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

We passed our first milestone Thursday. After two years of imagining, planning, learning and struggling on every possible level, we at last launched this site you’re looking at. Geniocity.com finally exists somewhere besides our own caffeine-enhanced daydreams.

The party we held that evening for our treasured friends and supporters felt like a combination of theatrical opening night and graduation: With pride and anxiety, we presented our creation, the sum of all our efforts, for the whole world to see. Now, will it – and we - measure up to the future we envision for it? 

The only two things I know for sure about that are, 1) it’s going to take an awful lot more hard work before we find out and 2) an appalling amount of the hard work will involve attracting some money.

Now, I knew money was getting harder and harder to find in the nonprofit sector. It takes a combination of individual and corporate donations, earned income and government grants to keep those groups alive and, as an arts journalist, I’ve seen that running a museum or performance troupe takes about 168 hours a week of fund-raising per person. Many nonprofit groups also find they have to develop money-generating sidelines such as CD sales or gift shops in order to make ends meet.  

But our company is a for-profit.  We looked forward to having a self-sustaining enterprise than would not require us to spend the rest of our lives vying for a place on our knees before the available gazillionaires and filling out grant applications.  (Have you ever applied for a grant? O. mi. god. They come with straws, the faster to suck away your will to live.) And we thought there’d be tons of money available for entrepreneurs in the commercial business world.  

And we were right. There is. The problem is persuading anybody to let you use some of it.

For instance: All those venture-capital firms and business incubators you hear about? They’re interested in backing new ventures … if they’re biomedical outfits developing some new C. diff-eating bacterium that will make investors a $5 billion profit in five years.

Banks? They have small-business loans to offer, if you’re a special case or if you care to put your house on the line as collateral. If you have a house. If you are starting a very small business.

Local governments? Well, they tend to insist that you do something like raise $100,000 before they’ll give you $75,000. The usual Catch-22 – you have to have what you need before you can get it.

What we discovered is that if you want to start a medium-sized business that employs about 15 full-timers and probably won’t make billions, even in 10 years, the official start-up resources aren’t interested, no matter how desperately your community needs companies that create new jobs and bring in outside revenue. So guess what? We found ourselves faced – much like a nonprofit – with what we saw as the choice between wooing individual investors and applying for the few grants that we’d qualify for, or not starting.  

And we had to start. How else would investors be able to see what they’d be investing in? Catch-22 again.  

Yes, we were naive.  Probably like many first-timers, I guess we sort of thought our idea was so irresistible and worthy that stunned investors would just let their checkbooks fall from their limp fingers into our laps. Realizing the truth has been hard and coping with it has been even harder, both emotionally and practically. Some personal adjustments had to be made.

So what have we done? Well, speaking for myself, the most important thing I think I did was to decide that this project was going happen no matter what. My business partner and I have always told each other that failure was not an option and so it wasn’t. Period.

The next most important thing was finding a way to start smaller. With that part, we had a stroke of luck: One of the people we had asked for advice thought up a way for us to get original content on our site without having to set up the entire news operation our plan called for. A full news webzine about creativity and innovation remains our goal – we’re simply developing it in more modest increments that we can pay for ourselves. This adviser rescued us with his idea, a demonstration of the value of talking to many people.

And third, we’re going to keep improving the site and what it offers until we start turning a profit or looking promising to investors, or both.

Our launch, therefore, was kind of like that first Mercury rocket. We can see where we want to go; we’ve got a model that should get us off the ground; and we’ll just keep solving the problems until we build the one that’ll take us to the moon.  Even if we don’t have all the resources yet, we’re going to prove we have the right stuff.

Just how did all this get started?

Well, they say that necessity is the mother of invention, but they’re wrong, whoever they are - it’s frustration that’s the real mother. 

Geniocity.com and its parent company, The Genius Group LLC, came about because I had completely had it with the ossified, lockstep, corporate-style practice of journalism in the United States. I was also about ready to slam the refrigerator door on my own head (it would hurt, but there’d be comfort food) because the book-publishing, theater-producing and music-recording industries were so impossible to break into, try though I had.

Clearly, something needed to be done. Not that I thought I was the one to do it, at least at first – we journalists are famous grumblers and most of us quickly adopt as a lifestyle the find-fault-from-the-sidelines habit that our profession requires to keep us observant but uninvolved. As time passed, though, and as daily newspapers became Titanics, slowly going down while the captains bravely remodeled the staterooms, I realized that I had two choices: die of exasperation, or think up a new kind of boat.

The only problem with that was, I had never built one before. And I had no real money.

OK, two problems.

Yes, I knew something about news-gathering and newsroom operations, certainly, but essentially squat about business. The idea of starting my own consequently had a sort of surreal terror/euphoria to it. But I figured that, as I would with any news story on a topic i didn’t know much about,  I ‘d just do a lot of research.

And the way journalists do research mostly is to talk to people.

So I talked to my friend Dan, who had started a magazine a couple of years earlier. We were both eager to find better ways of informing readers about creativity and of giving artists and inventors some access to the public and the global marketplace that wasn’t controlled by traditional gatekeepers such as agents. The idea of a combined publication and shop grabbed both of us. 

When Dan decided to be a partner in the project, we started talking to everybody else. 

