The nightmare before Halloween

I’m writing this on what we who grew up in Northern New Jersey always called Mischief Night – the evening before Halloween, when the juvenile delinquents and probably a few dubious adults would rampage through neighborhoods with toilet paper, eggs and salt, often doing real damage to people’s property.

No one with any sense went out on Mischief Night – or let their cars or lawn furniture stay out, either.  

By the time we were all costumed for trick-or-treating on Halloween, most of the parents had already spent long daylight hours seething and swearing – scrubbing dried yolk off the siding, digging up patches of salt-burned grass and reporting the occasional blown-up mailbox to the police. When it grew dark, they took giggling, shrieking packs of us from door to door, holding our hands, guiding us with flashlights and making sure no one’s bag developed a tragic, candy-leaking hole. Halloween was fun-scary, safe.

But the grown-ups couldn’t shield us from Mischief Night. We absorbed their worry - a frightening sense of unpredicability and lawlessness was in the air. Vandals were about. Our homes felt threatened. We knew there’d be trouble somewhere, maybe for us.

It’s been Mischief Night in America for a long time now. There’s egg to clean off our faces from having allowed the Bush Administration and its favored high-rollers to dismantle the safeguards and flout the processes protecting all of us from financial, environmental and military-industrial rapine. Salt’s been plowed into the ground, killing or stunting everything we need to keep healthy, from our incomes and climate to our international alliances.  

Though their spree is ending, they set off a last big cherry bomb for us in the milk box. Take a look:  It’s a lot more terrifying than a ghost. And we who are the grown-ups now – the thinkers, the doers, the earners and the voters – must respond to it by being entrepreneurial about more than our businesses and careers. We have to be entrepreneurial about our nation and the world.

Why? Because we have to do better than simply pull down the toilet paper and repair the damage. We have to make sure the delinquents never get another chance to damage things in the first place. So it’s going to be up to those of us with imagination and enterprise – and aren’t you one? - to invent new policies and strategies, new and better ways of creating wealth that encourage people to do their best, rather than their worst, and reward them when they do. 

It’s like the difference between clear-cutting old-growth forest and sustainably farming trees. Or between selling people risky mortgages and investing in neighborhood revitalization.

Too many people want to get rich doing what’s cheap, fast, easy or sexy, no matter how disastrous the consequences. We have to help people understand that there’s just as much money to be made from creative services and products that save our dying environment and build happy, flourishing lives, families and communities.

We have to make this the last Mischief Night we’ll ever need to call by that name.

Angels, earn your wings

Why is reality never like the movies?

Specifically, why is it so for hard for an entrepreneur like me to get an angel when George Bailey didn’t even have to ask?  From what I remember of “It’s a Wonderful Life”, all George had to be was suicidally frustrated and hopeless and presto! He found a kindly silver-haired guy talking him off the bridge and making his life seem worthwhile again. 

I think could work myself down to that level of despair. Of course, I’d want my angel to show up with a big check made out to The Genius Group LLC, along with the usual store of life-affirming wisdom. 

Anyone?

Anyone?

I’m not hearing any bells.

I keep hoping that my state or local government will finally create a program that connects entrepreneurs like me with angel investors. There was even a story about angels in the online New York Times yesterday saying that a report by the National Governors’ Association Center for Best Practices finds that state officials are working to develop more ways to help entrepreneurs find private investors. I quote:

“Among other strategies, this includes creating seminars on private equity investment, connecting entrepreneurs with existing educational opportunities, forming statewide angel networks, and appointing angel investors to state economic advisory boards, the report said.” 

I got a excited for a nanosecond, until I saw the rest of the story:

“Angel investing in entrepreneurial ventures can range anywhere from $5,000 to $100,000, with investors typically backing new medical devices, software, biotechnology, business services, IT and energy initiatives.”

Rats. Rats and mice with cheese on top. That’s why I keep saying “an entrepreneur like me” – I’m not in new medical devices, software, biotechnology, business services, IT and energy initiatives. I’m in new media, wanting to inform the public about all those technological innovations and many other kinds of creative developments. And so my state officials in Ohio (oops, did I name the place?), along with the other set of 49, apparently couldn’t care less whether my business and other nonbiotech, non-IT companies fulfill their great potential or not.

Guess we’re going to have to keep trying to do it for ourselves, huh? Boo! Happy Halloween!

