Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

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.