Made By Two is a design firm established by Kermit and Azadeh Westergaard, who caught our attention with their interdisciplinary approach to design, from interior design to inventing their own products. We were so impressed with the body of work they had created in such a short amount of time, all while raising a baby boy together, that we just had to know — how did they make this amazing business venture a reality? Kermit and Azadeh chatted with us, and it was a love fest: they expounded on about falling in love with each other, falling in love with eclectic design projects, and falling in love with Harvest to keep them on track of their time and expenses.

Tell us about how you guys met, and what sparked your first creative collaboration?
We met at Cafe Moto, a jewel-box of a restaurant under the subway tracks in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It’s a charmed world in there, like the set of Amélie or Brazil, or like a dream, everyone packed into this little triangle of a restaurant, a flamenco guitarist by the front door, the rumble of the M train rattling your wine glass. We were on a blind date and we talked for hours and hours. Somewhere in there, we realized that perhaps it was fated—’Azadeh’ is Persian for ‘free woman’, ‘Kermit’, Gaelic for ‘free man’.

Our first collaboration was our wedding invitation. Azadeh’s background is in graphic design & illustration, Kermit’s is in industrial design, and while we couldn’t approach things more differently (Azadeh: meticulous, elegant, whimsical; Kermit: chaotic, complex, kinetic), we managed to tune into a shared vision that produced something that was so clearly both of us, and yet better than the sum of the parts.

Renovating and redesigning your house together landed you guys in the pages of the New York Times – what did you do to catch their eye?
After we got married, we purchased a lovely, long neglected row house on a charming, historic, brick paved street off of the L train, literally one stop past the hubbub of Williamsburg. After nine months designing, contracting, and rebuilding the house, we moved into what felt like our farmhouse in the city. Before the move, we had been holed up in a post-war studio in the East Village with a hundred pound, slightly psychotic, rottweiler-doberman mix (Kermit’s contribution to the marriage), so moving into our freshly renovated 1908 brick house, with a front porch, sun-drenched garden and wood burning stove, simply felt too good to be true … we probably needed the Times article just to make sure it was all real (a friend of a friend, now a dear friend and a former client, recommended our place to the writer).

What does a typical day entail for you?
The best part of working for yourself in a small company is that there just isn’t such thing as a typical day: there are simply too many hats to wear, from project diplomat to contract drafting, from bidding to bookkeeping. A highlight for Azadeh is the research side of the process — honing in on the aesthetic vision in collaboration with the client, and then sourcing, scouting and antiquing until that vision materializes; for Kermit, there’s great satisfaction in the collaborative side of working with contractors and craftsman to nail down the twelve thousand details that you might never notice, but together really make the project. For both of us, the best days are simply design days, when we manage to carve out the kind of time it takes to fully get lost in a project, without distraction. Remarkably rare days, but always a favorite.

What project has Made By Two worked on that you are most proud of?
Last year, we designed a restaurant in the East Village called Northern Spy Food Co., and that project can’t help but stand out for us, since the great majority of our client work has been residential. The restaurant has done very well to date — it’s received a positive write-up in the New York Times and was selected by Time Out New York as the “Best New Neighborhood Restaurant” in the city. It was an exciting project, and we particularly loved the adventures and characters we met sourcing all of the found objects and reclaimed materials integrated into the design—the lumber yard leftovers (turned wall paneling), the vintage chicken coop brought back from farm country (re-purposed as retail cubbies), or the old bowling lanes we uncovered in a magnificent 1800’s gas company headquarters turned salvage yard (cut down into restaurant tables and countertops). There’s also something wonderful about being able to revisit a space that you’ve designed—as opposed to the residential projects which we rarely see again once completed.

You seem to have your hands in design and branding, product patents, photography, illustration, and residential and retail renovation. What types of projects do you see yourselves working on in 5 years?
In five years, we’d like to have a small boutique hotel in our neighborhood with a roof-top restaurant and a café with a roaring fireplace. We’ll run our design offices out of the hotel, and will take on a very limited number of eclectic design projects with clients we admire — preserving a good amount of time for writing and producing design books & children’s books; developing new products; and traveling to India and Turkey with Felix in tow on sourcing expeditions. Yes, that’s it: one third of our time welcoming people into our world, one third working with people in theirs, and one third fully in our own…

Why do you track time, and how do you guys use Harvest?
Amidst the learning curve of running a new business and managing our projects (and of course, our three year old son!), the back end of the business is inevitably a juggling act. Harvest has offered us a way to really stay on top of our time and expenses — whether for a client being billed hourly, or simply to have a sense of the time we’re putting into our larger projects, where we get a percentage of the build-out. When we started our business, a friend of ours said that tracking your time is the single most important step in understanding how your business works, and we’ve really come around to believe those words are gospel. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that you actually want Harvest to be part of your daily ritual — we’re absolutely in love with the gorgeous interface and seamless iPhone integration.

What advice do you have for people starting new ventures in the current economic climate?
There is always space for the exception. Always. As Woody Allen says, ‘eighty percent of success is showing up’. The other twenty percent just comes out of doing what you love. So our advice: show up, and do what you love. Oh yes, and start a business right after you’ve had a child and quit your day job. You’ll show up … and then some.

