Moxy Productions Inc.

What a wild ride. A few days ago, I took the opportunity through a friend to have a drink with a gentlemen I had met socially a few weeks ago. Norm Lehman is an interesting guy: ex-advertising exec, serial entrepreneur and general raconteur, and currently a small-business coach.

My motives were selfish, but they didn’t have to do with getting any free consultation on my primary business. No, I knew that he was fun to have a gab with and I also wanted to twist his arm into helping me with a side project I’m launching called BoatHQ.ca. I’ve blogged about it here before, but it’s remained in a state of soft-launch for months now. Like most side-projects, it had been creeping along as I tried to define the best way to build the community, the services the site should offer and a myriad of other things. The bonus was that I knew that Norm was a boating enthusiast times ten. In fact, I knew that he was—and I’m paraphrasing him here—in the fourth year of a one year restoration of a classic wooden boat.

I wasn’t disappointed. Norm “got it” and provided me with some interesting insights about approach, and a willingness to have a look at the beta-site. Perhaps even down-the-road, he may even even help with the taxonomy of the forum and generate some content in the form of an article or 6 about his restoration project. (He won’t know until he reads this that I’ll be soon leaning on him to actually moderate the boat-building section, though I probably should have saved that part for another meeting in a bar.)

But wait, there’s more—

As we were talking he mentioned the importance of giving things away, and tossed me one: he had often thought there was a real value in distilling things down into their 3 basic elements. That people who knew stuff could usually lay them out simply as a “1, 2, 3″. We chatted about it and I agreed that it was a cool concept, but didn’t think much more than that. Until bed that night. Fueled by a couple of Guinness and perhaps some bad mustard, I came up with a concept of making a user-generated site for folks to do that very thing: share their knowledge of subjects as a series of 1, 2, 3′s. I wanted it to be a simple, straight-ahead interface. Serious or Funny, I wasn’t sure. Maybe both; maybe that would be decided by the users. I just wanted a simple way for people to add them.

Rollout was another question. How do I finance it? Who’s going to program it? Where would I find the time to manage it?

Within six Google searches I had my answers…

(more…)

Some of you may know that we’ve worked for years on the Diogaurdi Tax Law account, under the guidance of Patti Plant from CEO Media Group and lead designer Tony Delitala of Delitala Design. We’ve rolled out a number of sites for them and even developed an in-house web-based application to help them take their clients from first phone call to full service. We’ve also learned a thing or two about they guide their clients through what is often referred as tax amnesty, and seen firsthand the good resolutions to difficult issues that they can accomplish on behalf of their clients.

We’ve also had our hand in with some other legal clients along the way. Perhaps most notably, we had the wonderful experience of working with Jordan Furlong on the redesign of his Law21.ca legal blog—one of the best examples of great blogging in the country. Our launch with him was a pleasure from conception to completion, and we were thrilled for him when he was honoured with the Clawbie for Best Canadian Legal Blog of 2008.

Throw in our work with some local clients such as Oakville family lawyer, Thomas H. Marshall through our long-time friend Shannon Anderson, and it seems we’ve been spending more time with lawyers than O. J. Simpson. Which reminds me of my days as a callow youth at U of T…

My original intention when studying at the University of Toronto hundreds of years ago was to continue through to law school. Now as it turned out, I became an actor instead—much to the delight of my parents, who still go slack-jawed at the recollection of my announcement to leave school—but I always maintained an interest in law, justice and government. Over a 25-year career in the film industry, I played a few lawyers in films and on television shows (‘I’m not a lawyer, but I play one on tv!’), and once even had a shot at recreating a Supreme Court address in the Sue Rodriguez Story “At The End of the Day” portraying real-life lawyer Chris Considine (here’s a link to the real thing.).

And now here I am spending an inordinate amount of time working with the legal community, helping them flow out onto the interweb and loving every minute of it. It’s interesting how things have kind of come full circle.

My Mom always said I’d end up with lawyers.

It’s more than a funny co-incidence that right while I’m in the middle of enjoying Tim Ferriss’s highly regarded The 4-Hour Work Week, I get a visit from Diane Goldsmith. It seems Diane is behind a new start-up called Village LMC, a local Lifestyle Management Consierge service. It’s interesting because Ferris is a big proponent of simplifying one’s life through outsourcing of mundane or inconvenient tasks that could easily be handled by an assistant. He makes the case that it can be cost-effective and time-freeing, and he makes a strong argument.

He often suggests using offshore assistants, but there are any number of things in our lives that could be handled only by someone in the physical world, located near to us. That’s why I have a feeling that Diane and Dan Meadowcroft’s endeavour is going to be a huge success. And why I was thrilled that they asked us to do their site! Nothing to see there yet, but this time next week we should have an intial site up and running!

The champagne has been smashed against the virtual bow, and BoatHQ.ca is now official. We’ve done so much work over the years with marine and boating clients, that the creation of community site for boaters felt just right.

BoatHQ.ca is intended to be a place where we can bring boaters of all kinds together to share resources, conversation and conviviality. A place to spend their time when their not at the helm, where they can learn about boating news and products and have a laugh once in awhile.

We’ve noticed that there were a few good boating sites and the odd manufacturer-specific forum,  but not really a social community—and boaters are very social beings it seemed to us.

So we have a Facebook-style social community set-up, and a separate forum built on PHPBB3, where people can get into more detailed multi-person threads and converstaions.

So head on over to BoatHQ.ca and join up. It’ll be fun!

We’re not officially back yet, but we’re stopping by to say all the best for the New Year to our clients, friends and family.

2009 will be wonderful. Guaranteed.

MOXY