It’s scary out there. Will I ever find someone(s) with the imagination, vision and enthusiasm to materially join me in this great quest to change how the world perceives and practices creativity? To revolutionize human problem-solving and change our societies into peaceful, constructive cultures?

Does anybody here see what I see? (Let’s count how many shows I reference today. That was “1776.” Title, not tally.)  

Anybody? Nnnnnot yet, apparently.

Ok, so – Here’s a guide I found online to help those of us on whose lines of business the venture people and programs spit. There are probably more, but this is a start. And remember: There’s no money anywhere right now except for the eight hours every third day when stockholders have taken their puppy uppers. But we can be prepared with strategies for when the money comes back, Little Sheba. Or bahk. Or ba-a-a-ak.  We hope.

And for those of you who were counting, the correct answer is six.

Pride or groceries?

I had to do something kind of weird today. At least, it made me feel weird. It was an entrepreneurial move, but in a direction I wish things didn’t have to go.

As any regular readers of this blog know, I launched Geniocity.com in June. … right into the maw of a howling, crack-of-doom economy. I guess it takes most start-ups a while to get on track and develop sales, but with people having essentially no money to spend right now on anything but the most basic necessities, Geniocity’s progress has been extra slow. 

For a year now, beginning back in our site-development phase, I’ve been partially supporting this venture through my consulting work as a writer and media specialist. That has worked well enough – but with the company’s cost basis rising along with the prices for everything we need at home, it recently became clear to me that I’m going to have to increase the consulting.

So I’ve been looking for more clients. And I decided that a good place for me to advertise would be the online membership network for Northeast Ohio performing artists that I used for years as a source of news tips when I was a daily-newspaper journalist. People in the local arts community post press releases, job notices and other show-biz-related information there and I figured quite a few of them might need help in putting together written materials, media campaigns and the like. 

But for weeks, I couldn’t bring myself to actually post the message. As a professional critic and reporter, I’ve always had to maintain a little distance from the people I cover, both for reasons relating to conflict of interest and because being the voice of record on a subject gives a writer some community standing, forces him or her to assume a certain authoritative dignity. After publicly investigating the issues and evaluating the work of the arts community for so long, I felt  queasy about asking its members for piecework.

This isn’t about them – artists in general are the most talented, friendly, appreciative, interesting and admirable people I know and many of these specific artists have become valued friends of mine.

What it’s about is me, wondering if I had the practicality and humility not to care that I’m no longer in a position to stay above the arts crowd’s daily struggle for survival – that, in fact, I’ve joined it. And I’ve had to admit to myself that I loathed the idea of any news colleagues or sources discovering that my new business was not an instant financial success.

I loathed it for three days and then I went ahead and posted the notice this morning, because I realized that it’s not shameful to need paying work and it is contemptible to worry that people will judge you for having to get it. I need to earn money to feed my kids and develop my new company and if my taking in washing – or whatever I have to do - allows them all to thrive, then a bruised ego has been no price to pay at all.

I thought parenting, with all those hours of having spit-up on my shirts and not getting to shower on time and running emergency errands with no makeup on, had permanently taught me not to be vain. But being an entrepreneur is showing me all over again, and in unexpected ways, that pride is a luxury I can’t afford.

The fried sole proprietor and other fishy tales of necessity and invention

It didn’t take a collapsing economy to show me that starting a business was going to demand all the ingenuity I have. Since I was beginning with essentially no funding but my own little savings, I realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t going to be able to hire all the experts or buy all the ready-made tools and services I needed.

I had to invent my own, instead. I’ve needed to learn to be my own marketing director, for instance, and my own office manager while crafting my own promotional materials, press strategies and inventory systems. When things turn out all right, I can feel some pride in my own creativity. And when they don’t, I find myself wishing like hell that I could just pay to get someone else’s. 

The fact is, no matter how energetic and determined I am, I just can’t be as knowledgeable, efficient and innovative as an industry professional in any field except writing. Which kills me, because I’m a type-A perfectionist.

So, on the one hand, limited money brings out my creativity, as it does many people’s, and on the other, it frustrates me with how inadequate that creativity often is. Thus, I am stimulated/bummed nearly all the time.

