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

Keep going, even when you can’t. The whole culture of the business world amounts to can-do optimism. Back in the Roaring Twenties era of Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt,” the word for it was pep. People who didn’t have it were dreary, defeatist weenies.

Not much has changed, I think. The business community sympathizes with failure if it’s a manly, go-down-fighting, heroic kind of failure. But it recoils from despair. Despair and desperation are for dimwitted crybabies who don’t have the cunning or sheer guts to tough their way through. You can complain about whatever goes wrong and agitate for a better deal and business people will admire you for it as long as you’re forceful. But let your shoulders slump or your lip quiver and there’s suddenly as big a circle of cleared floor around you as if you had “Leper” stenciled on your shirt. 

You don’t have to have dissolved in tears on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to know this.

So you have to get out of bed every day and make those phone calls and keep those appointments, even when you’d rather just wind yourself in the sheet and be carried out. You have to think of your entrepreneurial struggle as less Bataan Death March and more the conquering of Everest.

You don’t want to. I know. 

So here are some things to get you out of bed every day when bed feels like your last handhold above the crater of nervous collapse:

1) Fuzzy teeth – This is the bell and your dentist is Pavlov. Don’t even pretend you can lie there when you know you have to brush.

2) Breakfast – Your stomach gets a vote, too, even though you’re telling it that your brain is the only body part registered. Climb out and eat (is there pie ?!) But do it before you de-fuzz those fangs.

3) Money – Do you want to have anything in the house for breakfast? Do you want to have a house? 

4) Kids – Yeah, you need to earn money for them, too. But more important, if you lie in bed long enough, they’ll come join you there and then you’ll never get any peace, particularly if they bring the portable DVD player and eight seasons worth of “Family Guy” with them.

5) Your calendar – Is it today or tomorrow that the plumber’s coming to replace the stack in the upstairs bathroom? Surely, it was tomor… Damn. It’s today. It’s today, isn’t it?  

6) Humiliation – Never underestimate the power of worrying what your friends and neighbors and associates and clients and large judgmental family will say if you wimp out now. And if that doesn’t goose you out from under your down quilt, just wait till they start phoning you with advice.

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

Work hard, play … never. Among all the other things I have to work at as an entrepreneur, the most cruelly ironic one is relaxing. I think I’ve forgotten how to do it.

I desperately want to, I know I should, but the chores and worries pile up so high that I just can’t. Unless I’m completely comatose (usually by 1 a.m. after posting for the day) or getting a three-day weekend (which gives me the middle day free of residual or anticipatory anxiety), I spend what down time I have mentally sorting, scheduling, analyzing - and often dreading – tasks. 

I find I seldom think any more about what I actually want to do – just what I should be doing, and how much of it I can cram in before some other obligation intrudes. It’s a little scary to think that work has taken control of my brain, sort of like that rock-shrimp-looking thing that crawled into Mr. Chekhov’s ear in ”Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan.”

Yeah, true, I’m a hopeless Type A. I like my house clean, my desk organized, my work completed and my conscience clear. I sweat the details. And I was like that even before I started a business.

But entrepreneurship has made me a genuine workaholic and I have two diametrically opposed takes on that. The first is, I know I can’t keep this pace up forever – I need to stay rested, healthy and moderately sane as much for my business as for a decent life. Now here’s the second: I also have to admit that workaholism is what gets the entrepreneurial job done.

And done is what that job has to be. So I guess I’ll keep limiting my daily fun to nuking out spam, reloading my stapler and tearing out the little paper tabs in my day planner (confetti!). For now, stopping to smell the roses just reminds me that I need to spray them for Japanese beetles.  

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

Not quite ready for our close-up, Mr. DeMille. I just found out that Geniocity.com has been chosen for recognition by a publication I’ll leave nameless for now because, under the circumstances, I don’t think it would be at all sporting to scoop it.

My first reaction? Pure thrill. My second-wave reaction? Pure Woody Allen: Do I want my venture belong to a club that would have it as a member?

This isn’t some movie-grade inferiority complex kicking in. I’m quite proud of the imagination and relentless work it has taken to get Geniocity started and I believe with every subatomic particle of my being that it’s a great idea, both for making money and for making the world a better place.

But being an entrepreneur – which is not unlike being a parent - I’m exquisitely aware of just how much size, maturity, depth and sophistication my newborn needs to acquire before its potential, and my hopes, are fulfilled.

