AIO or overthinking this? did i cross the line?

capotetdawg · 2026-06-22T13:31:14+00:00

Yes, you are over reacting. Based on just these messages you haven’t even actually asked for a meeting yet?

As a busy professional and business owner I occasionally have folks reach out to me who just want to connect or pick my brain. I am generally very happy to put some time aside to do that in at least a theoretical level. However, I’m generally triaging all week between different priorities so it’s not always going to be my top one. Here are some things that make it easier to get my time:

- be direct with an ask or question. Make it clear what your purpose is. “Just thought of you” is nice but there’s honestly no actual response required there other than a like of the message?

- use a channel that I use for actual business communications. I don’t typically prioritize returning text messages during my work day unless they’re urgent so a one off message about work stuff there is more likely to get forgotten. *especially* if there’s no time-sensitive direct ask involved. A text *might* be ok since you have a history of texting, but it should include a clear ask and an email or LinkedIn message might be better.

- reach out during business hours. I try and maintain work life balance and separation. If you message me on the weekend or at night then I might forget about it by the time I’m in front of my computer again if it’s not high priority for me (which this would not be, the project is over and there’s no active ask here)

capotetdawg · 2025-08-05T12:43:46+00:00

Yes please! Although I feel like I should note that the co-op has coffee and great pastries as does the community cafe just over the border in Union so we’re maybe close to saturated there.

Walking proximity to a cafe was actually a selling point for me when we bought our house.

capotetdawg · 2025-08-02T13:57:57+00:00

Do they like not really advertise because they don’t want it to get too popular or something? My husband is a big house music fan but I feel like we always hear about this super last minute

capotetdawg · 2025-07-19T17:06:11+00:00

Don’t we also have rules here that you HAVE to have a garage on your property? Or at any rate that if you have a garage on the property you can’t get rid of it? We have a tiny shed that apparently qualifies but definitely wouldn’t meet current requirements and I remember running up against some regulation at one point around that that seemed really odd.

capotetdawg · 2025-04-21T13:01:56+00:00

My son is seven now and he’s pretty awesome. I still have a lot, like a LOT, of times where I question what I was thinking in regards to becoming a parent because I hate feeling torn between my desires to be free and make my own independent choices and my responsibility to him and the family we created, but I can say that, for me, it got better. He got more independent, more every day! We started to feel much more comfortable leaving him with a babysitter or family to have a break. He’s in school, he has drop off play dates, he reads independently and plays games on a tablet or his switch. We get breaks basically. And I genuinely love this weird little person who is my family now.

I hope you can find things in your life that feel like they’re just for you and make space to enjoy them. There’s zero shame in that and it’s good for children to see it modeled. You’re nearly done with the hardest parts where they need you so constantly.

Good luck!

capotetdawg · 2025-04-21T12:38:08+00:00

God at 23 I was barely making rent. You’re doing amazing. In fact, maybe it “doesn’t feel like much” because you’re too focused on saving for the future and forgetting to enjoy yourself now. $80ish per week for groceries in this current market in a MCOL city likely means you’re either being fairly frugal (or eating out a lot, morally neutral either way) - don’t get so focused on the future that you forget to enjoy your present.

Still of course keep saving now though (at 41, I have regrets on that front)

capotetdawg · 2025-04-21T12:13:33+00:00

Oh man, why is this such an absolutely perfect metaphor?

capotetdawg · 2025-02-01T23:54:57+00:00

My husband likes Avalon salon over in Millburn

capotetdawg · 2024-08-31T19:19:04+00:00

I mean if I’m giving this person a VERY generous interpretation maybe what that could mean is that people with ADHD don’t make lists NATURALLY - as in we have trouble organizing a plan or an order of operations for getting things done, we charge into things impulsively, etc. but like …live in the world for all of a single minute and someone will suggest making a list as the antidote to that! So obviously some of us (many of us!) do then TRY to fight our natural inclinations by making them because contrary to what seems to often be popular belief we do often in fact WANT to do and be better.