Only a licensed psychologist (which I’m not and I slump dejectedly to admit I never will be) can assess how many months and years of this sort of caffeinated moping my psyche will take before it cuts its moorings entirely. But in the meantime, the sleepless little orderly in my brain compiles growing lists of the creative tasks I want to keep and the ones I cannot wait to unload on some specialist whose personal economy I’ll be helping to develop.

This last list starts with fund-raising and, so far, ends with orchestrating search optimization strategies. But there’s a lot in between and the tally gets longer all the time. It all feels like homework and I seldom have a night without it, whereas the fun stuff, such as searching out new bloggers and artists, goes by as fast as recess.

Here’s the upside: Doing the creative jobs I like provides enough endorphins to get me through – well, almost – the icky stuff. But here’s the downside: Inevitably, say by Thursday night, I and my powers of imagination become burnt little knobs of pure filter-grade carbon. Week after week after week.

How can I and other lone business operators keep being endlessly creative (because we have to, especially now)?  Feed off other people’s creativity, I guess. Whether it really works or not, it’s a great excuse to spend Friday evenings reading novels, listening to music, watching movies and eating someone else’s cooking. For a sole proprietor, it’s a relief once in a while to make like a pilot fish.

Collaborations brewing

On Friday, I got to do a lot of what I think is my favorite part of being an entrepreneur: sitting around in a coffeeshop and brainstorming with talented people. I met with different individuals at different times and in each conversation, the more we talked, the more connections we discovered between us and the more excited we became about the possibilities of working together. 

How can you not feel elated after a day like that? I came home with plans for several new Geniocity Shop products, including two that will expand the store’s appeal in a fresh direction and offer the public creative resources that delight and inform. And because one of the people I met with introduced me to someone else he knew in the coffeeshop, I may have found both an intriguing new blog topic and a new blogger for my site.

There’s no telling if any of this will work out, of course – it’ll take hard work to make even one of these projects happen. And yet, I know I’ll enjoy nearly every aspect of trying to bring them to life, not just because they’re worthwhile ideas, but mostly because working with their sharp-witted, inventive co-creators will be so much fun.

It’s all too easy not to have any fun when you’re launching a business in a bad economy. But I started Geniocity because I wanted to work with people I was crazy about on a project we all believed could change the world. Though not all of those people have been willing or able to go the distance, others keep coming along whose enthusiasm and imagination restore my conviction that creative collaboration is the champagne and fireworks of professional life.

There’s always a danger of getting diverted or burned, I guess. But I know for a fact that the chance of discovering inspiration and lasting friends is even greater.

Real help for entrepreneurs: It’s in the (COSE conference) bag

The thing about conferences is that, so often, all you hear while you’re there is people grousing about the same old problems and repeating whatever has become the latest conventional wisdom about solving them. It’s pretty rare to come away with a lot of useful ideas and strategies.

But when the COSE 2008 Small Business Conference ended yesterday, I found myself with a bagful of  practical tactics that I have already started trying out and a good number of contacts I know I can call on for needed services or just some additional advice.  I’ve got step-by-step notes on how to market my business more effectively online through e-mail, organic search optimization and timely posts on news-release sites. I’ve also learned a bit about analytics and what they should be able to tell me about how my site is working – or isn’t – and why.

And I listened to other people’s experiences and discovered that their perspectives reinforced many of my own instinctive beliefs about how to establish my business. So now I feel less afraid to stick to my concept, plan and intuition.

That sure beats a load of refrigerator magnets, brochures and a few more slight acquaintances. 

The two-day annual convention opened Wednesday with a keynote speech by Michael Symon, the star restaurateur of Cleveland known by the rest of the nation as America’s reigning Iron Chef. The business crowd ought to listen to people like Symon more often – it’s like stepping out on the playground and hearing the honest reactions of kids after listening to a week’s worth of press-office statements full of steely, upbeat spin from carefully scripted bureaucrats. 

The man’s an artist as irrepressibly natural as he is gifted and focused. He tells funny stories and laughs at them himself with a cartoon-Tigger giggle. He started his first restaurant, Lola, with $120,000 from a customer who believed in him. The people who took jobs with Symon then still work for him. And when he recently opened two new Cleveland eateries, he did it with only $80 to his name, having used up the remainder of an $800,000 bank loan paying his staff their wages during the nine months they were idled by delays on the reincarnated Lola. 

That’s class. That’s also creative nerve.  

