Ryan Carson

There were quite a few people on Twitter today who expressed anger at Carsonified about how we pay our conference speakers.

I’d like to address the issue directly and clarify several things, as there are a lot of folks who have heard wrong information.

First, a bit of background …

In the past we have run single-stage events over one or two days. This year, we decided we needed to increase the value for attendees as much as possible, so we …

1. Doubled the number of speakers by adding an ‘Upcoming Stars’ track
2. Spent a ton of money on amazing food and snacks
3. Increased the wifi budget and provided 300 hard lines (the web connection was absolutely solid the entire show)
4. Introduced the ‘Design Clinics’ where attendees could have 1-on-1 five-minute sessions with the speakers
5. Doubled the audio-visual budget
6. Hired a proper film crew so attendees could re-watch all video, within 24 hours of the show

All of this ultimately doubled our budget from the previous year.

Paying Speakers …

We currently pay our Track One speakers £1000, cover the flight, hotel, transfers, food and hotel extras. We also pay for a chauffeur to pick them up at the airport and personally escort them to the hotel.

These are speakers who are big, established names in the industry who don’t need any more exposure. Therefore they need to be monetarily compensated for their time preparing their slides and the time away from the office. A lot of them simply won’t speak unless they’re compensated monetarily for their time and we understand that.

We could not afford to double the spend on speaking costs, so we decided to launch a second track where we would invite local speakers who were rising stars, but had not made a name for themselves. A lot of conferences have the same set of big-name speakers, without any new names being introduced. We thought it’d be cool to change that, while also giving attendees more choice of content.

It seemed like a great opportunity for people who wanted exposure to get their name out there and as they were local, they wouldn’t have any travel costs (or very small).

Anna Debenham

This morning Anna Debehnam tweeted this:

Gutted to have to pull out of speaking at FOWDNY. Just can’t afford the flights and accomodation. I’m sorry. It would have been amazing.

She wasn’t trying to start a fight – she was just saying she was sad she couldn’t speak. However, a bunch of people jumped to the conclusion that we don’t pay any of our speakers or take care of their travel and hotel.

Here’s what happened: As Anna was such a great speaker on Track Two at FOWD London, we said she’s more than welcome to speak again for us on Track Two in NYC (Track One was completely full) but in order to be consistent with other Track Two speakers, we wouldn’t be able to pay her flight and hotel. She said that was fine and tried to save the extra cash for the flight/hotel but was unable to do so.

In Summary …

There is a wide-spread belief that there is serious money to be made in the conference business. The truth is that very few events make a profit. We actually made a net loss on FOWD London this year.

We would, of course, pay Track Two speakers if the budget allowed it. But it does not, so the next best thing to do is give upcoming stars a chance to break into the spotlight while also offering more content and variety to attendees.

I hope this clarifies things a bit. We are doing the best we can to offer a ton of value to our attendees, take care of our speakers, encourage innovation on the web and make a small profit along the way.

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to let you know that I’m heading to Miami for our event The Future of Web Apps. If you’re in the area, hope you can make it!

We’ve got a killer lineup of companies speaking, including:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• FreshBooks
• Opera
• Mint.com
• Mozilla
• jQuery
• Reddit
• KISSmetrics

Topics include:

• HTML5
• Advanced JavaScript
• API’s
• Online marketing that works
• Funding strategies for startups
• Web app branding
• Functional languages
• Measuring your apps success
• How to build a successful web app business

Hope you can make it! Read more at The Future of Web Apps site.

Hey everyone – I’m experimenting with Google Website Optimizer on WordPress on this post, so apologies for the ‘noise’. I’ll try to share anything I learn.

Meanwhile, if you’re bored, can you please click on the following link to my profile page? Google Website Optimizer is going to randomly rotate the text and I’ll check which one gets more clicks :)

Ryan’s profile

Thanks :)

Jackson said his first real words yesterday. I was giving him a bath and Candy, our ballerina like cat, sauntered into the bathroom. Jackson looked at her, pointed and said ‘at!’.

Whoa. I was dumbstruck.

That simple action reminded me that he’s a person, not just a ‘baby’, and my duties as a father are very important and very real. I know it’s important that I spend real time with him – time where I’m not distracted by work or other things.

I, like many of you, absolutely love what I do at work. Running Carsonified is tremendously fun, challenging and exciting. Often, without even knowing it, my mind will wander back to what’s happening at work. However, I’ll be damned if I’m one of those work-a-holic dads who is always staring at their iPhone, answering emails or talking about work.

I believe that the key must be putting the needs of your family before your own – becoming more selfless.

So how do you do this? How can you practice selflessness on a daily basis? Any dads out there have experience in this area that want to share some words of wisdom? What’s the best way to make sure you’re giving your family the time they deserve and yet be passionate about your work?