Geniocity.com is still very young, not even a full seven weeks yet, and it’s only a suggestion of its future self. So isn’t it a little too soon for any accolade? I wonder, shouldn’t we let it get it over its colic and cradle cap first?

But if my inner nebbish can’t imagine why anyone with any judgment would think Geniocity is good enough yet, my inner stage mother can’t wait for the limelight to shine on my brilliant, tiny star-in-the-making. And, fortunately for me, stage-parenting isn’t as reprehensible a thing to inflict on a young enterprise as it is on a child.

So if the applause is kindly meant, I’ll somewhat apprehensively consider pushing my baby business out for this bow and hope that what people recognize in it are its infancy and its promise.

One thing for sure: With all these feelings of inadequacy, no one here will be getting a swelled head from the attention.

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

Legally creative. Many changes are coming to Geniocity.com. Any business needs to grow and evolve, but especially one championing imagination and innovation, so we’re working hard to turn this site into a place where you can expect to find something fresh and different every time you visit.

To that end, I’m proud to announce that Peter Friedman, associate professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, will join our roster of bloggers starting Monday, Aug. 2.

Peter, who specializes in legal analysis and writing at Case (click here) and regularly guest-teaches in such disparate places as The Netherlands and Detroit, will write for Geniocity.com about the creative cutting edge of the legal profession.

For those of you who think the law and creativity are separated by continents, if not galaxies, let me point out that technology, government policy, social trends and other forces constantly require the law to adapt in unforeseen ways. Look what Internet access has done to copyright law: How will artists get paid for their work if everyone can find music, pictures, writing and video for free on the Internet? Consider the questions that surveillance technology – security cameras, satellites, GPS-equipped cell phones and cars – raises about our constitutional right to privacy. And which locker room – men’s or women’s? – should an as-yet-surgically-unchanged transsexual be required to use? 

A furiously changing world demands some pretty inventive thinking about the rules we live by. Peter will explore that thinking and unveil the latest, fascinating twists reshaping our legal landscape and our lives. 

So look to Geniocity for briefs of a different cut.  And that won’t be all.  

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

Riding it out. As the economy gets grimmer and grimmer, I’m moved to wonder by what brilliance of timing it was that I decided to start a business in 2008. Investors are zipping their pockets shut; consumers can barely afford food and gasoline; companies of all kinds have slashed their budgets.

Hardly a great time to be selling advertising and creative work such as art. 

And yet, I may have less cause for worry than many business owners. At only six weeks old, Geniocity.com hasn’t grown enough yet to require much overhead: no rent, no full-time employees, few regular monthly costs. Our big expenditures tend to be somewhat elective - design work, legal fees, promotional stuff.

I believe my company can get through these bad times by being extremely careful about the rate of our site development and retail expansion. We may suffer somewhat from our inability to grow as fast as planned, but I don’t think we’re in any real danger. With our bare-bones budget, Geniocity.com should to be able to hang on until policy, politics or the sheer passage of time cures our national financial crisis.

But that doesn’t mean the crisis doesn’t scare me. And we all have more to worry about than our individual enterprises – from bank lending practices to weaning ourselves off oil, there’s an awful lot that has to change before the economy can truly recover.

So what I’m planning to do to help Geniocity.com survive is basically what I would have done anyway, only more so: Take things slowly; stay within my means; choose next steps very carefully; and rely on my own legwork and creativity. The next few months aren’t going to be much fun for any of us, but like any challenge, this economy will force us to think and invent our way out of trouble.

By the time things turn around, we may find that we haven’t just survived – by coming up with creative solutions to our problems, we may actually have leaped past our original plans and expectations. 

And no matter how incrementally Geniocity.com has to evolve, we’re planning to be your source of news and ideas on all that innovative thinking and leaping.      

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

Not farewell. I want to say a fond au revoir to Abby Maier, who is leaving her job as the leader of Cleveland’s COSE Arts Network to start a new life as a mom in rural Vermont. Though she will no longer be representing COSE on Geniocity.com, Abby will be returning to this site in 2009 to blog about creativity from the artist’s point of view.

That’s a point of view she knows well. Before joining COSE, Abby earned a degree in art, specializing in fabric-based work. She’ll resume that creative side of her life in Vermont and – because not all inventive art occurs in large metropolitan areas – will give us some needed perspective on what’s happening creatively in the vast areas of the U.S. that aren’t paved and overpopulated.