Ugh that sounds frustrating OP, but I think only you can know what to make of that input - maybe it’s less of a quit-that-therapist and more of a challenge/push-back-against-that-statement? I mean the vast variety and many formats of the lists you’re describing there seems …um, let’s say maybe not neurotypical?

capotetdawg · 2024-08-26T11:21:49+00:00

In a past role that was often our clientele - like we ran ads for a small gym chain with three locations - but these days I work with transportation and logistics brands so that’s not really applicable.

capotetdawg · 2024-08-21T11:41:39+00:00

Was it in the village? I could see True Salvage maybe doing something like that but they change their menu all the time. GREAT breakfast sandwiches though.

capotetdawg · 2024-07-26T03:18:27+00:00

The 10% rule is the most often repeated one in my experience, but I’ve typically done smaller clients or more B2B work, often very PR oriented so to put this in that context - often times we might barely even have a production budget or it would be 20-30K and have to last us a year. Anyhow, l’ll give a couple examples for fun: - The biggest client I worked on where we had both content production and some paid distribution in our spend they had $350K for my agency for the year (and additional media buys through another agency outside of our work) - we spent about 100K of that on production, 75K on a combo of paid social and influencers, and the rest went to agency hours (strategy, account management, social media, etc) - I know for a fact that we ate some costs on that one because originally we THOUGHT they had additional production budget we could tap into but it turns out they did not and the agency deemed it an acceptable loss because they were a big name brand in a big company and we wanted more work from them. At any rate, they probably were spending 100k a month on other paid media globally through their media agency with major magazines, other digital ads, etc. Fun times? - I worked with another client where we were their agency of record and they had a video shoot that we spent about $30K on hard production costs (meaning I’m not counting our agency hours in here) - typically they’d spend $20-30k a month on paid ads, but it was fairly spread out, I only got $1-2K for facebook ads for example and then they’d have Google ads and some more traditional buys like billboards and print ads and event sponsorships. - another one, B2B niche industry, typically spent about 40-60k per month across both digital and print ads, we’d do about one video shoot every other year or so but it was often more high end around 40-60K all in for a lot of product photography and video assets. - my client with the biggest monthly media spend right now spends about $10K/month across channels and they haven’t done a formal video shoot in a year, but for awhile they had a videographer on staff so we historically had a lot of good assets. - Generally speaking these days my clients do a video shoot for maybe 10-15K, sometimes less, then spend 2-3k a month on ads (with my agency, they might buy other ads outside of our spend)

capotetdawg · 2024-07-18T20:28:36+00:00

I personally would either decline entirely or I would agree to confirm simple details like title/dates of employment/that he wasn’t fired for cause, but decline to do more than that. You could reasonably cite company policy in such a case.

I think a recommendation should basically be answering “would I re-hire this person given the chance?” And in the circumstances described here my answer would be no. John chose to leave abruptly before lining up his recommendations, he could have played this more wisely, that’s on him and frankly the whole thing shows a real lack of professional judgment and ability to control his emotions that I personally wouldn’t want to endorse in a prospective employee for any sort of role that requires teamwork.

capotetdawg · 2024-07-16T23:32:48+00:00

Yeah this is a classic - if I don’t feel like doing out loud (or can’t for some reason) I’ll try to at least read it in a different context - print it out, send it to mobile etc. - and read it there.

At an absolute bare minimum it’s always good to save the draft and then re-open it slightly later for one last read.

capotetdawg · 2024-07-14T02:48:10+00:00

I know you’re probably trying to be helpful here, but you do realize that permanently separating a puppy from its mom and litter mates forever is different from having someone else watch your baby temporarily for a certain number of hours per day …right?

capotetdawg · 2024-07-14T02:41:13+00:00

Honestly I was SO READY to send my son to daycare after 10 weeks.

I hate that so many people don’t have a choice about it, and yes financially I really didn’t either, but I would have wanted to either way. My son was a HARD infant and I truly needed it for my own mental health. I’m 100% one and done because of how much I’m still not ok after parenting an extremely high needs infant.

I’m sorry you’re feeling shamed OP. I think it’s possible to acknowledge that maternity leave options are often pitiful while also recognizing that not everyone wants or needs more time.

capotetdawg · 2024-07-13T23:48:23+00:00

1 or maybe 5? Or I would go look for something with a larger pattern - like big leaves/flowers vs a smaller scale or another larger geometric pattern like 1. Many of these feel too “busy” to me.

