![]() It is fundamental if you have multiple projects going on at the same time and has proven to be an essential collaboration tool for us. Screen sharing and video chat is available, too, which is great when you are reviewing something with a designer. You can also link websites, upload images, and even share code within the chat. The interface is clean and simple and it comes with a phone app. Conversations are organized by project – so you can always go back and re-read them. But to be honest – it’s pretty awesome for communicating with team members who are in the office, too. We started using Slack long before COVID hit – and it’s an amazing tool for communicating with team members who are not in the office. The best part – you can automatically create invoices using the hours that you track, email them to your clients, and get paid via check or tie it to PayPal for credit card payments. But that’s not all it does – you can also set up time budgets for flat fee projects and log your time against that so you always know where you are, how much time you have left, and how to change your billing for the next project. ![]() It has both web and phone app interfaces and makes logging time super easy. Simply put, Harvest is the best at what it does. Depending on the project, we bill some of our clients on an hourly basis, so tracking that time is essential to our success. I don’t know about you, but for us, time is money. Harvest: Time Tracking, Estimates, and Invoicing We can access it from anywhere and it’s easy to share folders with our remote designers, printers, photographers, writers, etc. But we also use it for all of our internal file storage. It is the best way for us to share files with our clients – especially when we are building big complex websites with tons of photos and content. ![]() When DropBox started in 2008, we jumped in and never looked back. That is some serious old school file storage happening right there. I remember we would take them to the bank every month and switch them out and store them in our safety deposit box. ![]() We have found the following to be the best for us.įor years and years we had hard drives. Some were great and then got bought by bigger companies who dissolved them, some changed their pricing models which made them unaffordable for a small company, and some just didn’t work well. As I’m sure you can imagine, since 2001, we have gone through hundreds of software solutions to run the business. Soon after Jason left, I got pregnant with our oldest daughter – who is now seventeen – and the expectation to work insane overtime hours was too much for me – so I bailed, too, and we’ve been a team ever since. Taken outside our old studio in Ormewood Park 2017. Jason gave them a quote that was almost as much as his annual salary at the architecture firm he worked at and they approved it – so he bailed – and Biscuit Studios was born. One of the companies that he was side-hustling with still didn’t have a website. Some of them were really cool although I’m sure we would cringe if we watched them today. Jason was designing and building Flash presentations for some really cool urban design projects which then segued into a successful weekend side hustle creating Flash presentations for architectural reps to use at lunch and learns. In 2001, not long after the tragic 911 incident, designers and architects started getting laid off at our firms. Some weeks we would work 80 hours without any compensation for our time. We would spend hours and hours sitting at our ergonomic desks with our ergonomic chairs working on construction drawings – picking up redlines. Within months of starting our careers, drafting tables and arm lamps were being replaced with fancy work desks and keyboard trays.īlueprint machines, with that intense ammonia smell were being replaced with giant digital plotters. We were one of the first graduating classes that came to the table with extensive knowledge and experience using AutoCAD – the software that most firms were just starting to implement in their studios. We got an apartment in Virginia Highland – like every other college graduate that moved to Atlanta in the early 2000’s – and were offered a plethora of jobs immediately. Jason had family in Atlanta already – so it was easy for him, too. I had visited several design firms while on a class trip to Atlanta my junior year and really liked the work that was being done. Jason and I in college about to go to town on that ice cream – before we were lactose intolerant, apparently.Īfter we graduated, I wanted to move to New York City and Jason wanted to move to Orlando – neither of us would concede – so we both compromised on Atlanta.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |