Creative Nerve: Thinking Big

I got a chance Saturday to tour an amazing project that may turn out to be the envy of regional theaters and major cities across America.

With a small group of other people, I slapped on a hardhat and stepped through a downtown Cleveland doorway into the enormous, three-dimensional grid of scaffolding that’s currently holding up the old Hanna Theatre. Through a haze of dust, we all saw the glint of rich decorations on ceiling and walls, the elegant curve of proscenium arch, the sweep of space that even the endless metal forest of supports couldn’t diminish.

One of the five historic theaters in Cleveland’s Playhouse Square, the Hanna is already a beautiful and significant landmark. But that wasn’t the cool part.

The cool part is that the Great Lakes Theater Festival, which will be the Hanna’s resident company, hasn’t chosen to just restore the Hanna. GLTF is making it bionic, a Faberge egg with the technological future incubating in its golden shell.  

When it’s done, the Hanna will have the only completely adaptable thrust stage in Cleveland and maybe the only one of this kind in the country. Designed to move up and down in three separate pieces, the thrust can be set up as a peninsula attached level to the mainstage or lower; configured as a round; or dropped out of sight in the pit for shows that demand a traditional proscenium setting.  And, of course, the whole place is being fitted out for computer operations.

But what’s more, GLTF has had the Hanna designed for a new kind of social theater experience, adapting the art form to contemporary tastes by adding a wide bar, rails and lounge area at the rear of the main floor, where patrons can watch a production with drink in hand and stay after the final curtain to discuss the play over a nightcap before heading home. Standard seating down front and in the small balcony boxes bring audiences close to the stage action; a social room next to the lobby offers a party or meeting space. And the open design of the entire house lets people move around unimpeded, able to see whatever is happening onstage.

The whole thing is a different concept – a fresh way to see and enjoy theater, one that might have significant consequences for an art form struggling hard to revive the public’s interest in what it offers. The design also permits all this change to occur without compromising the theater’s historic structure and ornamentation at all: Generations to come can address their own tastes by easily removing what GLTF has put in.

The Great Lakes company has been thinking big about the future and, frankly, so was I as I peered over edges and around corners at the construction of what amounts to a huge “Yes!” to change.

It’s not simply that it was thrilling to find somebody in Cleveland daring to be bold - what actually stunned me a little was the thought that my company and I might someday have roles to play in projects of this kind. It takes a lot of public, private and corporate support to get theaters – and art museums and concert halls and hospitals and libraries - built. A city needs all its imaginative citizens to plan and carry out its future.

And being a creative entrepreneur means that I and others like me, who have never had the chance to turn our own hands to big civic tasks, might actually have something to offer. Ideas. Time and effort. Leadership.  Maybe even some real money someday.  

Every day, I’m trying to change the world in a good way with Geniocity.com and I’m struggling impatiently with the micron-by-micron pace that work requires. But for that hour or two in the Hanna, I caught a glimpse of the effect that people of enterprise can have on their communities and it made me see myself differently. Not just an outside observer anymore – someone who could, and should, lend a hand.     

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

Theatrical advice for the entrepreneur:

Mr. Cladwell: Don’t be the bunny.

                       - “Urinetown: The Musical”

Garcin: Hell is – other people.

                       – “No Exit”

Franz: Work is what you do for others, Liebchen, Art is what you do for yourself.

                       – “Sunday in the Park with George”

 Undershaft: I understand you want to come into the cannon business. 

Stephen: I go into trade! Certainly not.

Lady Britomart: Cannons are not trade, Stephen. They are enterprise.

                      – “Major Barbara”

Mother Courage: Don’t tell me peace has broken out just after I laid in new stock.

                      – “Mother Courage”

Chris: Is that as far as you can see – the business?

                       – “All My Sons”

Lord Goring: Robert, how could you have sold yourself for money?

Sir Robert Chiltern (excitedly): I did not sell myself for money. I bought success at a great price. That is all.

                       – “An Ideal Husband”

Estragon: I can’t go on like this.

Vladimir: That’s what you think.

                      – “Waiting for Godot”

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

I doubt I could have become an entrepreneur anyplace but Cleveland.

Not that starting a business isn’t much the same the world over – probably everyone everywhere faces similar hurdles in selling an idea, raising funds, containing costs, developing a market and staying ahead of the competition, no matter how large or small the scale of operation or how little or much the government exerts control. 

No, the reason I think Cleveland was the one place for me to try this has much more to do with my own history and the personality of the city itself.

