The problem with my pitch, in a nutshell

The world is a subtle and difficult place, but people will listen only to simple messages.  

Is that really true? Most business people seem to think so, judging by the number of marketing experts and elevator-speech coaches I’ve heard tell me that no business idea will work if it can’t be expressed in 10 words or less. They say people are too thick, impatient, easily confused or fearful to cope with a complex or unfamiliar concept. So you have to dumb it down, jazz it up and make the message about those thick/ impatient people as well as for them.

But even that’s not enough, they say: What you sell – the reason for your business to exist – has to be so narrow and specific that people will remember your company for only one thing. If Thankgiving were a corporation, it would have to pitch its business as either ”turkey dinners” or “bringing families together,” but not both – and no mention of feeling gratitude for blessings. Too nuanced.

So what do you do with an idea that’s bigger than “juicy hamburgers” or “fewest dropped calls”?  

I don’t know. I’ve been trying for a couple of years now to find a good way to succinctly explain why creativity and innovation are so important and how my site will help people make better use of them. So far, no 10 words I’ve put together do the job.

And so business people tend assume that I don’t have a good reason to give people for visiting my site. But that’s just wrong. I have many good reasons to give them. They’re just not simple. And neither is my site. 

So business people think I won’t succeed. And yet we all live in a world where millions, even billions, of people appreciate subtlety in literature, music, art, film, theater, dance, politics, personal relationships, you name it. Even sports – don’t tell me baseball isn’t complicated.

But somehow, these same people who can debate the convolutions and subtext of Scripture, Dylan and the reverse force double play are incapable of absorbing the idea that my site offers news, ideas and goods from the creative frontiers of all kinds of fields and that people can use these to improve their lives and work? 

I just don’t buy it. I mean, the ”Harry Potter” stories are much more intricate than that and pretty much everybody on the planet has paid money for them. Ardently.

However, not buy it is what customers will do with my idea, so the business wisdom goes. Well, sorry. I’ll try to make it catchier. But I think ideas – and wisdom – should be bigger than something that fits in a fortune cookie.

Taking the plunge … step by step down the ladder

I’ve been talking these last few days with an old friend of mine in Chicago. We hadn’t been in touch in many years and have spent a number of calls and e-mails filling each other in on the details of our lives and work.

Oddly enough, it turns out that we’ve taken similar paths. Like me, my friend started out as an English major and went into journalism. But then – much earlier than I did – he crossed over into business, got an MBA and held a number of high-level jobs with large Chicago corporations. He’s currently a partner in a communications firm.

But what interested me the most about his varied career were the two start-ups he tried to launch and how they fell victim to events that were not of my friend’s making or within his control. The first company died a-borning because a partner backed out and as a result, so did the funder; the second because the NASDAQ crash badly dented an angel investor’s holdings and so, once again, the funding went away.

My friend is nothing if not brave, creative and innovative – he’s working on a third idea. And the way he’s planning to carry it out has reassured me about how I’m proceeding with Geniocity.

He’s taking it slowly, not counting on the infant venture to support him, and he’s building it with his own money, a bit at a time. He plans to use sweat equity, not someone else’s big check, as the foundation of the business. He wants this one to work so, as he put it, “I am simply going to build the site that I know I’d be interested in, and therefore, I hope, a site that I think other people would be interested in.”  

Those words made me feel as if I were looking in a mirror, because that’s exactly the plan I’ve had to adopt for Geniocity. Like my friend, I’ve had my hopes of major funding disappointed and had to correct both my approach and my expectations. Though I continue to pursue my original idea, I’ve had to resign myself to a much longer and more arduous development phase of doing everything myself and making progress by little steps. Yet that process is teaching me many things I need to know – and though they agonize me now, I’ll be glad I learned them thoroughly when my company starts to grow in earnest.

It wasn’t wisdom that changed my view, just practicality: I recognized that this micron-by-micron strategy was the only way I could keep my idea and my enterprise alive. And now, because my much more knowledgeable friend has chosen the same kind of plan, I feel increasingly confident that I’m going at this the way I should.

A brain trust keeps your own working better

“Good morning, Mr. Phelps. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, will be to start a small creative company with insufficient capital and no staff during the worst economic period since the Great Depression. You must be everywhere at once and do everything yourself and, if you have not made a profit by the end of the allotted mission period, you – and not this tape recorder – will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck.”

Good luck, indeed.  Even the best-prepared entrepreneurs have got to have some, or their work will literally be “Mission Impossible.”

I’ve had good luck. Not yet with money or markets or personal fame – my good luck has been to discover a number of friends who try to help me succeed. 

These particular friends all started out as business acquaintances of one sort or other – one is a former source of mine from when I was a reporter, another two are people whose professional services I’ve used and a couple more are colleagues. I had a friendly, enjoyable but intermittent relationship with each, to start with. I never expected more.

So I was surprised and grateful when, independently, each one of them started forwarding useful information to me, checking in periodically to see how things were going, offering to introduce me to good resource people and generally spreading the word about my business. A few of them have actually gotten involved in what I’m doing and frequently help me by listening to my concerns and offering advice and ideas. 

And every time they do those things, I’m astonished and touched all over again. They make such a huge difference to my effectiveness and morale that they are becoming indispensible, like a team of personal advisors or cabinet officers who will set me straight or cheer me on when I most need it.

