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

Aren’t you forgetting something? I address this question not to myself - beset by gnatlike swarms of to-do items though I am – but to the greater metropolitan area in which I live.

This area, one G—-r C—d by name, these days finds itself in even more dire economic trouble than usual and so its elected and business leaders keep devising special new flies to tie to the community’s fishing lines, hoping to hook upstart fingerlings that could grow into 900-lb. tuna.  

Only a week or two ago, the latest one was announced: the North Coast Opportunities Technology Fund Pilot Program, a project partnered by NorTech (www.nortech.org) and Cuyahoga County, offering modest-to-medium, low-interest loans to small technology-based companies.     

But just like pretty much all of the various venture-capital firms, grant-giving incubators and other money resources available to start-ups here, this fund supports only companies that make technology, not companies that use technology. And, typically, only those technology-making companies that look like they’re going to turn a Google-sized profit within five years.

Does it matter to anyone in charge here that most people in most communities are employed by smaller firms? That technology-using companies also employ highly-educated and creative knowledge workers in well-paying jobs? That other companies besides biomedical enterprises have growth potential? That it would be just as dangerous to put all of G—-r C—-d’s eggs in the biotech-making basket now as it was to put them in steel a couple of generations ago? 

Where are the resources for the rest of us?  Can this region afford to ignore anybody with a bright idea and the determination to carry it out? Have we learned anything at all from the bad decisions that got us into this wretched, Third-World state of destitution in the first place? 

Will this city’s torrential brain drain continue to include people with non-technology-making ideas and creative abilities?

Some of us want answers. 

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

Little steps.  Well, I’ve been trying to make marketing a habitual part of my daily business life and I think it’s beginning to become ingrained. If guerrilla marketing equals raising awareness one person at a time, then I’m starting to earn my camo.

For a over a year now, I’ve carried business cards at all times – lately, I’ve added brochures to the other 8 lbs. of stuff in my bag, and am beginning to walk like Igor. (Eyegor, for all you other “Young Frankenstein” fans. And what hump?) 

Whenever I make a new acquaintance or encounter some uninitiated friend, I bend their tolerant ears with a quick description of Geniocity.com and whip out those materials. I try to be as conversational and light about the elevator speech as I can, because I just don’t think friends or strangers appreciate having to listen to a sales pitch, but at least each of them hears the name Geniocity.com and gets a general idea what it’s about.

In the last few days, I’ve talked to quite a few people. Another 10 or 15 down – about 6 billion to go. 

I’m also beginning to work on marketing collaborations, starting with such things as trade-outs (providing free services to another organization that in turn provides some to you). Of course, I’m also trying hard to use all the online viral tricks I’ve heard about to get our name around, but am working on local advertising, as well.

One place you should see the Geniocity.com name soon is on the website of IngenuityFest Cleveland (www.ingenuitycleveland.com), an annual celebration of arts, technology and cool combinations of both that runs July 25-27 downtown in Cleveland’s Playhouse Square area. Like Geniocity.com, IngenuityFest aims to show how fascinating, fun and important creativity can be, especially when it involves using cutting-edge science and media as means for artistic self-expression. This is Ingenuity’s fourth year - I’ve been to every one of them and they offer an outstanding mix of performances, installations, exhibits, street happenings and activities for people of every age and creative taste, so if you can get to Cleveland next week for it, do.

Maybe you’ll see me - I’ll be the one with the big bag, the bent back and the brochure in my hand.  

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

Caught by the web. When my partner and I started taking our first serious steps toward creating Geniocity.com, we were excited about everything we hoped to do with it.

We wanted to bring everyone fascinating news about the cutting edge of creativity and innovation. We wanted to spark the public’s imagination and support artists and inventors by selling terrific original work. And we wanted to do all that on a website of striking beauty, accessibility and technological daring.

All of those goals have presented us with huge challenges that will keep Geniocity.com evolving and improving for what I’m determined will be its very long, successful existence. But of all the obstacles we’ve encountered, none have surprised me more than the problems related to website design.

A big part of that has been due to my own near-total inexperience with web technology. The experts we talked to early on had to explain the basics of how the web is set up before I could understand why they thought some of my ideas wouldn’t work.

But along with the grid and HTML and Flash and search optimization, I also discovered that, in spite of the relative newness of their medium, web magicians had developed conventional wisdom, just like any other industry. When I would ask, “Why not?” about my ideas, the response I often got was, “Because that’s the way it’s done and that’s what people expect.”

