop there and then, but we continued working on this site in the vain hope that it would save us. But they could not secure any investment for the project, so that was that. We put Dark Horizon into Voluntary Administration a few weeks later, and started packing up. At first I was incredibly depressed - I mean, I had lost everything I'd worked so hard for - but then a wave of relief suddenly washed over me and I felt free.

3 months of being unemployed gave me a lot of time to think about what had happened, what I had learned, what mistakes I made, big business, the stock market, lawyers, clients, venture capitalists, workplace relations, etc. I think for the most part the experience was a good one. Despite the stress, the paranoia, the depression, the helplessness, I've come away with a world of knowledge that usually takes years of university training, and years of climbing the corporate ladder to obtain. If I do start my own business again, I won't be making the same mistakes. I'll be making a whole heap of new ones, and the learning process begins again - but I'll have a much greater advantage than other startups. But for now I'm happy working at Deepend - and gradually learning how to be myself again, rather than a corporate drone.

David

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http://bio-mechanical.net

GARY LOCKTON

I did get a place and hence did not start Deepend until 1994.

The name came from a day out at a local swimming pool to think about names for the company. After a few hours of stupid suggestions (Moist, Aubergine, Hole etc.) we saw the Deepend sign by the pool and decided it was perfect – straight out of college and starting a company was certainly 'in at the Deepend'.

From there it was down to business. Family contacts helped to get a company registered and family and friends again helped with a small amount of furniture and a telephone to get started. Our office at the time was at the back of our house in West London, the area that once was a dining room.

My partner Simon Waterfall was still studying so I was pretty much a one-man company for the first few months. I called in favours, contacts from freelancing and any other leads I could to locate work. Our main offer at the time was multimedia, using an early version of Macromind Director (that was the name at the time, now Macromedia Director of course) to create presentations for companies often showcasing 3D animations which we had created for them as well.

As this grew we started to look at video and other areas such as the web. Through this time we had been keeping our salaries very low and we asked the team working with us to do the same. The whole thing was more of an adventure rather than a job although this only just made up for me earning less in my first year of Deepend than I had in my last year of college!!

Within a year we had decided to move to larger premises as the back of our house was making it a little difficult to give off a professional image. We moved to a small shop about a mile away and did all of the painting and repairs ourselves. During our time in this space we were able to grow from four to fifteen people with work found through a great deal of networking. This in fact was the main way we found work. Keeping your feet on the ground and using every connection you can is the best way to build a good flow of work. Potential clients were impressed with our enthusiasm and our human way of explaining technical issues to them – so many competitors at the time were trying to create a smoke-screen of technical jargon to confuse clients.

After a couple of years at this office – always known as the sex shop because the windows were painted black so we could work inside – we moved to our current location in London's Shoreditch.

This office was massive compared with what we were used to, enough to house a team of about 50, but we still all came in on the first weekend and painted the walls ourselves.
By this time in late 1997 Deepend was starting to build a name in the market. We created this by always keeping a good relationship with the press and always understanding that a good story for us was not necessarily one for a journalist. The best way to get press therefore is always to think of a story from the journalist's perspective.

During the next few years Deepend and now Deepgroup has expanded out of all recognition and we now have nearly 300 people in 8 cities around the world.

Our most recent challenges have of course been caused by the fall of the dot com era. Although none of our companies worked for many dot coms the effect on the market as a whole has been significant. The current time to agree and start a new project is much longer than it used to be because even traditional company clients are now nervous about investing in digital media. The process reminds me of our efforts in 1996 when the web was just starting to get popular. Back then you needed to educate the client first as to why to invest in digital media and then write the quote. The same is true of early 2001.

Business is still strong though and we are confident that if we do what we have always done, and give our all to producing great creative work, we will get through this difficult period.

Just as we do not plan to change our approach to this even in tough times, many things have remained true since we started in 1994.

People must come first in all situations and the desires of your team are more important than pure money within business. Still to this day we ask our studio teams what sort of work they would most like to do and then try to find this type of work out in the market.

Always trust your instinct when making difficult decisions – as a good contact once told me, "common sense in business is just not that common and it ought to be!"

Always use the advice of those who have been there before. Passion and commitment are all very well but no-one is ever too experienced not to take a piece of advice from someone more senior. Even as I write Deepgroup is interviewing non-executive directors to advise us through the next stage of growth – and we are a £18M business!

Gary Lockton
www.deepend.com.au
gary@deepgroup.com