In mid-2008, Charfish Design became an actual, legal, tax-paying company. I’d like to tell you how my time in the trenches has been so far, and what I’ve learned along the way.

What you’re about to read isn’t stuff I read in some book or overheard some lawyers talking about in a coffee shop. These are just a few things I’ve picked up on this sometimes winding and bumpy road of owning my own business. Hope you enjoy these points and get something out of them!

Communication is the key

I’ve said this a million times on this site and IgniteLiving.com, but if you don’t communicate, you’re not gonna make it.

It doesn’t have to be …

Let me tell you a story…

At the end of 2007 I gave away a free ebook to my customers over at IgniteLiving.com, another site of mine. At the time, the site was only a couple months old and had exactly 17 RSS subscribers.

My plan was to offer a great ebook that would attract some visitors and possibly some business. So, I wrote the book and designed the hell out of it. I gave it a slick cover, nice fonts and typography, a cool color scheme and made it available for free download.

When the post went live, a whole lot of nothing happened. Which is sort of what you’d expect of a …

If my mom had told me making money would be this fun, I’d have gone to check with my dad.

ThreeGears.com recently hired me to create some napkin sketch style artwork for his sales/support process.

The Sketches
The sketches were created first with good ol’ pencil and paper and later redrawn in Illustrator. The final versions shown here represent the phases that any company goes through between its formation and its back end support structure:

Start-up
Sales
Service
Support

Sketches like these are a great way to show your customers what your business is all about. They can also, in short order, show your site visitors how to get around, …

Just because you use an out-of-the-box theme doesn’t mean you can’t make it something special.

I recently got the opportunity and honor to work with Leo Babauta, the creator of the ultra-successful ZenHabits blog.

Recently Leo released a new blog that is already well on its way to becoming ultra-successful in its own right. His new blog, WritetoDone.com, is a great place to pick up what Leo has to teach about the art and craft of writing.

Thanks to a great pal and erstwhile client of mine, Stephen Smith, Leo and I were introduced to each other. At the time, WritetoDone hadn’t been unveiled yet, and Leo wanted to give it some more oomph and branding …