Life has many twists and turns and over time, you come to anticipate them but you never really know when they will happen. Everyone handles changes differently and gets into their mode of operation. I tend to quickly assess the situation, process my feelings, and then give myself some time to reflect and look at things from a distance. Sometimes, next steps are really obvious and other times, it takes some time to emerge. For me, I tend to adapt rather quickly to change. I believe it's partly just due to my nature of wanting to be active and productive, but I also had some early exposure to fast-paced industries like cable and satellite TV and was put into a lot of situations where I had to change course quickly  and react to situational factors. That has stayed with me throughout my career during the challenging times and the successes. When I look back, change has always led me to more growth, new adventures and ultimately exciting career moves. 

So, with change impending at my current full time role of 9-years, I took on some side projects to keep myself inspired, stay occupied and help out a friend. I love creative projects. They inspire me, keep my skills sharp, and with every project I learn something new. When I heard through my good friend Mark Henderson, a property developer and designer in Austin, Texas, that our friend Matthew Coe needed some help on a website, I contacted him. Mathew is an American living in Barcelona with a very specialized business that helps clients identify, buy and sometimes renovate properties in Barcelona. He needed a website created to describe his services and showcase his projects. We moved fast!  Fortunately, Matthew had an extensive archive of photographs, written content, and an established team of associates. This is often times the most time consuming part of building an online presence - capturing, creating and organizing your content. It can take many weeks or months to capture content that will be presentable. Since we already had that, we quickly discussed his objectives and I learned more about his business, his design sense and wishes. We agreed that having a clean, contemporary looking site that had concisely written content and with a comprehensive set of galleries to showcase all of this work would be required. I got to work. I used Weebly to build the site, layout the images and I did an extensive editing job to cut down and format the copy. As I worked on the site, I also advised on ways to incorporate quotes to lead into project galleries, where to incorporate links, how to make it easy to navigate plus some careful attention to image selection and placement.  It was important to retain a focus on his core business, property search and identification. It was tempting to get into other related services.

I formed a vision and quickly built a draft to make sure Matthew liked the look and feel. We met, reviewed it page by page, and felt very good about the feedback. Matthew knows his business intimately and new what he needed, he just needed someone like me with marketing and website experience to collaborate with and make it happen. Once that was established, we had a unique situation. I was based in San Francisco and on my way to my condo in Hawaii. Matthew was in Barcelona. We realized it was a 12-hour time difference between Barcelona and Kona, Hawaii  which meant he could brief me at night and by the next morning, he would see all the changes. International business can really work wonders when the team members routinely work in this manner. We used Zoom, Whatsapp, email and cloud-based applications like Weebly and GoDaddy to make it all happen. 

Once we finalized the content and layout, I pointed his domain name, www.vistafutura.eu, which was registered with GoDaddy, to the new content built with Weebly. I had a few calls with GoDaddy support to ensure the SSL was working between Weebly and GoDaddy. I tested the site multiple times on multiple browsers. I added Matthew's email for the contact form. Within a 24-hour period after changing the DNS, everything was up running!  It's only been one day since the site went live. Matthew has already sent out emails to his network of contacts and is already receiving replies and very positive feedback about his new website. Having a site has made a tremendous difference by making it easy to engage with new and existing customers. 

This project was a lot of fun and completed in just two weeks. If you are thinking about working remotely from Barcelona either full time or part of the year, or plan to relocate or invest in property in Barcelona, check out www.vistafutura.eu. Matthew can make it happen and find you the perfect property. 

Have you ever built a website and taken inventory of all your professional and personal skills and packaged them up? It can be challenging. My method is to just get it all down in any random fashion, then iterate, share with friends who might specialize in design, or are also writers, and get multiple perspectives. Then, I make adjustments until it feels right. In my experience, collaboration usually makes things better. New ideas emerge. Then the fine tuning process takes hold. At the end of the day, it just has to feel right because this is a reflection of me. 

I am working on some amazing customer video and writing projects with Oracle. One is an industrial manufacturing global campaign video that will address all the challenges manufacturers are facing while connecting to a suite of solutions on the same platform. Sounds complex and it is, so the challenge is to create a story that brings it all together. The planning process and the filming is a great behind-the-scenes story in and of itself. Rather than our usual method where we draft a script and film the speaker then apply B-Roll at the end of a project, in this case, all of the visuals were selected up front, and then the actor was directed to say and do things for each and every scene. The end result will reveal that the actor is in the live action settings - interacting with his environment. It's very cool! A lot more pre-planning and precise directing required, but the end result is a more innovative and informative video production! 

And then there's the writing project with a tech partner that I'm working on. The project is an article involving a half dozen stakeholders from multiple companies  all contributing their expertise. Having had a significant amount of  interaction with this tech partner, my role as subject matter expert is to look at it holistically, ensure the positioning is correct, and identify anything that seems potentially inaccurate. Then flag it and make sure it's fact checked. In the end, when everything gets polished, it will be a very comprehensive yet concise article about the world of transportation management and how digital technology is shaping that industry.  

This is a good time personally and professionally to regroup, take a look back, and a consider the future. There are so many different opportunities and choices to make and starting this professional and personal Journal is one way to get started. I realize that my work and personal life seem to intersect often. Maybe it's the freeing of the mind when playing music, or paddling out on San Francisco Bay that releases the endorphins in my brain. Or perhaps it's when two things fuse to form an amalgamation instead of the previous two separate entities.

I know that for me, taking time to reflect and get things in balance is when I do my best work and feel happiest. It's an intellectual exercise!