I’ve moved around a lot in my life – had lived in six different towns in four states by the time I was 15, and after I went to college, made another six major moves before landing in Cleveland. Once I got here, several key factors converged.

One was that I’ve ended up staying far longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere else: After 16 years here, I feel as if I truly have roots in a community. A second was that Cleveland turned out to be made up of the most welcoming and caring people I’ve ever encountered, among whom I’m lucky to have found many friends. And the third – every bit as important as the other two – was that I happened to be living in Cleveland at the time in my life when I became psychologically ready for this kind of challenge.

If any one of those elements had been missing, I’m pretty certain I would never have taken this huge and strangely necessary step. For sure, I would not have gotten this far with my big idea without knowing a lot of people here, people familiar enough with me and my work to believe I’m not a total kook and kind enough to offer me some guidance.  

For extra sure, I would never have so completely revolutionized my career without having reached the exact moment – in age, experience, ambition, frustration and altered duties as the parent of adolescents instead of toddlers - when revolution seemed both crucial and possible.

Other entrepreneurs may have different specific reasons for taking such a risk, but I’d be surprised if most of them didn’t have convergences of their own that suddenly opened a path where none had been before. And I’ll bet that when most of them saw that path appear, they didn’t even have to think about whether or not to follow it.        

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

I had never heard the phrase below until a year or so ago, when my business partner offered it as encouragement for both of us. At the time, we were trying to psych ourselves up for the long, ongoing task of finding investors. 

Apparently he had seen it applied to the founders of Google. They had, someone had written, “a healthy disregard for the impossible.” 

And that is what you need. That is certainly what an entrepreneur needs. I remember feeling relieved that someone else out there believed you had to stick to your vision.

But some parts of impossible are harder to disregard than others. I’ve found that it’s a lot less difficult to trust my idea that it is to overcome other people’s fear of the unknown. 

And that fear is the arch-enemy of creativity.

Why do we have an endless array of products, shows, public policies and styles that amount to the same old thing over and over again? You know?  Sitcoms with the same seven plots (and reality shows with only one),  clothes that simply echo earlier decades, the same campaign rhetoric election after election – the slavish replication of notable successes in anything, even though the replications by definition lack the (sometimes microscopic) creative spark that made the original successful?

Our country has been nearly paralyzed by this constant recycling of the trite, boring and ineffective.  And it’s because so many people are terrified of the new.  Especially people who pretend to be leaders.

This affects me as an entrepreneur in two ways: It’s exactly why I decided to create a business that would help people learn about and appreciate creativity and innovation, including their own; and it also means that my project is the kind that people with the power to help are most likely to shy away from.

I understand that those with money and influence don’t want to waste it on something they aren’t sure will be successful. They don’t want to take a risk on a model that hasn’t been proved yet, preferably many times over. But that means the ideas they’re willing to back are old and trite, not fresh and adventurous.  

So they leave all of us with strategies and industries and processes and products that either work poorly or not at all because they’re outmoded or weren’t that clever to begin with.

Where is their vision?      

Fortunately, some people somehow find ways to do what they believe needs to be done anyway, pushing the frontiers and showing the world what it has to gain from thinking differently. Eventually, we at Geniocity hope to be among them. In the meantime, here’s a story a friend passed along to me about one of the staff geniuses at Google who’s revolutionizing the web.  click here  Impossible?

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

Note to self: Try not to need sleep, minor surgery or human relationships while starting a business.

I should have given myself that advice a couple of years ago, actually. Instead, I’ve relied on a policy of deprivation regardless of need in most cases, which does eventually backfire at the most inopportune moments – usually in my automobile, which morphs into a phonebooth, work station, lunchroom, vanity, attic, psychiatrist’s office, nap spot or cave on demand.  It’s like Harry Potter’s Room of Requirement: Whatever space you suddenly, desperately must have … it’s in the car! 

Someday, someone will invent an expandable, interlocking set of all-purpose rooms on wheels – like a telescoping office tower with plumbing – and right after the Geniocity webzine breaks the story, I’ll run out and buy two.

Parents know the car is the only real retreat they have left in a world full of clattering, trash-talking, text-messaging, belongings-scattering, iPod-blasting progeny. Well, ditto for entrepreneurs – I essentially live in mine when I’m not on the computer and once I get a laptop, my family may never see me again.

Entrepreneurs have to meet with so many people that they’re behind the wheel as much as traveling sales reps, no matter what their business is.  To economize on time and make my car-dwelling experience as aesthetic as it is convenient, I stock mine with all the necessaries of home and office. 

