Looks like it’s time… .

The new Geniocity Shop brochures arrived in the mail yesterday. There’s something about having your information printed in well-designed, professional-looking form that makes you feel like a real grown-up.

Some days earlier, I had a new head shot taken for my blog page, one that I think makes me look surprisingly like a successful adult (probably all in the lighting…). I’m also adding a number of new bloggers to our roster over the next couple of months and have been rapidly expanding the range of merchandise in the shop this fall, adding glass works, more photography and, soon, jewelry.    

Change! I love it, especially when it’s the kind that looks like progress.  Maybe by January, our nation will get that kind of change, too, and life will get a little better for all of us, at home and at work.  On that happy note, I leave you with a tune for the weekend.

Reminding myself how far I’ve come

Maybe this is true of most people with big goals to work toward, but I tend to focus on how far I still have to go, rather than how much distance I’ve already covered.

The habit keeps me motivated - I believe I’m less likely to slack off if I continually stare at my destination and the milestones I have to pass than I am if I’m always looking back at where I’ve been.

On the other hand, too much gazing at the horizon can convince you that you aren’t getting anywhere. Especially because a business isn’t a finish line you cross, but an endlessly evolving process that you have to revise and refine every day.  You never really “arrive,” although making some serious money might persuade me that I had. 

So maybe it was a healthy thing that, in the course of pulling together the exhibits I need to attach to my nearly-finished business plan this week, I looked at the stack of documents and materials and realized that I’ve actually accomplished something in the last couple of years. 

I think if I made a list of what I’ve done, I might feel pretty good for once about this experiment with entrepreneurship. Maybe making your own list would do the same for you.  We all need and deserve a little boost, don’t we? Ok, so let’s try it. Here’s my list: 

1. I came up with a business idea that totally excited me and still does

2. Over a year and half, I sought advice from experienced people I trusted and began shaping that idea down to the smallest details

3. I wrote an initial short plan

4. I found lawyers and got my company incorporated

5. I joined the Council of Smaller Enterprises ‘ Arts Network

6. Through COSE, I found a business advisor and started learning about the practical side of running a company

7. I chose an accountant and got prepared to deal with taxes responsibly

8. With help from my advisor and a friend, I wrote a Power Point presentation about my business

9. I got a vendor’s license so I can sell goods in my online store

10. With the help of my partner the web expert, I chose a designer, bought software and got my site designed and built

11. Assisted by my lawyers, I got a consignment agreement drafted for merchandise suppliers

12. I recruited three bloggers to write on my site every day and five artists to supply creative work to my shop and learned how to post my own blog entries

13. I got business cards and stationery designed, as well as an invitation to my company’s launch event

14. I wrote and sent out press releases and got some media coverage of my business launch 

15. I launched my business in a great location with a nice party that a good number of people attended and seemed to enjoy

16. I worked out cash-flow spreadsheets, set up a merchandise log, developed a rate card for advertising and developed a brochure for recruiting artists and one for promoting my store

17. I recruited an additional three bloggers and three more artists (more about this soon…)

18. I worked out three different sponsorships with area organizations and carried out a direct-mail campaign promoting Geniocity Shop creative goods as holiday gifts  

19. I slowly but finally created a full business plan

20. And I’ve continued to refine my site bit by bit, with the help of my tech partner and the designer

I was right – I feel pretty good about all that. It took an incredible amount of work and psychological discipline to get it done, and even though I know I have to keep myself steeled for all the many jobs still ahead of me, I’m confident that I can handle them in time.

So how does your list make you feel?

Virtual networks for actual economic development

I made a recording today.

No, I wasn’t singing, although I’ve made those kinds of recordings, too, and boy, can that process be tedious.

This was a lot easier because all I had to do was talk about what’s important to me professionally: my business; helping the world value and practice creativity; and building a happier future by inventing better solutions to our problems.