Just as her own artistic background informed Abby’s work at COSE, so her COSE experience and close connection to the issues, policies and practices of arts entrepreneurship will enrich her commentary on how artists function creatively in small towns. 

Geniocity.com owes Abby more than a “see you later” and a thank-you for her posts. We are deeply grateful for the help she gave us, as she did so many other COSE Arts Network members, in pursuing our entrepreneurial dreams: finding resources and advisors for us, keeping us regularly tuned in to COSE’s many helpful networking and educational events and cheering us on.

As the pioneering first leader of the Arts Network, Abby helped COSE create something unique in this nation: a place for artists at the table of business, a place that honors and supports the economic role  artists play in the Greater Cleveland community. The city may not be wealthy right now, but it is rich in a kind of arts-business innovation that the rest of you around the world will want to give a second look. Abby and COSE, along with Cleveland’s Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, are making this part of Northeast Ohio a home of unequaled resources for the arts and those who practice them.

So I wish her well and wish her back at Geniocity.com soon. Abby, you’re the best.

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

Missed opportunities.  I realized yesterday that I wasn’t going to be able to promote Geniocity.com at an event that’s coming up this week. I had really wanted to do that.

I’ve also realized at least once a week for months that I can’t network at some great-sounding gathering, can’t pay for or man a booth at a conference, can’t get logo-embossed promotional goods - can’t take advantage of a thousand different chances to get my company name and business noticed.  

The reason is almost always lack of time or money, the two things any entrepreneur tends to run out of. Because I have only two hands and they’re busy juggling every aspect of my start-up, as well as the demands of home, extended family and consulting work, I have almost no spare moments or change. I also quite frankly run out of energy.

The situation feels like a vicious circle to me, because I know my business would grow faster if word about it got around more effectively. And a growing business might mean more money and time – or just more money – to spend on proper promotional materials and events (there it is again – the darned chicken and egg).

But if the choice I face amounts to making dinner for my kids or getting to a business reception, most of the time the kids have to – and should – win.

And what would you pick if you had enough cash either to pay your software bills this month or to purchase 100 plastic gizmos with your logo on them? Yeah, me too - the software.  

So I have to let a lot of valuable breaks pass me by.  I hate that. I’d like to get past the stage of being able to reach people only one at a time, a state a friend of mine in politics once described as “cutting the grass with a plastic knife.” 

But I believe if I reach enough individuals, I’ll look up at some point and discover that Geniocity.com has a following. And some wherewithal. And maybe you’ll find me at some future year’s big July event, sitting in my own booth with a whole array of logo-ed gizmos to hand you. I promise the mini-flashlights will be really awesome. 

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

Could we go faster, please?  I’m an act-now person in a wait-a-minute world. And I have to say that the amount of time it takes to get other people moving just about kills me.

Because starting this business of mine requires input, decisions and actions from so many, I frequently end up on the strategic equivalent of hold while those guys get around to getting around to getting back to me.

Take yesterday. I had messages and questions in with at least a dozen people: writers I’m trying to recruit, artists whose work I’d like to have submitted to our shop, advertising folks, tech experts. I need to hear from them so I can take my next steps, resolve issues, keep things going.  Not one of them got in touch.

Of course,  I know they’re probably being held up by dozens of other not-getting-to-it people – or chores or other problems – in their own lives, so it’s not as if I blame them, exactly. But I do constantly feel as if my feet have been encased in lead weights.

I can clearly see where I need to go and what I have to accomplish and I can’t budge. It’s agonizing. 

The only way I’ve found to deal with that is to find other tasks to start. By the time those stall out, there’s likely to be some movement in one of the earlier situations I was hoping to deal with the week before.

And so things creep forward. I take deep breaths and try to lower my heart rate.  But there are plenty of days when I think the answer to our national energy problems is to replace oil with the steam generated by my frustration.  

That would solve my capitalization problems, too.    

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

Not yet ready for prime time? Got my spirits severely malleted Friday, along with my ego. I went to a consultation with a marketing firm to find out what creative, hopefully inexpensive ideas these folks might have for me about getting the word out on Geniocity.com. They told me I shouldn’t do any marketing yet because the site isn’t good enough.

Ow.

Maybe that blow to my self-esteem caused my personality to split, because now I both see their point and reject it, too. 