But I don’t want to do what people expect, at least not all the time. I want to startle and delight them. I want to provoke and intrigue them. I want them to say “What’s that?!” and not be able to resist finding out. And the only thing I want them always to expect from us is amazing content in an interactive visual setting that makes them say “Wow!” every single day.

We do not lack for ambition at Geniocity.com.

So I’ve been a little shocked to find how formulaic most web design and construction are and how difficult it is to find ways to create on screen what I see in my head. I’ve also realized that a great deal of what we want to pioneer – like everything else – depends on having enough money to develop it.

But on a frontier such as the Internet and especially on this site dedicated to creativity, the answer to “How do we do this?” simply can’t be “It’s impossible” or “It’s just not done.” The answer has to be “Let’s try something new.”

So I keep trying to experiment, as our bank account and my still-limited knowledge allow. Though Geniocity.com already differs in some ways from other sites, it’s not a tenth as different – and cool and enthralling – as it will to be someday, if I and the talented people working with me keep insisting on trying something new.

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

People are so nice. They keep asking me how it’s going.

Unfortunately, I don’t know. I mean, really – going compared to what? The evolution of humankind? Traffic on I-480? How long it takes to dry my hair on a damp day? 

I have no idea how long it should take to get a business humming. Some days, it feels as if I’ve made huge leaps. Most of the time, it all seems to be happening at the same rate that dead leaves turn into coal.

For every significant task I accomplish – and there have been a good number - there must be at least three or four imperceptibly crawling months of trying to get the stars to align. And as soon as one thing finally comes together, innumerable others snarl up in a vast, looming, cosmic pile that seems impossible to sort out. 

This must be why business people so often sound like coaches or televangelists or maybe Henry V on St. Crispin’s Day  - I think they’re terrified that if they don’t egg themselves on every second, they’ll just lie down and die from sheer despair over the giant tangle they face.

I find that I egg myself on, too. And, as surprised as I am to be an entrepreneur in the first place, I’m even more astonished to find that the motivation is necessary and works. It isn’t always cheerful – actually, it’s mostly internal bullying of a highly insulting nature, especially when I’m trying to get myself out of bed in the morning. But if I keep telling myself that I can do it and that the reason I can do it is because I have to do it, and that I have to do it because otherwise I’ll both starve and suffer terminal humiliation, then eventually I just force myself do it. Whatever the “it” for the day is. 

I guess this is called negative reinforcement.   

By contrast, Jay Conrad Levinson, the author of “Guerrilla Marketing,” adopts one of those supremely confident sergeant/cheerleader tones in his book, alternating glorious bribery (“A bigger pot of gold than you ever imagined” !) and stern admonishment (“maintain your focus“) until he’s whipped you into a state of high-tension zeal for the battle you have to face.  

I don’t recommend reading it before bed unless you like lying rigid as a plank with your hands fisted all night. But once you’re up, reluctantly or not, Levinson – and a big cup of coffee – can be just what a struggling entrepreneur needs to stay off the ledge and on the job.  Especially on a Monday, when hardly anything seems to be going at all. 

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

Seeing green. Creative House Studios is so cool, you might want to take up filmmaking just to get a look at the place.

A new, soon-to-open facility run by creative entrepreneurs Peter Sampson and Johnny Wu, it occupies a quiet spot on Cleveland’s East 40th Street that scarcely hints at the exciting promise of what’s going on inside: It holds the largest green-screen studio in Northeast Ohio that’s open to everyone.

The video on their website (www.CreativeHouseStudios.com) can give you a glimpse of this incredible hulking space. But you have to stand in the center of the wide, curved, solid-bright-green chamber with its 22-foot-high ceiling arching overhead to get the full impact.

Filmmakers and videographers use green screens for special effects. When actors perform in front of (or in this case, surrounded on three sides by) a green screen, computer technicians can take the footage of their work and drop out the green color, substituting any manner of other recorded images – from scenery to animation, graphic designs or other performances – in the area “behind ” the actors.

So live action can be made to look as if it’s taking place on Mt. Everest, on the moon, underwater, in a cartoon world of dancing mushrooms or wherever. But until that stuff gets put in, the performers look as if they’re moving around in a kind of nuclear-green outer space.  

And feel that way too, as I can attest – on Wednesday, I got a chance to walk around in the studio and the intense lights and vivid color, combined with the curving walls that seamlessly become the floor, make you feel as if you’re a floating extraterrestrial.  Or something that got swallowed by the Jolly Green Giant.