A woman named Betsey Merkel was behind the camera. A member of the Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-OPEN, www.i-open.org), she’s been instrumental in helping Northeast Ohioans form themed virtual networks to promote idea-sharing and more productive, collaborative efforts among people trying to solve community problems and/or build business.

Merkel was recording my words for the Women’s Enterprise Network (www.womensenterprisenetwork.net), a group made up of women interested in empowering themselves, helping each other and contributing to economic development and civic leadership. WEN isn’t just a virtual network: Its members regularly meet for dinners, coffees and face-to-face discussion. But with Merkel’s help, the network has also begun building a virtual video library of community knowledge gleaned from those of us who are out there working, being entrepreneurial and trying to improve the world around us.

Betsey wanted me to answer three questions for the video: What do I feel passionate about right now; what do I want other people to know, think, feel and do; and what do I envision for the future?

I’m not sure how much I added to Northeast Ohio’s store of knowledge, but I came away encouraged that someone wanted to know what I think and what I’m trying to do. More important, I was heartened to discover that so many talented people in my region are working valiantly to change our collective luck by thinking innovatively and supporting each other. That’s the kind of network we all need. And it just gets better as more of us join it.

How does your business plan grow?

It hit me yesterday, while I was back in the mental hermitage I have to occupy in order to work on the damn thing, that my business plan is like pachysandra.

Anyone who’s ever been responsible for – or nearly eaten by – pachysandra will understand instantly what I mean. Personally, I know the stuff all too well; my neighborhood was built in the 1940s and ’50s, a period in which all suburban homes in the Northeast United States seem to have been landscaped with yew bushes carefully clipped into giant muffin shapes and surrounded by mats of pachysandra to give the impression of flower beds without anyone having had to plant any actual flowers. 

Like pachysandra, my business plan is dense, ubiquitous and invasive. It takes over everything. It won’t go away.  Just when I think I have it contained and ordered, I find it has sent up sneaky little shoots outside the borders I established for it. And you can’t just pull the shoots out – they’re not really new, independent facts and ideas, but only the latest developments in a vast, complex network of facts and ideas that will all come up out of the ground in one huge, filthy snarl if you tug on them.

I actually did try to rip pachysandra out of the bed in our front lawn years ago. Once I started, I knew it was all or nothing - I ended up with what looked like an enormous rolled-up sleeping bag made of thickly knitted vines, dirt and outraged insects. 

The only difference between that and my business plan is that I think the plan has more bugs.

Or at least more bits of unexpectedly outdated material. Experts call business plans living documents, but I’d call them undead ones: You can’t kill them, so you just have to keep pruning and pesticiding their gnarly, proliferating sections every – what? two weeks? – and hoping you don’t get strangled by them in your sleep.

Finances or marketing?

Economic collapse and the Kobayashi Maru

It’s my favorite season and month. We’ve been having perfect, clear, cool days with all the glowing fall colors framed by a deep-blue sky. There’s a fat pumpkin on the doorstep and cider in the fridge. I should be elated.

But I can’t take joy in any of it. I haven’t been able to shake the fear lately that I and my business are gradually being overwhelmed by circumstances I don’t have the resources – mental or financial – to overcome.

I’ve never known such a dark time, even though my generation has gone through the Cold War and its constant state of nuclear threat, the Vietnam War and its protests and riots, a series of assassinations, a bad recession, one confirmed criminal presidency, decades of destructive corporate greed, 9/11 and Iraq.

Now, with the progressive ruination of the environment and the near-collapse of the U.S. and world economies, it’s beginning to feel as if the end is really near.

I know my parents went through worse. I know we have to try fight our way back from this brink. But I don’t know how – and I don’t know how we’ll all manage to live in the meantime.

There’s been a nearly feudal division of wealth in this nation for years, but with the plunge of the stock market and the failure of so many banks and other firms, now not even the rich are safe and the rest of us seem doomed.

I find myself wondering what my family will do for a home and food and medical care if businesses keep failing and the jobs disappear. What about my kids’ college educations? Will we still have savings in a year?   