Symon had two messages. They weren’t new, but from him, they were clearly true:

- Treat your employees and associates right, and they will reward you with loyalty and good treatment of your customers

- And start your business from a passion to change the world, because it’s that passion, and not a desire to be rich, that will carry you through everything you’ll have to endure to succeed. 

The two other convention speakers echoed those same lessons in their own ways. John Moore, the relentless master marketer of Starbucks and Whole Foods, urged professionalism and good customer-responsiveness (treat people right!), along with sharp focus (passion!) no matter how small or big your company. Debbi Fields, who founded Mrs. Fields Cookies, advised not accepting no (passion!) and making customers feel valued and special (treat people right!).

They’re all correct. Still,  inspiration goes only so far when you’re struggling with the day-to-day crises and dilemmas of birthing a business. Entrepreneurs need tools and those are exactly what the COSE conference offered its members: more than 50 seminars on practical matters ranging from communications and the latest regulatory changes affecting businesses to workers’ compensation and preventative health care for employees; dozens of exhibitors with services to offer and information to give away; and COSE’s own programs, from sector support groups to reduced-cost services to educational opportunities, not to mention the reassuring solidarity of shared problems and interests that comes from COSE’s membership of almost 17,000 companies.

Far from being a gigantic kvetch session, this conference actually helped.

Cleveland has a lot of problems. But excellent operational assistance and advocacy for the small-business sector isn’t one of them.

Big time at the Small Business Conference

I am knee-walking tired. I got through the intense first day of the COSE 2008 Small Business Conference yesterday and barely had the strength to drive home again.

But it was a good kind of catatonic exhaustion.

I climbed - fell is more like it – out of bed at 5:30 a.m. Wednesday to get to Cleveland’s IX Center for a full day of listening to keynote speakers, attending an e-mail marketing seminar, exploring exhibitor displays, recording a promotional interview about Geniocity.com by SBTV.com, sitting on a lively panel about social networking and blogging, and talking with some of the hundreds of other people who showed up. That’s a lot of opportunities for one sleep-deprived entrepreneur to pursue. 

By Friday, I’ll have a full round-up of conference events for you, including what Cleveland’s own Iron Chef, Michael Symon, had to say about starting a business and what branding wisdom was passed along by John Moore, marketing whiz for Starbucks and Whole Foods Market. 

Assuming I’m conscious enough by the end of the conference to sit up and type.

Greek that I may learn to speak

I spent a large part of yesterday in a tutorial with Betsey Merkel of I-OPEN. She was kindly trying to help me understand how Near-Time works.

For those of us who need to enhance the reach of our businesses by building online communities and markets for them, as well as increasing collaborations and partnerships, Near-Time may be worth looking into.

What it does - if I got the essence of what Betsey was saying - is make it much easier for entrepreneurs to create online spaces for their companies that serve not just as informational pages, but also as virtual meeting rooms, where people including customers and teams can gather, share ideas, work together and do business.

It sounded to me like a set of power tools that allows you to rapidly construct a combination of standard website plus media outlet, conference center and what Betsey called storefront. If that’s correct, it could be a godsend to someone like me who has to spend days, sometimes weeks or months, trying to figure out how to get certain site features and functions created, then more days or weeks waiting for someone else to construct them. 

I certainly don’t understand it all yet. But one thing I’m clear on: Anything that helps me reach more people faster and enrich my site with services more easily is something I need to check out. And I’m hoping that, in the course of studying services such as Near-Time, the techno-jargon of the web will start sounding less like Greek to me and more like the lingua franca I desperately need in order to communicate well with the designers, developers and other websters I depend on. 

So far for me, working with web technology has been like trying to read the train schedule in a foreign country. I know where I want to go, but I end up sidetracked or in the wrong city altogether because most of the words mean nothing to me.  Software ought to come with phrase books. (Donde es el Es Es El ? )

But since it doesn’t, I’ll keep trying to teach myself to understand things like Near-Time – with the help of patient people like Betsey.

Salesmanship without Tears

With the recorded Women’s Enterprise Network interview that I mentioned yesterday now behind me and the panel I’m on at the 2008 COSE Small Business Conference coming up tomorrow, I’ve suddenly realized that public speaking works a lot better for me as a way of promoting my company than does networking at receptions or buttonholing people in elevators.