Scratch pads, paperclips, pens, phone charger, extra glasses, cheap calculator – all so obvious as to scarcely need mentioning. Also business cards, brochures, rate cards. I haven’t moved a tape measure and postal scale in yet, but I’m sure that’s next. File folders!

The mirrors are built in, thank goodness, but I also never move out of park without tissues, moist wipes and a standard bagful of emergency toiletries, as well. You can’t survive winter in my town without lip goo. And even if you never use the dental floss on your teeth, it makes a great clothesline for those unexpected items of laundry.

 A bottle of water (scoff all you like, tap tipplers) – replaced daily – and packets of almonds mean I’m never lunchless, though possibly under-flavenoided, and it takes only a few moments in the drive-thru for me to replicate a coffee shop in the front seat. Especially if I spill. (Extra napkins in the console compartment for the clean-up.)

A flashlight for security and re-reading the latest staff-plan revisions in parking lots on January afternoons. Maps, to back up the Mapquest directions to back up the GPS. A CD opener and an enormous range of tunes, because I never know when a meeting is going to leave me feeling like ”Death and the Maiden,” “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” or ”American Idiot.”  

And a plastic knife. I guess I’d have a hard time using it to give myself that tonsillectomy I think I need, but just try sawing open a sealed aspirin bottle in the car without one.   

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

Sunday has never been one of my favorite times. Once I get past breakfast, the dread of Monday permeates the whole rest of the day. And most of those hours end up consumed by dreary chores that have to be done so I can start the week organized: cleaning, laundry, paperwork, mending, ironing, bill-paying (the worst). I seldom have any actual fun on Sundays.

But I really topped myself for eye-glazing tedium yesterday - I had to spend hours online trying to figure out proper shipping charges for the items in The Geniocity Shop. I would have had a more rollicking evening poking dead gnats out of the tiny squares in the window screens with a pin.

I’ve had a lot of Sundays – and Saturdays and nights and holidays – like that since I decided to start Geniocity.com. I thought I saw it coming, but I’ve always been nearsighted: What looked like a few hills from afar were actually K2-sized piles of minutiae that I’ve had to identify, extract and analyze since committing to this project. At this point, two years of suffering later, the merest word from anyone about needing me to come up with numerical calculations or comprehensive rates or profitability projections acts like an instant karate-chop on my will to live, dropping it to the floor catatonic, with its thumb in its mouth.

But in the business world, catatonia doesn’t count as an excused absence.  I’ve had to physically drag myself to my desk like a briefcase full of lead, unsure whether I was more terrified of trying some humongous, math-related task or of not trying it and dooming my project to a shriveling, contemptible death.

The most awful chore jumped my partner and me (not now, Kato!) about a year ago: We had to create cash-flow spreadsheets showing all our anticipated expenses and income for three years. Three years. Even with the proper forms and some tips provided by our kindly business advisor, we honestly thought we’d die. It took weeks of agonized labor with calculators and a laptop, marked by emergency coffee breaks and deep breathing, to get us through it. We probably could have used some portable defibrillator paddles.

I exaggerate only slightly. Making myself deal with this stuff has been not unlike facing down writer’s block. In fact – and even though my being a word person is why I suffer these numerical meltdowns – business has more in common with being a journalist than you might think. 

Just as I do as a reporter, I the Entrepreneur have to find things out. And I have to make sure those things are accurate. It takes a lot of checking out information sources, from phoning people and asking questions to hunting up written stuff online and in print, to learn what I need to know. And also like a reporter, I can’t allow myself the luxury of failing to produce on time.

See, journalists can’t afford writer’s block – those stories have to be written come hellfire or power blackout. You miss deadline or get beat on a story, you’re toast. Entrepreneurs, alas, can’t afford to skip figuring out where every dollar is going to come from or go. Not even if that makes you wish you were one of the dead gnats in your own window screen.       

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

It’s been a couple of fine days.

And here’s the truth: I’ve actually had lots of them since I decided to quit my wage-slave job and build something of my own.

I overlook them all too often, dragged as I frequently am to the murky bottom of the ol’ emotional pond by the many bewildering subjects I have to master and the obstacles I need to overcome. It can be all too easy to let my outlook get scummed over by weariness and the sensation of being all alone with my large and scary responsibilities.

But even my worst days as an entrepreneur have never been as bad as the lows I’ve suffered as someone else’s helpless hireling – and the good ones are good in a more satisfying way.