What’s extra thrilling about this venture is that Sampson and Wu, who have other careers as a marketing specialist and a film editor, respectively, recognized a film-community need and are filling it by creating a facility that will 1) probably prove affordable for most filmmakers; 2) encourage mass-media artists to be even more creative because so much is possible there; and 3) help grow the success of the local film community by increasing the sophistication and appeal of their work. There could even be a 4) – helping the economy and self-image of a discouraged city. 

What’s more, I’d bet that Sampson and Wu will end up seeing green of another kind.  What better way to do well than by doing good? 

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

No way to do business.  For several days this week, I’ve worked with Independent Pictures, a nonprofit organization, on its summer film-production internship program, which teaches filmmaking and production-staff skills for free to those who wish to learn them. 

Auditioning actors is one of the many processes required to create the film the interns will eventually help shoot. It’s something I’ve witnessed a number of times before as a playwright and as a theater critic, but I’d never observed it with the eyes of an entrepreneur until yesterday.

Here’s what I saw: Actors not showing up for audition appointments that they themselves scheduled.

That kind of behavior would be highly unprofessional in any industry. In show business, it’s career suicide.

Actors, whether they know it or not, are entrepreneurs running one-person businesses. They provide a service to as many customers as will hire them, a service that’s usually offered by too many suppliers for the number of job assignments available. Competition for paying parts in plays, films, commercials and other types of shows can be especially fierce because so few acting jobs actually pay anything. 

You’d think that if a performer took the time to contact a film’s producers and schedule an audition for a paid role, he or she would make every effort to be there; call to cancel if a conflict arose; or at the very, very least, call the next day, apologize profusely for missing the appointment and make sure to keep the rescheduled date. 

But at auditions on Tuesday and Wednesday, several people just didn’t show up. Almost no one called to explain and one of the people who did call to reschedule didn’t appear the second time, either.

Now, practically any industry is a pretty small world, but film and theater communities have to be the most interwoven little societies on the planet. People tend to know or hear all about each other and word gets around fast when someone turns out to be lazy, difficult or feckless.

These people who skipped their auditions have foolishly blackballed themselves – and not just with the rather well-connected makers of this one small film. What do these actors think other producers and directors will hear if anyone mentions their names in the vicinity of the filmmakers they stood up?

No one is going to hire a person who can’t be counted on to show up. In business, your dependability makes the difference between succeeding and losing everything.

That applies to artists, too. So, actors? Act smart. 

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

Hot glass, cool person.  One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about being a journalist is getting to meet interesting people all the time.  Lucky for me, that hasn’t changed now that I’ve morphed into a media and retail entrepreneur – in just the last few weeks, I’ve had a chance to meet several kinds of visual artists, a law professor and a marketing consultant.

Today it was a glass artist named Mikey, a great guy who took the time to show me not only his finished pieces, but also how he creates them. 

On the end of a long pipe, he gathered glowing glass the consistency of hot fudge from the well of a furnace white-orange with heat. Deftly twirling the pipe to keep the glass from oozing off, he blew a small bubble into it, shaping the radiant glob with thick, water-soaked pads of newspaper that sizzled and smoked at the contact. While he worked, periodically reheating and reshaping the glass, he kept colored glass chips warming on a hot plate; when the main piece had become a solid bell, he took a metal stylus and poked the chips into the mass, creating blooms of color magnified by the piece’s thick, curved  outer surface.  

Then he swung and spun the pipe, elongating the glass into an abstracted triangle, precursor to a tri-colored vase.  As Mikey worked, a huge fan sent some – but only some – of the furnace heat through the big open doors of his warehouse studio into the sultry July afternoon.

It’s a hot job – Mikey jokes about he weight he loses. But the creativity and skill he demonstrates can bend your mind as easily as he bends the melted glass. And is that cool or what?        

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

As much art as business.  I spent all day Monday thinking about film.

In a conference room, I sat with 20 people of all ages experiencing their first day in the summer film-production internship program run by Independent Pictures (www.ohiofilms.com), a nonprofit indie-film presentation and education group.  I was there to talk about writing; the interns’ program will conclude with a hands-on shoot of a short screenplay I wrote called “Wall of Fame.”

 But after my explanation of how to find good script ideas and what components make a story compelling for other people to experience, the questions that followed had much more to do with how to get work produced than how to create it in the first place. Like entrepreneurs, they wanted to find out how to build their skills into a career, what the pitfalls are, where to find funding and sponsorship and attention for their projects, how to parlay their early attempts into bigger and better-paid ones – whom to talk to, whom to cultivate.      