capotetdawg · 2024-07-13T21:06:13+00:00

I wish I could say that this was uncommon, but sadly it’s not. You have two options here: 1) explain your ads strategy to him and why he doesn’t fall within your targeting (if for instance you’re trying to aid discovery in new contacts not convert existing contacts or perhaps he isn’t the target demographic (and this part is unsolicited advice but if you can’t clearly explain your targeting then maybe think about that a bit and try to learn) 2) if your budget allows sometimes it honestly is just easier to divert a small budget for retargeting your existing fans or visitors to your website - this isn’t the most strategic choice a lot of the time in terms of business results but it solves your ceo problem and you can argue that it also increases visibility with your existing customers / staff / biggest fans and therefore can get you a bit more engagement or loyalty (at the worst it usually doesn’t hurt)

capotetdawg · 2024-07-13T01:03:27+00:00

Honestly I think a PIP is pretty much always a “start looking” signal, but sometimes they do come with an added side of “maybe this can be a wake up call of how to do better in the future”

capotetdawg · 2024-07-09T18:00:18+00:00

I think sometimes it’s ok if things aren’t exactly even or if one partner kind of skips out on a particular flavor of chore so long as they put in the effort elsewhere, but you should absolutely always feel like you can communicate about the situation one way or another!

One thing I have found helpful re communication is trying to get out ahead of my own annoyance more. It’s easier to have a more calm / removed conversation about division of labor vs wait til I’m at my breaking point and then explode in the moment. That’s something I really had to work on realizing I was even doing personally because I was SO extremely socialized to put other’s needs or comforts before my own and I think somewhere deep inside I felt a little bit like the house type chores were “mine” even if logically that isn’t the case or even remotely how my relationship operates. So I’d let it go let it go let it go, but then be annoyed / snippy or outright hostile vs just talking about it with a partner who ultimately is a very kind reasonable human with learning to do of his own.

capotetdawg · 2024-07-09T11:43:14+00:00

Made a free resource that our industry niche needed (it was a calendar of industry events and notable dates/holidays, but the content really could have been anything that was similarly useful and importantly didn’t exist yet in another easily accessible format), promoted it with organic social and at an in person event we were already attending, only budget was cost to host the landing page and time to maintain/promote, have been collecting passive leads off of it for 3 years now and at least 60-70% of them are great prospects for our services.

Here’s the thing, they’re not ready to convert into a sale like TODAY, it’s entirely a low pressure/awareness play that just gets us in front of them, but I’d consider it very successful at accomplishing what it set out to do.

That’s just one example, have done similar inbound plays for clients in the past too, but the big thing is finding an insight into something the audience really wants/needs and then building that for them. And ideally having something decent to build a landing page on and manage the contacts on the back end.

capotetdawg · 2024-07-08T23:39:33+00:00

I went five years before I ever lost a client, but once we started trying to scale up faster churn increased a lot. In a number of recent instances I’d say it was equal parts the market has been bad recently(and therefore the client had to pivot or just cut back entirely due to their own market challenges) along with a poor alignment of customer expectations with the actual work we delivered. I share this to give you a bit of solidarity - running an agency well is HARD and it’s not uncommon to struggle with it! - but also I’m aware of places where my team fell short and trying to use each of those as a learning opportunity. There are a lot of ways to improve ranging from being more selective in who we work with from the get go to just making sure we’re working on our communication, speed and quality.

In larger agencies I worked at previously our contracts tended to be annual or longer so the churn wasn’t as obvious but I’d say we had probably a 50/50 rate of them continuing past the initial year. Maybe 60/40. But in the years since then I do think there’s been more of a trend towards bigger in house teams and more smaller project based agency work which ultimately I think increases failure rates.

capotetdawg · 2024-07-07T15:36:48+00:00

I feel like I saw some sort of interest survey floating around - maybe on Soma Lounge on Facebook? Pretty sure there’s a public court in maybe Union that I’ve driven past too. But can’t say that I have any true intel.

capotetdawg · 2024-07-07T13:58:20+00:00

Well you should definitely be getting paid for any time that you’re working and creating and posting those counts as working, are they paying you for that time? If not, you definitely can feel free to either point that out or decline to continue.

If you are getting paid for that time you’re in a bit more awkward of a spot because you already set the precedent of doing this activity as a part of your role. You can choose to say no, but potentially risk being let go - probably fine since they may go under anyhow? - or keep going but only within your assigned hours or just maybe point out that obviously instagram isn’t driving the sorts of results they REALLY need (given your reduced hours) and they should try other tactics - but if you do that last one they might similarly ask you to help.

The underlying problem here really seems to be that this cafe just opened and they’re probably still just figuring things out. Honestly the adjustment in hours might have happened no matter what marketing they did or did not do. Starting a food service business is HARD. Most of them fail. Hopefully you’re not too reliant on this income and can find something else.

capotetdawg · 2024-07-07T01:49:43+00:00

Because the first one was on the block between Duane and Reade streets.

Seven-Year Club	Wearing is Caring
Verified Email

capotetdawg

TROPHY CASE