On the Organization of a 3d Arch Viz Studio and Standard Hiring Practices

[braddewald]

I am currently a freelancer with a decent client base and fairly steady work doing still images of mostly small interiors and I'm thinking of hiring a couple employees to help out with overflow. My problem is that I've never worked in a 3d studio so I have absolutely no idea what the organization/structure of a business like mine should be like in terms of division of labor or workflow. If anybody could give me a short/quick overview or even just an idea of the structure of a smallish studio that would really help a lot.

 

I also had questions regarding the protection of digital assets like 3d models and proprietary scripts: How do you keep an employee from downloading it all to a flash drive and taking off with all of your stuff when you part ways? I'm guessing the answer is something to do with contracts, which brings me to my next question: what is the standard procedure for signing non-disclosure and non-compete agreements? I wouldn't want to keep a former employee from getting another job, but I wouldn't want them calling up all my clients and trying to coax them over to him either.

 

I'm sure that this is all standard stuff that everybody knows, but like I said, I've never worked in (or even set foot in) an arch viz studio so I'm completely in the dark!

[Ismael]

There are some good business articles at the bottom here and on the next page:http://www.cgarchitect.com/features/category/tutorials/recent/0/5

[Scott Schroeder]

If you are planning on using these employees as independent contractors, you really can't force a non-compete on them from my limited understanding. If you have them full time, you can have them sign a non-compete but there are many restrictions, such as time limit and distance limit, involved in that and I think they vary from state to state. You'd want to see good legal advice if you are thinking about non-competes.

 

Some reading on non-compete and independent contracting.

http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/x/246534/employee+rights+labour+relations/No+No+No+Your+Independent+Contractor+Cannot+Sign+A+Noncompete+Never+Ever

 

http://freelanceswitch.com/the-business-of-freelancing/handling-non-compete-clauses/

 

You can however have them sign a non disclosure and that is a good idea. You really can't protect yourself from letting a former person leech a client away from you. Even if you have a non-compete, once that expires in a few months, they can still leech the client. What you need to do is trust that your client is decent and won't jump ship like that.

 

Same goes for assets. Unless you pay for good IT support that warns you each time a USB drive is plugged into one of your machines, you can't protect against employees stealing assets. If you do something like that, I think you have to have a signed from from the employee that they are aware that exists on the network. You can put it in the contract that they can't take assets but it can be incredibly hard to enforce once they leave your employment, unless you see a render of theirs that is a blatant example of our unique asset. If you have stuff from Evermotion, Design Connected, etc, that is hard to enforce as your former employee can claim they purchased them. Of course, the payment receipts (or lack of) will confirm if they are lying or not.

 

The typical structure in terms of labor is:

Boss (ie you)

Minions (ie them)

 

How you split them up is up to you. Some places have dedicated modelers, some have the person doing the entire project from start to finish.

[braddewald]

Scott, thanks for the info! It seems like it basically comes down to just how unenforceable contracts really are without a team of lawyers on the payroll. Is it fairly common for companies to have assets like models, textures or scripts taken by employees? Couldn't a script at least be written to expire after a period or require a login or something or that nature?

[Scott Schroeder]

I wouldn't say it is a common thing for employees to steal assets, but it does happen. The only thing you can really enforce is a no USB drive policy and set up your firewall to block sharing applications like dropbox. I know many game and film companies have these policies in place to protect assets from getting out before the game/film in announced.

 

If you have custom scripts, they usually work on your network only. You write them so they call other scripts and assets from your network drives. So unless your employee sets up their home network exactly as yours or they take the time to edit all of the scripts, they will have a hard time using them. You can also encrypt your scripts as well so they can't be edited and save the source script on only your machine or locked network drive.

 

If you take your time and hire the right people, you more than likely won't have an issue. Treat them right as well. In the 5 years I worked at my former employer, we only had one issue (that we knew of) and that was with someone from our outsource team who came into the office to train for a bit. Even all of us that got laid off from that place, no one that I know took any assets other than images from projects we worked on for our portfolios.

[Jason Matthews]

I don't know what kind of business model you are going for, but here is my 2 cents:

 

Are you sure you want to officially hire someone as an employee? There are many items that come up that are really a pain in the rear-end. I won't go into them here, but maybe look into contract employees that are responsible for their own taxes and expenditures and you essentially hand them a 1099 at the end of the year. It will make your HR headache go away. This will also aid in the non-disclosure / non-compete discussion. If you contract to people not in your area then the problem solves itself. Do not disclose who the client is. Once you can establish a good relationship with a handful of reliable good quality artists, then you can start bidding the work out to them.

[braddewald]

Jason -- that's definitely an option. Is there a good place to find contract employees (established channels for shopping around for them, I mean)? Or does it come down to just looking around people's portfolios and approaching them one by one?

[Jason Matthews]

Well there are websites like elance.com if you need to bid out the jobs. You can browse profiles and portfolios of people. Create the job posting on there and then list the cost you are willing to pay for the job. I worked at a company that used that service. I am not saying that it is the best way to go because you cannot really hold them accountable.

 

You can approach the people on this forum also. We do have the one section for job postings. Again, not saying this is the best way to go either, but when you look at the big picture, it is very much worth it to contract out work rather than to hire employees.