It’s not new these days for people to equate artists with small-business owners and to assume that the business world has valuable survival skills to teach artists. But it struck me, as I encouraged the interns to create something worthwhile first and worry about the marketing and business politics second, that maybe we ought to be equating businesspeople with artists, instead.

A quick googling of the phrase “creativity and innovation” last night brought up pages and pages of URLs – nearly every one of them a business-related site. Wouldn’t your expect those words to connect you to artistic sites, too?  And scientific ones?

Yet the business community – which very seldom seems to view what it does as having anything in common with arts and sciences – seems to own that phrase.  

I think it would have a beneficial effect on both sectors if business people began to recognize that entrepreneurship is a form of art and invention and that they are artist/researchers of a special kind. For one thing, it might help dispel that lingering biz-com prejudice that the sciences are for incomprehensible eggheads and the arts are merely whipped cream and glitter – of no consequence and requiring none of the “hard” skills business people value most.

For another, business people might develop enough respect for their own “artistic” sides to appreciate what artists and inventors can teach them about creativity. The overtly creative people might discover that business types are not necessarily the money-obsessed, calculator-toting, imaginationless suits they tend to think they are.

They might end up working together more and coming up with better results for everyone.

That’s part of what Geniocity.com is for – to help people tear down those walls between their east and west – left and right – brains. So much of creativity is simply changing your usual way of thinking.

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

And here’s the one-word answer: exhausting. I thought that if I planned everything properly and took adequate time in getting going, I’d have a smoothly running, manageable organization right away – one with sufficent capital and personnel for well-regulated, Monday-through-Friday operations. We optimistic perfectionists tend to think that way, I guess.

My husband, on the other hand, turned to me one day early on in my plan-writing process and said he’d always had the impression that starting a business meant working 18-hour days and seven-day weeks for years while maxing out credit cards and living on peanut butter.

I hate to admit it, but guess who was right?

At least about the hours. Since about March, when we of The Genius Group LLC decided on the launch date for Geniocity.com, I’ve kissed my evenings and weekends farewell as I’ve struggled to cope with the many aspects of this venture and the unruly mob of unforeseen difficulties. It certainly has helped that we had a plan in place, but it’s the same kind of help that Navy pilots get from landing lights on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier. At night. In a storm with rain and high seas.

So, I haven’t gotten much time off. It’s been starting to tell on my spirits, brain cells and ability to cope. 

Which is why I took two full days off this past weekend. Really off – I didn’t even check my e-mail more than once in 48 hours. I read a novel, saw fireworks with my family, went biking and to the beach. I slept more that six hours for three nights in a row.

And it helped. Duh, you say.

But it can be almost impossible to make yourself stop and rest when you’re fighting for an idea and for your economic and professional life. Someone has to deal with everything and when you’re starting a business, that someone is you.  Most of time, I’m running on pure will power, because I’ve burned through all my other natural sources of energy.

It does catch up with you. What I’m finding is that I’m going to have to plan, and psychologically aim for, certain weekends – or even parts of weekends – off. When I was employed by someone else, I did this with vacations, like everybody else. Who doesn’t keep him- or herself going by counting the days until spring break or Thanksgiving?  

It’s just that, for now anyway, my vacations have gotten a lot smaller. I can only hope that looking forward to one Saturday off every six weeks or so will have the same effect as knowing Christmas is coming.   

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

Fireworks.  What a great way to end the week – not only is tomorrow Independence Day, but things are lighting up businesswise right now, too.

After Tuesday’s unhappy news about some artwork I had hoped to get for The Geniocity Shop, I’ve had encouraging conversations with three other creative people who appear interested in submitting pieces, including our first writer. And though the entrepreneurial work still seems ceaseless, the holiday will give me a few needed extra hours to deal with big-picture issues, such as marketing.

It’s been tough to decide how to get all of these issues handled.  

Everything exists in a chicken-and-egg circle of interdependence: It’s hard to increase news content and store inventory until you’re earning regular profits and you can’t earn regular profits until you get traffic, advertising and sales and you can’t get those until you have great content and inventory. It’s like not being able to get a job until you’ve proved you can hold down a job. The old double bind.

Thus, it’s hard to know where on the circle to start. Basically, everything needs to be done at once. But the reality is, you have to put off some things, at least briefly.

And now it’s finally time for me to start figuring out how to effectively tell the world about Geniocity.com. So I took Will Limkemann’s advice and bought Jay Conrad Levinson’s “Guerrilla Marketing” and now I have three days to get through it. 

I think I’ll fire up a sparkler to read by. Happy 4th and see you Monday.