What’s the secret to keeping your clients happy?
Three secrets in our book: listen, collaborate, and don’t advertise. Designing someone’s home (or business for that matter) is an intimate process. It’s about who they are, but it’s also about who they want to be and how they want to live. Our job is to work with them to figure that out. We’re not delivering a design, we’re unearthing how they are meant to live in the space, and we’re bringing our aesthetic and sensibility to that process. Since we don’t advertise, it’s not just that we want them to be happy, we need them to be happy. If every job eventually leads to three new jobs, we’ll be alright.

Speaking of secrets, what’s the secret behind running a business together while raising a family?
Working creatively with the person you love is like spreading mascarpone and honey on a waffle — it’s totally decadent to put two of life’s greatest sweets on one fork, but if you can do it, why not? OK, there are plenty of reasons why not: starting a new business is completely all-consuming, starting a family is a total juggling act, and starting a business and a family with the same person is, well, kind of insane. The secret is probably balance: taking down time, taking time to yourselves, taking time as a family, and most importantly, taking time as a couple. We’re not there yet, we’re still in the trenches; but we’re both determined, by some circuitous path, to get to that place where we need to be … and at least occasionally, to pick up a Masala tea along the way.

We welcome Made By Two to our growing roster of Harvest New Founders, and are excited to support them as they they make the world a more efficient, personalized, and beautiful place.

We created a profitability dashboard to total up which of our clients we are profitable on based on hours, hourly rates and expenses over quarter and month ranges. We then created a score based on that. Your API tool supplied everything and it’s officially up and running on the tvs in the office.

It turns out that they have set up two different dashboards, to keep the clients displayed relevant to the employees who can see the television.

At the top left corner is a score based on profit and retention from quarter to quarter by using Harvest and looking at last time stamps and active/inactive projects. The right hand side queries our other database to show vacation and sick leave.

Now onto the bulk of the system. It lists every client and project (column 1 and column 2 respectively). The next bars (one for monthly and one for quarterly) use Google charts to display graphs which include (hourly rate X each employee) + expense cost. We have 2 dashboards setup for our 2 teams in the office so it only lists their clients. This helps us to review our processes to determine which clients are too demanding and which we need to focus on more. As each employee spends more time the chart grows closer to 100% which means we are using 100% of the budget (or the amount the client is paying us). It turns yellow when between 80-100% and red when above 100% (meaning we are over budget and have allocated too much time), otherwise it’ll show green.

Thank you Chris and the whole Search Mojo team for sharing how you use the Harvest API. Those dashboards are an awesome way to utilize your Harvest data to keep tabs on profitability.

If you have an interesting use of the Harvest API that you would like to share, please let us know!

I have a confession to make: I’m not as productive as I’d like to be.  For me, the realization that I was less productive than I thought came via Harvest, a web-based app for time-tracking and invoicing. At the suggestion of productivity wonk John Pavlus, I gave Harvest a whirl.

Harvest is a productivity dream. There’s a web interface to track your projects, tasks, invoices, and expenses. There’s a dedicated MacOS dashboard widget, even an iPhone interface. I set up my tasks and projects, and then diligently set to work trying to track my day: 44 minutes to interview so-and-so; 36 minutes to read this paper; a bit more than 3 hours to write that article, and so on.

I felt very accomplished… until I added everything up and found that, despite all my careful tracking, I had gaping holes in my day. Partly, that’s because I didn’t add things like lunch, picking up the kids after school, and the occasional break to check Twitter, email, and the news. And partly it’s because I’d start reading something and then realize, oops! I forgot to turn on the timer. Still, it’s clear I can do better. It’s not that I thought I was some productivity machine, working 25 hours a day, 8 days a week. But I didn’t realize how much time I was frittering away, either.

By casting my daily activities in such sharp relief, Harvest helped me identify the problem. It’s up to me to set things right.

Confessions of a productivity hack(er) was originally posted on Freelancer Hacks

Kiva.org has been using Harvest for over a year in its Microloan Review & Translation Program, and it’s not only an incredibly useful tool, but it has actually made us enjoy keeping track of our time! The Harvest time tracking widget is friendly and simple to use, and the website provides a nice array of options for managing its data while being very intuitive to learn.

As a small team in a rapidly growing organization, our program staff has found it invaluable to know where our time is going and how much efficiency we gain as we introduce new processes into our work. Recording time on specific projects via Harvest has helped us make decisions about budget, intern recruitment, and staff allocation.

It’s also great to have a central place to share information about our projects from week to week. Our team reviews our priorities weekly, using data from Harvest, and it’s the foundation for our communication about what we’re working on and how we can make the best use of our time as group.

My program staff found Harvest online and love it so much that they insisted that I sign up. As the team manager, I love the conversations Harvest enables and the visibility it gives us into each other’s working patterns.

Harvest has been such a success at Kiva that the Kiva Fellows Program will soon be using it to manage a team of over 100 Kiva Fellows each year. This group volunteers to work with Kiva’s Field Partners in over 40 countries throughout the developing world, and it’s a big challenge to keep in touch with what each of them is working on day-to-day. Through Harvest, we’re excited to have a simple tool to help all the Kiva Fellows keep program staff updated, and a tool that allows us to keep the fellows’ work aligned with Kiva’s evolving goals.

–Naomi Baer, Kiva Microloan Review & Translation Director

Interested in making micro-loans to entrepreneurs in need from around the world? We encourage you to learn more about Kiva.org and see how they’re living up to their mantra, “loans that change lives.”