IndyHall Member Profiles: Megan Canney
Filed under: Community Support, From the Business Side, Independents Hall, coworkers
Meet Megan Canney.
Megan is a professional seasonal fabric home décor designer. Wow, that’s a mouthful.
For all you seasonal fabric home décor design civilians out there this means she designs those pretty Christmas stockings you hang above your fireplace in addition to various other holiday decorations. She claims designing Christmas stockings is a year round activity but I don’t buy it. My current theory is that it’s a front for her true profession: Mercenary Assassin. More on that later.
I couldn’t help but wonder how one gets into her alleged profession.
“I originally went to school for fashion design but mostly for wearable art, not production fashion.”
Seems she’s better suited for making wearable art for the runway, no?
“You can’t make money doing that so when I left school I got a job doing seasonal home décor design.”
Consider the dots connected. So how does Megan find herself among our ranks here at Indy Hall.
“I knew a lot of the early members and we would go to the Junto down in South Philly and people were always talking about the Hall. When I heard about the job I’m doing now I came and checked out Indy Hall before I even interviewed. I knew that I’d be working remotely and that doing so from my apartment just wouldn’t work for me.”
Interestingly, I more often hear that someone’s been working from home prior to joining the Hall but found them self too distracted to be productive. Excellent foresight she’s demonstrated here… a little too excellent perhaps.
“I’m a really social person and it’s hard not having a design team to work with so at least this way I get to have the social interaction as well as a separation between by working and living space.”
Megan’s presence at the Hall predates mine so I was curious to know how long she’d been here.
“7 months on and off due to the time I spend in China.”
… Now you remember that theory of mine?
“I go to China because that’s where all the buyers from all over the world go to meet with people like me and the salesmen. If a company does import they usually will meet in Hong Kong. It’s the hub of product related business transactions.”
I believe that, assuming that by “product related” she means people and by “business transactions” she means bounty collections. All I’m saying is you’d do well to buy plenty of decorations this year.
Happy Holidays folks.
From the Video Archives: Coworking Questions answered for Web Worker Daily in 2009
Filed under: FAQs, From the Business Side, Independents Hall, IndyHall 201, IndyHall U, Videos, coworking
Wow…a WHOLE YEAR AGO, I answered a bunch of questions for Web Worker Daily in video format. I completely forgot about them until Gerard Sychay from Cincy Coworks tweeted about them. They answer questions that we answer a lot, so I thought it’d be valuable to post here.
IndyHall History:
Bootstrapping:
Diversity
The Future of IndyHall (from last year)
Coworking Tips
IndyHall Member Profiles: Bill Jones
Filed under: Community Support, From the Business Side, Independents Hall, coworkers
Meet Bill Jones. Bill is an IT guy. He’s not just any old IT guy though; he’s the incredibly bold and savvy IT guy who’s not afraid to tell you your IT solutions suck. See for yourself.
“When I would go to my doctor, my dentist, or any small business in my area it would stand out to me that they had substandard IT solutions and I would point that out to them.”
Harsh, I know. Did I mention he has a kind side too? He would always follow up by helping them out.
“When I stopped working for a huge company and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I thought that it would be easier for me to be engaged and understand the value I was delivering to people if I worked directly with customers in a smaller context.”
Consulting the IT civilians, empowering the little guy, it all makes sense. However, there isn’t exactly a wealth of substandard IT solutions floating around Indy Hall so what does “Mr. Savvy IT Guy” do here?
“The plan has always been for me to mine that area for a product or two and then focus on building those products because that’s what I really enjoy doing. Consulting and products are two different areas and I’m more of a product guy. Right now I’m actually moving away from the consulting side of small business to work on three products I have in development.”
If that’s not livin’ the dream, I don’t know what is. Naturally, I was curious as to what role coworking has played in Bill’s ability to create this situation for himself.
“When I was looking for office space I ran across this idea called coworking which sounded good to me. I quickly found that Indy Hall was one of the leaders in the area but living in Jersey I didn’t think I’d want to come to Philadelphia all the time. I came in one day just to do research and I realized that I really would be better off just hangin’ out here.”
Ok, but… why?
“The first day I had a six hour conversation with Jason Allum and I said to myself, ‘Ok, this is a good place to be.’ There was a lot of excitement about Indy Hall Labs and the business model that Alex, Jason and the guys were figuring out and that was very interesting to me. I realized there were people here who could teach me stuff and that was better than being alone in my basement office.”
There you have it. Indy Hall: The perfect alternative to your substandard workplace solutions.
Guest Post by Dave Troy of Beehive Baltimore Coworking
Filed under: Community Support, Education/Workshops, Events, coworking
On January 22nd, a delegation from Beehive Baltimore visited IndyHall — a trip we called “A Tale of Two Cities.” Baltimore and Philadelphia share many common characteristics: an amazing, eclectic workforce and arts community, a prominent position in the east coast corridor, and also many of the problems that plague many of our urban areas.
The idea for the trip came after I visited with Alex back in October and I wished I could “bottle” the energy and ideas behind IndyHall to share with my peers in Baltimore. Of course, I had already done this in one way; in 2008 my chance meeting of Alex Hillman at a wedding of a mutual friend is what led directly to the creation of Beehive Baltimore, our coworking community in Baltimore.
But I wanted to do more: to connect the members of our coworking community directly with like-minds in Philadelphia, to inoculate them with the knowledge that our two communities are linked by common values and also to raise the idea that coworking is a very powerful seed for urban renewal and economic growth. The founders of Beehive share something very important in common with Geoff and Alex: we want to change our cities for the better, and not just a little bit.
At first the trip was going to be a small carpool affair with 8-10 people. Pretty soon it turned into a bus trip with over 30 people registered. When we showed up on the doorstep at IndyHall, Alex and Geoff were a little surprised at the size of the crowd. But here’s the thing: show people a better way, a path forward that has room for hope in it, and people will rush to understand and be a part of it.
Our delegation was eager to learn what made the IndyHall community tick, and to compare notes from experiences in Baltimore. Some were our regular members, others were members of our community that want to drive change here. While we arguably gained a lot from a generous Q&A with Geoff and Alex, the real fun came in the Show & Tell and the extended lunch at National Mechanics. Many good new connections were made between the Baltimore and Philadelphia communities.
But, perhaps most importantly, the trip did one thing: show that we’re here for one another. Philadelphia and Baltimore both face staggering challenges in the years ahead. I, for one, am comforted by the knowledge that there are likeminded souls in a nearby city who will be working to understand these challenges alongside us, and I hope you feel the same way. We invite you to make a similar trip here to Baltimore sometime soon. Thanks for sharing with us. We all truly appreciate it and will be looking for ways to keep our communities growing together.
