Name: Justin “Bugsy” Sailor
Title: Freelance Web Developer, Aspiring Photographer, and Renowned US Traveler
Website/Blog: www.bugsyrocker.com
Location: Marquette, MI
Tell us about your educational/professional background.
My home is the Upper Peninsula, where I was raised through high school and am proud to represent my Yooper heritage. After high school, I found myself at Michigan State University where I spent five years, finishing with a B.A. in Advertising and a B.A. in Sociology. However, when I wasn’t working on my degrees, I continued to stay busy pursuing my passions in photography and web development.
After graduation, I started and completed my biggest project to date: a yearlong 50-state tour of the United States. Through a lot of hard work and a bit of luck, I was able to get sponsorship from Jeep, national press, and stay in over 100 households of people I had never met. I documented it with 12,000 photos and over 400 blog entries, and ate better than any other time in my life. It also led me to bring the first squirrel to go to all 50 states. That finished up in September 2007, and you can read more at www.hometowninvasion.com.
Tell us about your current job.
Since coming down from the clouds after my trip, 2008 has focused on my freelance photography and web design work, mostly working with small businesses across Michigan. With my latest web projects I have been putting more emphasis on the power of search engine optimization, search engine marketing, social media, and web analytics.
Another of my projects started in February 2008 and can be seen at www.yoopersteez.com. After seeing all 50 states, I collected nearly as many t-shirts and was a little inspired by it. I knew that after finishing my tour across the country I wanted to come back to my roots in the Upper Peninsula. It was clear that the U.P. could use a quality website and product that didn’t involve any stereotypes.
Since its inception, Yooper Steez has delivered t-shirts to over 30 states and have been photographed on five continents. It has allowed me to network with Yoopers across the world. It has been an incredible learning experience, not only to start my own business, but to find the potential in a very small niche market.
What does a typical day look like for you?
On a perfect day my roommate will turn on some Miles Davis in the morning so I can wake up to the smooth sounds of jazz at about 9am after a good eight hours of sleep. I have been incredibly fortunate to be able to make a living with a commute that is only a few feet from my bed to my desk as freelancing has given me a great amount of freedom.
The first order of the day is a bowl of cereal and to see if there are things to take care of such as e-mail, clearing out spam comments on my blog, checking if any orders came in overnight, and making sure all the dots are connected.
Writing is usually done by mid afternoon. I usually split that up with a daily walk to the post office in downtown Marquette (this seems to be a good time to avoid the lines). Writing code is usually done at night.
Typically I work to one of two stations on Pandora, the Ray LaMontagne station or the DJ Shadow station.
What kinds of documents do you produce?
In my field things are spoken in acronyms, and the ones most familiar to me are PHP, HTML, CSS, SQL, RSS, PSD, JPG, CR2, and a few other random assortments of uppercase letters.
It’s rare for me to work with a hard copy document. The most frequent hard copy documents I work with are Post-It notes and time to time there are some photographs that come through in hard copy form.
What communication skills are needed for your job?
For a web developer working directly with clients, it is essential to be able to communicate things in a simple and easy to understand context. With this comes patience, as everyone has a different level of understanding with the massive world wide web.
While I get to communicate directly with people through Facebook, phones, and in person, learning the communication skills of blogging and Twitter are a different beast. Your audience and niche have to be kept in mind at all times and you may be talking to hundreds or thousands of people daily on a blog, people you have never communicated with. Simply keeping in mind that I have a broad audience allows me to communicate a message more effectively.
How did you prepare for your job?
There is an amount of experience from my Hometown Invasion Tour and Yooper Steez that I believe I would have never found with a job I applied for.
Planning a yearlong 50-state tour to stay with people you have never met and to live off donations is no small task. Several others have done it, or other similar trips. And everyone is entirely capable of greater accomplishments.
Most people ask me about the sponsorship with Jeep. My approach was to be as professional as possible. I had only written one press release before, had never written a sponsorship proposal, had never walked into the headquarters of one of the largest corporations in the world asking for a free car to use for the year.
I talked to as many people as I could. I talked to all my professors, got both positive and negative feedback. And ultimately it was through my professors at MSU that got my foot in the door with Chrysler.
Despite several naysayers, I never lost hope on funding the trip. I made one of my best PowerPoint presentations, a fairly convincing sponsorship proposal by using guides I found online and having my professors review it, and despite how nervous I was walking into their headquarters, I tightened up my tie and walked in with confidence.
List three of your favorite professional resources/references/tools and tell us why they’re your favorite.
Envato – The Envato team is responsible for bringing some amazing resources such as PSDTuts, Freelance Switch, and a slew of other amazing sites. It gives me a daily source of new techniques and inspiration.
MSU – I have become a very vocal advocate of university life. No matter what school you went to, and even if you didn’t, universities have what seem to be an infinite number of resources. From libraries to websites to academic newsletters to faculty, there always seems to be something with the answers to my questions (Google and Wikipedia will never be able to answer everything, sometimes you just need another person).
Metro Detroit – Since I’m a Yooper and I’ve only been to Detroit a couple times, I unfortunately hardly know a thing about the city. However, I’m extremely fortunate to know many, many talented and knowledgeable people there. They have listened to my ideas, given me advice, and pointed me to resources and potential clients. To name a few on Twitter: @charliecurve, @shannonpaul, @kenburbary, @ddelonge, @mollysly, @terrybean, and @shaunabiznet.
How do you stay up-to-date in your field?
The answer above is one great way to stay up to date. I have been able to surround myself with a network of people who provide me with knowledge and answers.
How would you define professional writing?
I think it’s best I leave this to the pros. But I will respond with an anecdote…
While I was a senior in high school, I wrote the family Christmas letter. And our Christmas letter ended up in the hands of Gordon Guyer, who was the current president of MSU (he was a family friend of my grandparents). A couple months later, I saw Gordon and he said my Christmas letter was one of the best he’s ever read. He told me, “You’re going to make a great Spartan!”
It was a moment when I realized my words were really able to communicate with people. So whether it be a family Christmas letter, press release, advertisement, news article, blog, book, or anything else, writing will always be able to resonate with people across the globe.
Do you have any tips to share with other professional designers/writers/editors?
I grew up playing hockey nearly my whole life, and my dad always told me “Don’t wait for the puck to come to you.” So hockey fan or not, I pass this on to you. Be a go-getter. Be active. Be ambitious.
Get connected:
@bugsyrocker on Twitter
Facebook
Hometown Invasion on Flickr
LinkedIn
Tags: In the Workplace
[...] The new year is a time for dreaming big, making resolutions, and then diving in headfirst. Or at least it is if you are Justin “Bugsy” Sailor. [...]