Looking back at 2012 – No Grey Creative turns 10

2017 marks 10 years for No Grey Creative. As part of the celebration I’ll be bringing you a series of blog posts with the purpose of sharing my unique business story and also with the hope that you can relate to, learn from and have a laugh at (along with me) my experiences. 
Here’s a look back at 2012…

Hired my first design assistant! When you are trying to grow your own business but also work on existing clients stuff too, it can be a bit of a juggling act. You have the best intentions of setting aside time to work on your own marketing but in reality you are always going to put your clients first even if it means you suffer. In 2012 (actually end of 2011) this is exactly what was happening and I needed help mainly from the perspective of managing the No Grey brand. I mentioned this to a client – Warren from Howardco – and he said his daughter Gaby might be interested as she was studying Graphic Design at Monash. Gab and I met for a interview and she pretty much started right away. Isn’t it funny how life has a way of looking out for you sometimes? The solution was right there waiting for me. Gab was a huge help with maintaining the No Grey website, writing blog posts and often helping out with client design work when things were super busy. Thanks Gab – you were awesome 🙂

THE MOST STRESSFUL EVENT: As you may well be aware, No Grey Creative has a 1300 number that spells out the business name 1300 NO GREY (664 739). One day out of the blue I received a strange phone call from someone wanting to take me up on some sort of finance offer. I told them they must have the wrong number and didn’t think much of it. That afternoon I went to the Melbourne Film Festival and after I cam out of the session I had 15 missed calls all leaving messages enquiring about a finance offer. I thought it was a simple mistake by my answering service and they must have been diverting the wrong businesses calls to me.

The calls kept coming, they didn’t stop. I asked one of the people that rang who they were trying to reach. They explained that they had received a letter from NAB (National Australia Bank) with an offer for their current mortgage and my number was printed in the letter as the call back offer. I felt sick. It dawned on me then what had happened: NAB had misprinted my number in their campaign! How many letters had been sent? Was this Australia wide? Had they printed my number somewhere else too? Who do you even call about this to fix it? I was panicking. The calls were coming about every 5 minutes. To make matters worse, if you have a 1300 number with a answering service you are charged everytime you receive a call, so I was paying for every incoming call wether I answered it or not.

This image pretty much sums up this experience

HOW DO YOU STOP THE CALLS????!!!!

After days of calling NAB and trying to explain what had happened, needing to speak to someone in Australia in Marketing I FINALLY got my foot in the door in trying to solve this nightmare. To cut a very long story short NAB said they would attempt to telephone every person on that list that was sent the letter of offer with my number on it  agreed to cover all the costs with my phone company and also compensate me for the hours away from my business trying to sort it out.

Of course they would never have been able to reach every single person who had my number and the calls did continue to come but less frequently until after about 3 months drying up all together. What a unique nightmare to experience.

Collaboration with Howardco: A client, Warren Howard of Howardco, invited me to collaborate on a project he was working on for debt recovery firm in Melbourne; Recoveries Corp. Warren was busy doing what he does best, and developing their in house Skills Development Program. Warren needed from me the visual side of things to help make the project ‘come to life’. This was such a great collaboration because Warren and I worked really well together as a team and we both learnt new things about each other’s businesses.

Stand out client of 2012: Dingley Village Real estate. I didn’t have to fight hard to win this business because the company was started and ran by my Dad and Step Mom Vicky. I was really excited to be working on the design for a Real Estate Agency and I wanted to come up with someone wholesome, friendly, family run feeling and small suburb allure. Below are only some of the examples of work I created for Dingley Village Real Estate.

Fav design work from 2012:

Chapel on Lt Ryrie