Everyone knows that times are tough financially at the moment. A lot of businesses are finding it hard to make it and many are closing their doors forever.

At Carsonified, we had to make the really tough decision to let some of the Team go. It was very hard, but it was the right thing to do. In addition to that, we’re generating brand new revenue (and profit) by doing new things.

Thankfully, we’ve established a good reputation in the web design and development industry, so we decided to start doing design, development and consultancy for the web industry. We’ve established three exciting partnerships that are generating over £80,000 of brand new revenue (which is mostly profit, as we have the capabilities in-house).

We’re also changing our sponsorship model for our events. Instead of just creating value for sponsors at the physical events, we’re starting to work with them throughout the year to help them reach new customers and generate excitement. Sponsors need more value in order to justify spending their marketing budgets, and we’re delivering that by being more creative and working harder.

Bottom line: Evolve or perish

If you aren’t prepared to update and evolve your business model, you might be in trouble. It’s important to create new profit that didn’t exist in 2008.

In the comments below, please share any ideas you’ve had for creating more profit in 2009.

[Photo Credit: flickr.com/photos/apsmuseum]

We were heading into town on Friday and I wanted to make it memorable. There’s so many times when someone says “What did you do over the weekend?” and I answer “You know, I can’t really remember. Just hung out, I guess.”

With that in mind, I decided to bring our camera and my mission was to try to spot unusual things in Bath that I hadn’t seen before. It was amazing the amount of detail that jumped out at me.

Hope you enjoy the photos.

Gill bought me some Geo F. Trumpers shaving soap over a year ago … and I’m still using it. Compare that to your typical crappy can of Gillette Shaving Gel that is just as expensive, last a couple months, and is bad for the environment (aerosols, metal/plastic can, etc).

Instead, my little wooden bowl of soap from Mr. Trumpers is completely bio-degradable and, if I do say so myself, looks pretty cool.

I think there’s a lot to be said for products that last a little longer, are a little more environmentally friendly, and maybe don’t work quite as well as their super-modern-ultra-efficient counterparts.

Old fashion, FTW.

By the way, feel free to read more about me.

We all have things we want to do, but we struggle to find the motivation or time. This is the constant relationship I have with working out. I hate working out. I know it’s important, but I just hate it. So after reading the chapter Why we don’t do what we want to do in Predictably Irrational, I had an idea:

I would withdraw my monthly budget of spending money, in cash and then I’d then give it to my trusty wife. I asked her to dole it out to me in 12 chunks (three times a week for four weeks) and I’d only get it if I worked out. Here’s the kicker: if I didn’t go to the gym, I instructed her to burn the money.

Nothing good could come of me not working out – the money couldn’t go to charity, my wife, a savings fund … nothing. It had to be burned.

Guess what? I’ve worked out three times a week since the beggining of January, without missing a single day. It works.

[Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/whitecatsg]

I’ve really been enjoying Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. There is a particularily interesting section from the chapter The Three Lessons of Joe Flom that I’d like to share:

Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately make us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us. If I offered you a choice of being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take? I’m guessing the former, because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that’s worth more to most of us than money.

Work that fulfills those three criteria is meaningful.

I really enjoy running Carsonified because it meets those three criteria. One of the main reasons I quit my last job as Lead Web Developer at Fingal Design, was because there was no connection between effort and reward. I remember we worked 48 hours straight to launch barF1.com (now defunct) and my boss handed me a beer at the end and a pat on the back. That’s when I knew I was going to leave. I didn’t want money, I just wanted to be appreciated.

Is your work meaningful? Why or why not?

Gill and I decided to spend a week of holiday at home instead of flying somewhere. Gill got the idea from watching 1940′s House, a show about what it was like during World War II in Britain. It wasn’t safe or affordable to travel for holidays during the war, so the government encouraged people to stay at home.

How it works

1. Chores and all normal duties are off-limits (great excuse to dodge household tasks).
2. Make a list of ideas for each day. This keeps you from sitting around in your pants and browsing the web all day.
3. Plan your meals ahead of time and buy all the food you need (this is where grocery shopping online makes perfect sense). This makes it more fun as you have gorgeous food all around during the week.

Why it’s great

1. It’s cheap.
2. It encourages you to explore new things around the area where you live.
3. It’s much less stressful than flying to a holiday location.

What we did

• Day One: Exploring Bath and Geocaching (photos)
• Day Two: Day trip to Glastonbury
• Day Three: Movie Day at home
• Day Four: Pig Hunt in Bath (photos)
• Day Five: Trip to Blenheim Palace
• Day Six: Boat trip from Bath to outlying villages
• Day Seven: Walking on the canal and swimming at the Bath Thermae Spa
• Day Eight: Movie and PJs day (I know we’re too old for Harry Potter but I don’t care)

If you’ve done anything similar or have ideas, please share with us in the comments.