Take Wednesday. I had a ton of free-lance work to get done and spent hours conducting interviews with sources. But in the middle of the day, I got to meet with an interesting person I’d never met before, a professor, to talk about my new business and his area of expertise. I didn’t have to take notes and I wasn’t on deadline – I could just listen to this man, find out who he was and enjoy a conversation about the creative and informative aspects our work that gave us common ground.

That would have been fun enough. But the best part was hearing him agree to blog for Geniocity.com about his field (you’ll hear more about this soon). It felt like a coup and a significant step for us to have this expert join our project – and I was free to make my own decision about it. No boss loomed over my desk, poised to fault me and spoil my efforts. The omnipresent dread of having to defend or justify or gut or adulterate my own work to accommodate a supervisor’s whims or cowardly conformity was gone.

Similar thing yesterday – I met with a marketing person at one of my favorite coffee shops. We had never seen each other before, but the more we discussed our work,  the more exciting connections and possibilities we discovered. The conversation continued for an hour. No one was waiting back at the office to disapprove of my taking so long, or to tell me I couldn’t explore working with this person, or to dismiss the ideas I’d returned with.

I left that meeting energized and hopeful. And I got to stay that way.

I think that’s reason enough to start my own business.         

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

Did I neglect to mention supporting yourself?

Oh, not with your new business - I mean earning a living while you’re struggling just to set up your new business.

You might want to think about that, if you haven’t, because there’s likely to be a big time gap between your giving up whatever work supports you now and being able to live off what your new enterprise brings in.

We found that out the hard way. Optimistic enthusiasts that we were, we believed in our idea so passionately that we just knew we’d be able to get a start-up grant or an investor before we reached the end of our resources.

And … we were wrong. It was a dark and scary day when we realized we were going to have to scale back on our entrepreneurial efforts in order to earn enough for food and mortgage payments. How could we get our site operational if we had to spend most of the day concentrating on other work? 

We were already relying on a few heroic, unpaid friends to help us cope with parts of our would-be operation that didn’t fall into our own areas of expertise. These wonderful people were performing needed tasks because they believed in us and our project and were willing to devote a bit of their time to it.  But they couldn’t help eight hours a day and that meant we had to make up the difference ourselves. 

And now we were going to have way less of each day in which to do it.

Speaking for myself, this was one of three critical situations in the course of starting our business that have forced me to fight down my own dismay and fear and decide that I was somehow going to find a way to continue.

The entrepreneurial experience sometimes seems overpopulated with these kinds of Frodo-and-Sam-at-the-foot-of-Mt.-Doom moments. Yes, throwing yourself into the unknown for what you consider a good cause does demand a certain amount of personal bravery. Or at least some creative desperation. But every time a crisis has occurred in the making of Geniocity.com, I’ve found – after the first stunned, sickened minutes while the news sank in – that I just make the same decision over again: I’ll find a way to handle this.

I guess it’s happened often enough now that I’ve stopped thinking of it as courageous or special or anything – it’s just necessary. Someone has to keep going. And if that someone has to be me, then I’ll just have to find the hours and information needed to get the job done.

I’m not saying it doesn’t get harder to take on more chores when you already have a lot to do. It sure does. My family has watched me devolve into a chronically exhausted and distracted screen zombie for months now; I frequently have to apologize to friends and colleagues for showing up late to scheduled meetings.

But someone has to make the calls and answer the phones, research the ad rates, talk with writers and artists and website builders, handle the banking and taxes and insurance and inventory, order supplies, meet with lawyers, make the decisions – and that person right now is me. The same one who has a marriage and children and a house and creative pastimes she loves and needs to care for. The same one who needs to help financially support our household.

It would be much more difficult if I were my family’s sole provider. In that case, my approach to being an entrepreneur would have had to be quite different - certainly, I would have had to build up more resources before starting on my project and I probably would have had to keep a daily job during the entire start-up process, instead of free-lancing.    

But bottom line? It can all be done. Not perfectly, lord knows, and not all at once. But it can be done if you decide it must be – and if you’re willing to to adjust your business plans to give yourself more months in which to accomplish your goals. That part is hard for me. Sometimes I have to mentally smack myself to keep my own impatience in check, but I’m still here and so is my start-up and I’m going to keep us both going for as long as it takes.           

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

We’ve asked an enormous range of people for advice. Lawyers, business experts, civic leaders, accountants, technology gurus, marketing people, elected officials, artists, designers, retail folks, PR veterans – we could start our own city with these people. And the second question out of nearly everyone’s mouth has been, “Do you have a business plan?”

Aieeee. The business-plan issue. If you start your own company, you’ll face it, too.

