E8: How To Diversify Your Skills with Joe Mease

Unlimited WordPress tasks for digital agencies at a fixed monthly cost with UnlimitedWP, get 25% your first month with code “das2020” (sponsored).

Today’s guest is Joe Mease, a Denver-based designer, and developer. Joe has been a player in the Denver creative scene for 20 years and has worked with some really awesome brands and agencies. He’s also one of the original co-founders of Xylem Interactive (LRXD). He’s been doing some real estate investing, and he stays busy with his family. Today we are going to talk to Joe about how his career has developed over the past two decades.

Highlights

• Why and how Joe got into design and development, as well as what the beginning days of his career were like.
• The basis of Xylem, how he got started, and why he wanted to start a digital agency.
• The process of starting an agency with four partners.
• How Joe broke away from his partnership and began working with a team of developers.
• Lessons that Joe has learned as he’s gone from business owner to employee and back again.
• How Joe’s relationships with agencies have paid off and been mutually beneficial.
• Joe’s experiences on getting compensated fairly for his time and balancing supply and demand.
• Why Joe began diversifying and moved into real estate investing.
• Some of the challenges of leaving an industry where you’re a known player and starting something new.
• Where Joe thinks he’s going in the future.

Links

Xylem Interactive
Sublime
Adobe
Google Apps
Harvest
Basecamp
Code Complete
JoeMeaseCreative.com
Joe on Facebook
Joe on Twitter

Quotes

“Partnerships are tough. When you’ve got four equal partners, the chances of four people equally sharing the workload is slim to none.”

“[A partnership] is like a marriage…. No one wants to think about the prenup or the divorce down the road, but in business, you’re doing everyone a disservice to not have that conversation.”

“At first, I set my hourly rate too low, to the point where the demand was far exceeding the supply.”