I’ve become convinced over the last few months that there’s very little point in trying to promote a business through ill-fitting means. If I can’t sell my enterprise naturally and enthusiastically, no one’s going to believe me anyway, so I figure I might as well stick to the tactics that I enjoy and that make me feel I am, and appear to be, a confident champion of my business.     

I’ve been a public speaker and performer since the age of six and even though I do get stage fright – sometimes badly – I would Always. Much. rather address a roomful of strangers from a podium or stage than have to engage each one of them in cocktail chitchat, or worse, persuade them in 30 relentless seconds that my business is better than the best thing they ever imagined, including a bathtubful of hot fudge.  

Some people are really really good at light chatter and/or sales pitches and manage to be likable, persuasive or both while doing them. I don’t think I’m one of them. I love deep discussions with people I know and respect. I thoroughly enjoy bantering with the witty. But put me in a situation where I feel required to inflict myself and my spiel on the innocent, or exchange bland pleasantries with people I don’t know and will likely never see again and I feel as if I turn into a one-person sitcom of awkward artifice and embarrassed misery. 

Mary Tyler Moore, without the laughs.

Delivering a talk or participating in a debate is entirely different and makes me feel like a much more worthwhile human being. Here I have a topic to explore and an audience that has gathered on purpose to hear about it – I can joke around or drive home a point without feeling guilty, because what I have to say is at least part of why my audience has come to listen.     

So what forms of lobbying for Geniocity.com am I best at? 1) Writing, of course. I’m a career journalist. 2)  “Interviewing” the people I’m conversing with – I’m experienced at this as a reporter and it should work better, whenever I’m with someone I would like to have support my business, for me to ask good questions and listen, rather than rattle on nervously about myself and what I do. 3) Addressing a crowd; agreeing to guest talks, panels, interviews by other people and the like will get me and my company’s name in front of the public in ways I can be proud of. 

So my message here is that I believe you have to go with your gut about how you communicate best. Yes, I do practice being effective in the scenarios I like least – that’s just sensible self-preservation and eventually, I may even get good at it, if not happy with it. But I know what my strengths are and from now on, I intend to play to them as much as possible and not feel guilty for turning down an occasional promotional opportunity that might advance Geniocity’s name, but would make me want to gnaw my own arm off to escape.

Our new blogger, Matthew Charboneau

I wish every Monday started this happily: Today all of us at Geniocity.com welcome Matthew Charboneau, the new leader of the COSE Arts Network, to the site as our newest blogger.

In his blog, “Arts-Entrepreneur Resources: Creative Views from the COSE Arts Network,” Matt will keep you up to date on the innovative and ever-growing resources offered by COSE to artist-entrepreneurs. But he’ll also shine a light on regional and national arts-business issues and the creative approaches to them developing on the frontiers of art and commerce.  

Though he’s been on the job at the Arts Network for only a few weeks, Matt brings years of experience as a working musician and nonprofit arts manager to his new task of helping other arts entrepreneurs find and make best use of the contacts, information, programs and mentoring they need in order to succeed.

He started out with a bachelor’s degree in double-bass performance from the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, added a master’s degree in nonprofit organization from Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management and has most recently worked as associate director for the nonprofit Roots of American Music, helping to bring arts-based programs to underserved schools throughout Northeast Ohio. 

At the same time, he’s performed regionally, nationally and internationally in jazz, rock, blues, roots music, Afro-Cuban and Brazilian music ensembles for 12 years.  Matt plays double bass and electric bass and studies flamenco guitar and tres cubano, a Cuban folk guitar. He even served as guest clinician and adjudicator for the 2004 Tiffin Jazz Festival, twice served as artist-in-residence for the Summer Festival of the Arts in Bar Harbor, Maine, and has been featured with his instrumental trio, the Up ensemble, on NPR and PBS.

I’m excited to have him among us here and I know his posts will give everyone who reads them a clearer view of the creative economy and future coming to us through the work and influence of arts entrepreneurs.  

Matt, thanks for joining us.

And here’s another news item, smaller this time: The video I made for the Women’s Enterprise Network explaining my plans and hopes for Geniocity.com and for human creativity in general has been posted. You can see it by clicking here. Creativity is vital to all of us on so many levels, starting with our survival, that I hope more and more of you will join the growing exploration and discussion of it in our Geniocity blogs.