The fact is, of all the people we’ve talked to, the only ones who didn’t  seem to care about  business plans were artists and technology entrepreneurs – the very people Most Likely to Start Something Independent. 

Individual artists just tend not to be ruled by plans; artists starting nonprofit organizations think more about mission statements and building their boards of directors. The techies? Well, we went to several of Cleveland’s many digital conferences and at one one them, I directly asked a panel of young technology entrepreneurs if they had created business plans for their companies. One simply said no. Another said he probably ought to put one together. The third sheepishly admitted that he had the start of one, but he’d stuck it in a drawer somewhere long ago.

Entrepreneurs know they’re supposed to develop business plans, but frankly, no one wants to actually do it.  They’re like giant term papers. They have a huge ugh factor.

People who’ve succeeded without them insist they aren’t really necessary (see college educations), but the fact is that all the people you’re going to want help – read money – from will demand to see your plan.

Really. All of them. Unless you’re planning to ask your grandma to underwrite your enterprise – and even she might insist you do one.

Banks, foundations, venture capitalists, incubators and angel investors want to know exactly how your new business is going to work. Which is kind of amusing, since everyone admits privately that all the projected customer-base and profit numbers will have to be invented.

The truth is, you – and they - don’t know if your business will succeed. And you won’t know until you get it up and running, probably over years. Unless you already have a working business, the bottom-line numbers tend be a polite fiction.  

But writing a plan – and my business advisor and fellow blogger Will Limkemann will be entertained to find me espousing his view now – truly does force you to consider every aspect of your business, from philosophy to staff positions to production costs. Especially if you have partners, it helps a lot to work out in advance any differences of opinion you may have on, say, whether or not you’re going to offer your employees health insurance, or if you’re going to locate your offices downtown or in the ‘burbs.

You know what they say – don’t get married without working out how many children you want and how you’re going to handle religion.

So – groaning and dragging all the way – my partner and I actually did sit down together for weeks and hash out everything we could, writing market justifications, drawing organizational charts, describing how our news and store operations would work, estimating costs of every kind from legal fees and web design down to pens and staplers and trying to guess responsibly, based on painful calculations of ad rates and merchandise sales, what our income levels and profits would be. 

Will helped us, coaching on how to figure out the numbers and what kinds of statistics we needed to back up our gut feelings. (Many resources exist to help with plan writing: check online and in bookstore for business-plan guides and ask your chamber of commerce and local business schools about workshops and the names of reliable professional advisors. )   

Yeah, our brains hurt. It was like having to write a dissertation about a topic you hadn’t majored in yet. But now we have a plan to show any people who ask. And we’re hoping they do. 

 so it’s not as if a plan is proof of        

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

Ok, so the party’s over. Literally.

Not that making this project a go has ever seemed like frivolity. But if I had to choose a metaphor (and that’s what we English majors love to do), I guess I’d compare what’s happened so far to deciding to get married and preparing for the wedding. For months, we labored at getting everything in place for the symbolic start of the rest of our lives, went through the rituals and celebration last week, got a weekend honeymoon afterward that involved some well-deserved sleep.

And then it was Monday morning. All of a sudden, I had a day-to-day marriage to make work, a marriage that has joined me to a complex entity with needs demanding ceaseless looking-after, needs that I’m still trying to understand: online information content, store inventory and sales, site development and maintenance, advertising, marketing, cash flow, collaborations and all the terrifying nuances of proper financial management. 

For the whole last year of knowing I was really going to do this, I’ve swung between euphoria, a sort of surreal disbelief and moments of pure panic. Monday morning was panic. I had what felt like thousands of phone calls and e-mails to make and issues to resolve, people to meet with, a whole marketing strategy to concoct, advertising sales to start in earnest, a store to refine, content to expand.

But, not to spin out the comparison too long, when I’d gotten some of the most immediate chores out of the way, I had to remind myself that you don’t create a marriage and raise the kids all in one day. I’ve been working with my husband on our real marriage for over 21 years now, so I should know better than to want instantaneous results. In business, as in love, enjoying the slow growth and minute but important changes of an everyday life together has to be the real reward.

Or you flame out.

So since flaming out is not an option (see yesterday’s post), I’m trying determinedly to ignore my momentary crises d’esprit (studied French, too) and take heart from little victories: the kindness of friends and colleagues who took the time to attend our launch or send messages; the budding collaborations with other businesses and organizations; the willingness of experts to spend a little time coaching me; the enormous number of brownies left over from the party.

So, my business wisdom for June 17? Never underestimate the healing power of chocolate. Deep breathing helps, too. On with Tuesday ….