I love this time of year. Mostly because we always close down for a while. No matter how much you love what you do for a living, you really need to close down every once in a while. It helps give one perspective.

Perspective. I have a new ex-client who could use some of that. These bozos lost some critical data a couple of weeks ago. Then, instead of calling us up and asking if we had a backup copy of the data they could have, they hired a lawyer and wrote us a nasty letter threatening to sue us if we didn’t give them the data. Immediately. Now, of course we’re happy to help if we’re asked to help. But these butt-munches never even asked us (nicely or not) to help them out of their jam. They just went and immediately threatened legal action. And this from a client who only a few months ago sent an email to me praising us for our “awesome, rocking work” on another project of theirs. Weird, huh?

Those guys are clown-shoes. And I told them so. Of course, being the great and easy to work with gang that we are, we sent them a CD with all their data. And then fired them as a client. We don’t work with bozos. The chump change they paid us just isn’t enough coin to justify continued dealings with rude chimps.

But it’s funny how life is- once you clear out some dead wood, prune away some dead weight, etc., the world opens up for you and really cool things begin to happen.

And that’s what happened here. Even though we’re closed until 2008, I landed a new national commercial for an existing client and a website for a completely new client starting in January. We have some other really cool stuff happening in 2008 that I can’t talk about, too. Plus, of course, a good amount of fun work for existing clients that’ll be launching in a month or two.

In a nutshell- we’re busy! And it’s fun!

I love how we get to play for a living. And in general, I love who we get to play with- our client list is a pretty fun bunch of people these days.

I also have a new hire who came on- our new video editor Brandon, who will be kept extremely busy in our main edit bay this next quarter. Brandon’s a good friend as well as a very talented editor, so we’re excited about working with him in the coming weeks and years. He’s edited feature films and commercials, and well… that’s pretty much what Brandon will be doing for us as well, with the addition of a lot of video destined for the web.

Back to perspective, I decided to hire Brandon after enjoying this downtime and realizing that as we grow this company I will need to gradually bring people in to help out with these projects. And I decided that the best way to ensure success would be to bring in people I enjoy working with, who share our core values, and well… I’ll admit it… who are better at their specialty than I am.

This break is giving me perspective. And it’s much needed. I think 2008 will be a much more exciting and rewarding year because of it.