What if my own business dies a-borning? How can I capitalize it if no one has any money to invest or to buy what I sell? I need to hire people to handle what I’m not trained to do. I can’t expand my company or even bring it up to professional standards if I have to keep doing everything by myself. I have no time for anything but work the way it is. And my bits of investments are withering, like everybody else’s. 

I’ve been scared all weekend. And I’m still scared, especially about our environment and about America having to struggle for years – maybe decades – just to get back to where we were one president ago.

But as write this, I find myself rebelling against my own words. I’m exhausted, worried, even despairing these days, it’s true, and yet I can’t really, truly believe there’s no solution to this dilemma. There just has to be and I have to find it or invent it.

I’m not a Trekkie, but I remember in one of the “Star Trek” movies, Bones reveals that Capt. Kirk was the only cadet at Starfleet Academy to beat the Kobayashi Maru, a simulated battle and leadership exercise that left whichever cadet was playing commanding officer in the no-win situation of having to choose surrender or the destruction of his ship and crew. In the exercise, Kirk refused to accept either of those alternatives and got out of checkmate by rewriting the program.

Some called it cheating. I don’t. He needed a better result, he thought up a way to get it - and it worked. That’s what I call creative problem-solving. 

I’m with Capt. Kirk. I don’t accept that there’s no way out, for America or for myself. Now which program, which wall, which way of thinking do I have to rearrange to change my luck?

The people’s bailout?

A friend of mine forwarded the following e-mail to me yesterday. I like the author’s willingness to shatter convention and expectation with a bold, creative solution to a problem that everybody else seems to be approaching with fear, bewilderment or knee-jerk certitude. We’ll never get out of the mess we’re in unless we get inventive first.

And I like the part about money to support entrepreneurs.

It isn’t clear if such a plan could really have the effect its author supposes, so, economists, please weigh in. But even if it couldn’t work, the plan makes a sharp political point:

 The Birk Economic Recovery Plan 

Buying success

A head shot and an SSL. Legal-sized envelopes and 500 brochures. Coffee. Gas. A sponsorship.

That’s some of the stuff I had to buy for my business in the last week.  Just in the last week. 

If, before I decided to start a business, anyone had presented me with the shopping list of things I was going to need in order to get set up, I think I would have gasped, burst into hysterical laughter, wept hopelessly and passed out.

Granted, such a list would have to include several years’ worth of items; my family’s composite grocery needs for the same period would probably drop me in my tracks, too.

But at least I know what kinds of things to expect to buy to feed my kids and husband. Whereas, an awful lot of what I’ve discovered I have to have to fuel a business has come as a complete and fairly nightmarish surprise. I always feel like Dorothy, having finally struggled all the way to Oz only to learn that she’s somehow going to have get the broom away from the Wicked Witch of the West before the crummy wizard will give her proper site security.

So if you’re thinking of turning entrepreneur, you’d better start stocking up on certain weird supplies.

1. Domain name. You’ll have to have one for your site, but just try to find one that isn’t taken

2. Thesaurus. For domain-name ideas. You think I’m kidding.

3. Portable file case. Because you’ll have to carry your business around with you until you can buy offices.

4.  Coffee cards. Coffeeshops are your temporary offices. Collect punchcards now from every place in town, so that at least every 10th cup will be free. After 600 Americanos, this adds up.

5. A big ol’ purse. Doesn’t matter what sex you are or want not to appear to be – you’re going to be carrying your business cards, brochures, date planner, cell phone/Palm Pilot/BlackBerry and coffee punchcards with you wherever you go. Stashing that stuff in your pockets will only make you look like you’re on your way to drown yourself.  Maybe you are.

6. A technology translator and five kinds of software with matching servers. Not for some interplanetary tea party – just to make your site basically work. You hope.