About 8,583,999 meetings later, I can say I highly recommend it to anyone starting a business, journalist or not. I think Dan and I singlehandedly kept four or five of our local coffeeshops solvent by conversing with local experts in law, entrepreneurship, arts, marketing, technology, economic development, design, fund-raising and retail. And in between meeting with all those people, we met with each other to discuss what we wanted our business to be, how we would like to set it up, and how we should go about translating our ideas into practice.

That part of it was the most fun – sitting for hours together over scone crumbs and half-empty cups, concocting ambitious new ways of changing our industries, our communities and the world for the better by creating a project both daringly innovative and head-smackingly logical as a solution to existing needs. 

I’m not saying we didn’t reach information overload after about a year.  (Once all the major themes have emerged, it’s hard to keep your eyes from drifting out of focus.) And at that point, we both instinctively decided we had heard enough to start choosing our own course.  But everything we had heard was useful, because it forced us to think, analyze and accept or reject other people’s points of view, thus solidifying our own. It allowed us to examine each other’s tastes and ideas, recognize each other’s strengths and understand each other’s weaknesses. It helped us find out if we could live with each other, professionally – a sort of business courtship every bit as crucial and nuanced as dating.

In fact, fittingly, when we had found out enough to feel ready for a commitment, the first thing we did was go to a lawyer. It’s important when you start out to know exactly what of legalized relationship you want your company to be. 

But what mattered most to me about all the brainstorming and questioning and note-taking was that, by the end of it, I was sure I wanted to carry out our idea – no small step for a lifelong wage-slave.  And being sure helped me cope when we got to the working-hard-for-no-paycheck part of being entrepreneurs.

And that part is a story for some stormy night when the power is out.     

And that’s why the focus of Geniocity.com is creativity and innovation – because nothing helps us solve our problems and save our sanity 

Where we’re going

It was like this: My business partner and I were lost.

Actually lost, somewhere among the fields and woods of Northeast Ohio. We had driven east of Cleveland to a picturesque country village for a meeting a couple of hours earlier and, on our way back to the city, I had taken a wrong turn.

And now we were both a little wild-eyed, me clutching the wheel as we looped around the two-lane, blacktopped roads on a cloudy summer afternoon, staring hopefully at signposts and at masticating cows, neither of which gave us any helpful information. The signs stated only route numbers – not west or north or anything – and as far as I knew, cows didn’t grow moss.

We needed to be at another meeting, it was getting later and later and neither Dan nor I had any idea which direction we were going.

We were both rattled to begin with, which is probably why I missed the turn. Our meeting in the village had been with a twentysomething designer we hoped could help us with the web site that was to be the core of our new business. But instead of offering us design ideas, this young person had spent an hour and half telling us why he thought our business idea wouldn’t work.

Our reactions had started at surprised and defensive, intensified to dismayed and were building into anguished fury as I aimed the car for – I thought – Cleveland. Deep in agitated discussion, we scarcely noticed that we had traded a view of ruburban yuppie chateaux for 360 degrees worth of sugar maples and late-season corn.

Who the heck did this guy think he was? We absolutely believed in our idea, in the goals of our plan, in the viability of our services and products as moneymakers and good influences on society. Yes, we were first-time entrepreneurs – an arts journalist/creative writer/singer and an arts journalist/artist/teacher – but we knew our fields, we saw a real need for what we wanted to offer and many professional people we trusted had said they liked our concept. What gall this character had, telling us we were wrong.

But what if he was right? He couldn’t be. But … what if he was?

We didn’t really believe he was right. Not really and truly. Yet even before we realized that we had lost our way, we had lost our confidence.

Off course, unnerved and alone (not counting the cows) – if that car ride wasn’t a metaphor for a big part of the entrepreneurial experience in general, I’ll eat my annotated Shakespeare.

On the long, strange trip to owning and running a creative enterprise, I’ve constantly rocketed up and down between bone-deep discouragement and euphoria, but that frantic drive was both the lowest moment and the literal turning point in my attitude towards my project.

I learned a lot about myself in the two horrible hours it took us to make what should have been a 45-minute jaunt – I mean other than that I could use a GPS in my car.
First, I found I was able to get back on track by using common sense and looking for familiar landmarks. Second, I realized that, even though all the conflicting input Dan and I had been given over months of seeking opinions from different experts had been informative in some way, what we had to do now was trust our own judgment and heed only the advice that helped. Naysayers could sleep wid da cows.

And third, I figured out that business isn’t that different from arts or journalism or raising kids or working with humans in any of a zillion other ways you can think of. Everyone you have to deal with thinks his way is the right way. Many people will try to talk you out of, and even prevent you from trying, your way. The overwhelming majority of people don’t have the imagination to understand your way until you show them a working example.

And since finding the road up and out of my pasture-ized personal wilderness, I have decided this: Above all, don’t let anyone talk you out of being innovative. A great many people are comfortable only with what they know and have seen over and over again, but that’s not how humans make progress. I mean, are you reading this in charcoal pictographs on a cave wall?

So welcome to Geniocity.com, where we encourage those who dare to think up new ways of working, expressing themselves and solving problems. From our initial focus on entrepreneurism to the broader information on creativity and innovation that we plan to bring you in time, we hope you’ll find this site helpful, entertaining and inspiring.
And just wait ‘til you hear what we’ve been going through to get this far ….