Yes, the site is not nearly as rich with interactive information and creative merchandise as it will be one day, if I keep breathing long enough. And yes, I agree that I should not build expectations that Geniocity. com can’t meet right now, in its first phase.

But don’t you have to start somewhere short of perfection? 

And if the answer is no …  then when do you start marketing? Does your enterprise really have to be glorious first? And if so, wouldn’t that mean that only businesses with enormous start-up funding could actually open for business?

I’ve heard of many companies that started in garages, spare rooms or on kitchen tables. I’m pretty sure that the likes of Google and Amazon.com didn’t spring from their founders’ imaginations fully formed and visually designed with endless layers of interactive features and every book or site in the world all ready to be accessed from their pages.

So when did they start marketing? And if it wasn’t right away, how did they ever grow into the global behemoths that they are now?

I know I’m asking a lot of questions here, but I’m honestly confused. I thought the idea was to start building name recognition for my business from the beginning, even though it has a long way to go before it even faintly resembles the spectacularly creative, fascinating, have-to-visit-every-day site I have in mind. 

How else do I build the site traffic necessary to attract advertisers and sell some merchandise? Without ad and store sales, how do I afford the development the site needs to grow?

Is this yet another one of these chicken-and-egg situations? Do I have to have a magnificent site in order to get a magnificent site?

Well, here’s reality: I don’t have a magnificent site yet and I’m going to have to keep changing it tiny bit by tiny bit until it’s outstanding enough to catch people’s attention in a big way. And I don’t see how the site or I can survive until that point unless we slowly build a customer base for the fewer-but-good services and products we can offer and bring in revenue.

So I guess I’m going to have to market my imperfect business anyway, keep trying to sell my vision of what this thing can be and risk that some people will be disappointed in what it is now. I’ll just keep inviting them back every time Geniocity.com gets a little better. And maybe someday, they’ll discover it’s great.   

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

Learning to be a good employer. Ok, I don’t pretend to know yet how to be a good employer.  Our company doesn’t even officially have employees yet; we work with independent contractors.

But my own experiences on corporate payrolls sure have taught me a thing or two about how to avoid being  a bad employer.

What have I learned? That employers are stupidly self-defeating to treat their staffs as automatons instead of humans with lives and needs. Some compassion and flexibility go a long way toward keeping employees well, happy, feeling respected and able to focus on their jobs. You need to let them have occasional and reasonable amounts of time to pick up children, get to the dentist, take a catnap if they’re exhausted, head for home early if a blizzard’s brewing or if the furnace-repair person has to be let in.

I’ve learned that you can’t respond to those who work the hardest by dumping more work on them just because you don’t trust the unproductive ones to come through. It’s not an honor to be overburdened and underpaid.

I’ve especially learned that companies have to be teams where everyone’s ideas are sought and listened to; where people are trusted, given some autonomy and encouraged to communicate and work together effectively and enjoyably; where initiative is rewarded, not exploited; and where dedicated people with great skills and attitudes – not political operators  - are recognized, rewarded and nurtured.     

 Easier said than done? Maybe. But the point is to try, and so many employers these days don’t ever seem to. They seem to think of their people as paper towels: identical, essentially worthless, there to absorb all the company’s messes, subhuman, disposable. That’s a crime, both morally and managerially. It takes relatively little sacrifice to engage people’s loyaltiesand good will, and you lose so much productivity and competitiveness if they feel undervalued and mistreated.     

Yesterday, I got a chance to put some of my convictions into action. One of the people who’s been helping me with Geniocity.com will soon be leaving, going along on a family move to another state. A talented, bright, versatile young person, she has qualities I didn’t want Geniocity to lose. So I came up with an idea (creativity!) that I thought would allow her to try a new, interesting role on our site and maintain her professional profile in the world while enjoying the flexible schedule necessary to getting settled in a new place and a new life.

Fortunately for me and Geniocity, my idea was met with enthusiasm. And so I think I’ve not only retained a needed and valuable teammate, I’ve also gained an intriguing new site feature for our visitors – all while demonstrating to my teammate how much I appreciate her, want to earn her loyalty and help her succeed. 

And this doesn’t mean I’m saintly or something. What I hope it means is that I care about the people I work with and want the best for them – and thus for my company. I like to think that’s a lot smarter – and nicer – than crumpling up and throwing away those humanoid paper towels.