7. A vendor’s license. Visit to state administration building = the mission to Mt. Doom. Pack a lunch.

8. Stronger lens correction. A single year of staring at the screen, MapQuest directions, other people’s nametags and legal fine print and you won’t be able to see your own feet without the Hubble telescope.  

9. Public-speaking lessons. Thought you could already talk ok? Ha. You’ll need to communicate as if every conversation is a call to 911. If you can’t afford them, just drink more coffee. 

10. Ergonomic chair, car lumbar cushion and physical therapy – unless you’d rather pay to have the EMS cut your spasmed, sedentary body out of its seat with the Jaws of Life. 

11. Double-wide, business-account bank checkbook. Checks and deposit slips to last you until the next millenium.  Bench-press it if you can’t afford the physical therapist.

12. Large, economy-size bottle of ibuprofen. But be prepared to kiss your small intestine goodbye. So to speak.

13. Postal scale. Even if you don’t have anything to weigh and ship at first, it makes a convenient headrest for when you pitch forward in exhaustion. Your keyboard will only give you waffle-face.

Just wait a minute…

Since I left my job to start my own business, the questions I get asked most often by friends who remained on the corporate payroll are, “Bet you’re glad you left, huh?” and “Are you having fun?” 

I think they imagine that, because I no longer have to deal with the particular frustrations and problems they’re still enduring, every moment of my new life is a party. Well, not quite. Though the answer to the first question is emphatically yes, the answer to the second depends on what day you ask me.

I think I would have called yesterday fun, even though it wasn’t all good. And that’s because it had variety.

Any regular job can get routine and boring, even in the newspaper business which - for reporters at least – enjoys a high daily novelty quotient. But the entrepreneur gig absolutely guarantees wild disparities in what you have to do and who you have to be, often on a split-second basis.

Yesterday, I produced 15 marketing letters to send to potential clients, from writing and printing them to sealing the envelopes and putting them in the mail; took part in a meeting about education as a political issue; interviewed an interesting  potential blogger for Geniocity’s roster; handled the next step in the development of a Geniocity Shop brochure; helped with preparations for a panel I’m participating in at the COSE Small Business Conference this month; contacted artists; followed up on networking connections; spent an agonized hour online trying to understand why my (third? fourth?) certificate request wasn’t going through and calling on – aieeeee! – tech support, my tech-savvy partner and, I think at one point, my Maker to guide me through this hell of acronyms, jargon and malfunctioning processes. Plus, I wrote this blog post.

Not to mention all the – because I’m having to work at home for now – domestic chores I can’t avoid doing in between, or at the same as, all the business chores.  Some days, I’m working at the computer with a business contact on one phone line and one of my kids calling me from school or practice on the other, while the doorbell’s ringing and the timer on the oven’s going off.   

That’s pretty darned varied, you have to admit. Sometimes it makes the old days in the newsroom of a major daily paper seem peaceful by comparison. But even though I’d say, oh, three-quarters of what I have to get done isn’t stuff I like to do, I can usually feel confident that whatever situation I’m facing will yield to another one before my eyes have a chance to glaze over.

Sort of like a movie. Probably one of the Marx Brothers’.

Trick or treat: Gender bias in my bag at the business show

I went to a business show today.  Well, more accurately, I power-walked through a business show for half an hour in between having to drop one kid off at the skate park and pick up two more at the mall.

These events always feel a little like Halloween, with everyone carrying around big bags to hold out for exhibitors, who stuff them with business cards, brochures and cheap plastic promotional tchotchkes. It being October, this show openly embraced the comparison: Nearly every table held big bowls and baskets of candy bars, in addition to platters of cake and pastries and steam-table vats full of hot appetizers.

I came out a brisk 28 minutes after entering, reeking of sterno and cooking oil, reasonably pleased to have met a few people, left a few cards and escaped without eating anything I would have to pay for later with guilt and extra workouts. I had a modest haul of information and trinkets. Because the event featured businesses physically near my own, I may even end up making use of the goods and services I found out about.      

But the most lingering thing I took away with me – besides the deep-fryer scent – was a tiny bit of indignation.

Ironic, half-amused, but indignation nonetheless.

Here’s why: When I entered the area of the hotel where the show took place, I had to stop to get signed in by a cheerful, helpful woman at least a decade younger than I.  She chatted pleasantly with me while waiting for the visitor ahead of me to fill out a form, then turned to the man sitting next to her and asked him if he would help me, as she was still busy with the other visitor.

What she actually said – very brightly and kindly - was, “Would you please help this young lady?”

Now, obviously, she meant to be sweet. But just as obviously, she was trying so hard to be agreeable and flattering that her remark ended up having just the opposite effect.

Friends, I am 52 years old. I am not a young lady, a term I associate with the teenaged female children of reproving parents; I don’t look like a young lady; and, most important to me, I do not act like a young lady when I am in a business milieu (if ever, anymore). I’ve worked hard to earn some standing in my field and I hope I’ve developed an air of friendly, intelligent authority to go with it. I am a professional journalist and businesswoman. 

So I didn’t know whether to laugh or swear when I heard this 40-something event host try to be complimentary by reducing me to youth and inexperience.

Yes, we live in a nation where glowing adolescence is the Holy Grail and all of us want to look and feel that young – once we aren’t. But would she have “flattered” a 52-year-old businessman by referring to him as “this young gentleman” ?

Heck, no. How patronizing, not to mention absurd. So why do that to a woman? 

Because, evidently, women are still  – even now - believed to care much more about the power of their beauty than about the power of their accomplishments and position. And men are assumed to care about the exact opposite.

The unfair part is that, with age, professional men are seen as more and more powerful. At least until real decrepitude sets in. But older professional women are, I fear, seen only as less and less beautiful.

Can’t people let me and other older professional women enjoy whatever rank we’ve reached without demeaning it by assuming we’d rather be pretty ingenues?   

I’m at the stage in my life where compliments about my appearance are pointless if they aren’t sincere – the loving appreciation of someone dear to me or, rarely now, the spontaneously turned head. I mean, I remember what I looked like at 30 and I don’t look that way now. No amount of indulgent praise or pretense will delude me into thinking I do.

So what I hope to hear from people I encounter is no ludicrously false blandishment (“Meet my daughter.” “Oh, I thought you were sisters!” Gag me), but some simple respect for my years of hard work and experience – and for the focus and determination with which I’m trying to reshape the world in the last half of my life.

Rough selling and sailing ahead

The people who analyze such things have predicted a dismal holiday-buying season for retail businesses. Stores and online outlets that sell non-essentials, especially high-priced and luxury items, will likely take the worst hit. 

And, yeah, guess what I sell? Too bad you can’t eat art or fill your gas tank with it.

On the other hand, far too many people assume that art is non-essential when they wouldn’t go a day without watching a movie or a show, listening to music, reading a book or looking at pictures and objects. We all turn to such things for fun and stimulation.

But we also turn to them for solace, diversion and uplift when life isn’t going right. And life sure isn’t going very well for a lot of us right now. 

So I continue to hope that many people will want things – however small – of beauty, creativity and meaning to cheer themselves and other people through these unsettling times.

From a business point of view, I’m trying to sail around this economic Cape Horn by diversifying the merchandise in The Geniocity Shop, including the price levels, and targeting the consumers I think likeliest to keep purchasing what I sell. As a social entrepreneur, I’m also hoping to contribute to the survival of talented artists. Like so many other working Americans, a lot of them have no financial margin at all – they have to live sparely at all times and an even a few months of high prices and little work can mean disaster.  

So I take it as a personal and professional responsibility to try to help artists, inventors and our whole society by informing readers about the importance of creativity to our lives and economy and increasing the chances that original work will be bought from gifted makers and enjoyed by appreciative owners.  

But for me to carry out my mission, my business has to stay solvent. (Yours, too, huh?) That’s going to get even trickier over the next few months.              

Shorten sail...