Entrepreneurship can be a lonely occupation, so it’s wonderful to feel as if I’m not totally by myself, especially when I need to weigh difficult decisions or situations. And even though creativity seems like a naturally solitary kind of work, I find I’m most fired up imaginatively after I’ve spent some time talking and trading ideas with other inventive people.  

So I thank them often for their smarts and their support. And I hope continually that I’ll be able to repay their confidence in me by succeeding. Because of them, that mission – on most days – seems to be getting a little less impossible.

Not done, but not burnt, either

Maybe I’m finally getting a clue.

Usually, if I don’t get things accomplished that I thought I would during the day, I become an ambulatory stress mill and end up either flogging myself into working absurdly late hours or getting knotted up with worry, sleeping badly and spending the next day ferociously meeting goals until I’m toast. And I don’t often discriminate between the real deadlines and the self-imposed ones.

So, yesterday, some things didn’t go right. I was hoping to get two separate sets of artist contracts signed, but one meeting got postponed by the artist and I had to cancel the second, in a distant location, because of snow (before Thanksgiving! Insupportable…). I also had a piece of consulting work I wanted to finish, but couldn’t because some necessary data hadn’t come in.

But for some reason, I didn’t sweat it this time. I know the contracts will get signed eventually. The data have started trickling in and I’ll be able to complete my draft today. I feel – comparatively – relaxed.

Can this be wisdom, at last? Well, I doubt it. More like fatigue, probably, or maybe just resignation – I have been learning the hard way that no matter how much you nudge and urge and jump up and down, it just takes forever to get things done, especially when other people are involved.

But whatever my reason for having it, I’m going to celebrate my strange mellowness. By the time you read this, I will have gone to bed before 2 a.m. for once and will, I hope, be resolutely not having a panic attack as I labor to get my consulting work done right and submitted on time.

It’s Friday. Thanksgiving is next week. If I keep breathing deeply and getting enough sleep, maybe I’ll even get through the holiday cooking and the two family birthday parties that bookend it without having my internal temperature soar as high as the turkey’s.

So let’s all take a lesson from Joe Walsh….

Pro-creative, not procreative

Not surprisingly, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time lately wondering how we’re going to survive all the things that are wrong with the world. I suspect that the economy’s flaming tailspin, the heavily damaged environment, the endless horror of terrorism and war and the obscene failure to care of so many leaders has many of you pondering the same thing.

Human affairs have become intricately, monstrously, maybe fatally messed up. How do we even start sorting through this steaming heap of wreckage we’ve produced?

I haven’t entirely abandoned hope that we can think and invent our way out of trouble – I’ve always had a lot of faith in humanity’s creativity. But I’m beginning to think our creativity is no match for our procreativity.

There are way too many of us. Period.

 In my James Michener-like search for the absolute beginning of our tale of woe, for the root cause of the disaster that is mankind’s reign on earth, I can get no more fundamental than that. We have reproduced ourselves to the brink of planetary collapse and nature is going to do what it has always done when populations exceed their resources and their welcome: Restore balance by wiping out the excess.

I don’t mean to sound Old Testament here. I am not a religious person and, in my opinion, the issue has nothing to do with religion whatsoever. It’s just simple math.

Here, you do it: Earth’s finite land, water and materials divided by billions of people increasing geometrically every year equals … what? The increasing destruction of wilderness as people spread out; overdevelopment; the wearing out and desertification of land; climate change; the disappearance of fresh water; the overwhelming of our entire environment by waste and poisons; fighting; pandemics; starvation; and, eventually, mass deaths. A lot of this is already happening.

An exaggeration? Try the lab work. Start with a male and female rabbit and no predators in an enclosed acre of lush land the rabbits can’t dig out of. You’ll see. 

Even people who don’t pay much attention to the big picture must be noticing that there’s less and less undeveloped land where they live, that competition for jobs, housing, money, recognition, doctor’s appointments, even parking spaces has become absurd and that the complexity of human systems from health to government to schooling to business has become so stressful and time-consuming that, if nature doesn’t kill us off, we’ll probably commit suicide.   

This is what it comes down to: Like it or not, humans are going to have to get serious about limiting the number of children we have.  And we’re going to have to start now.

If this discussion seems a long way from the concerns of a small-time entrepreneur who’s supposed to be writing about creativity and innovation, remember two things: Entrepreneurs spend the majority of their waking hours being terrifiedly aware of how limited resources have gotten; and they’re also among the first to see opportunity in a problem.

We Earthlings have a problem that’s likely to be terminal. We’re going to have to start birthing ideas instead of babies immediately or kiss ourselves goodbye. 

Good social networking = your past + your future

I’m beginning to think that the best part of outreach tools such as Facebook and LinkedIn is not their potential for helping you develop relationships with new people, but the nearly miraculous ability they give you to find the old ones.

Over the last few months, I’ve been friended by all kinds of people I haven’t seen, talked to or heard anything about in nearly 30 years. I’ve found out what they do now and who they married; we’ve apologized for old hurts and/or reaffirmed our affection, traded ideas and hard-earned wisdom.

College friends, long-ago office pals – whatever our original connections were, these people feel like the best possible contacts I could have, because we share history and caring that came about through spending time face to face and experiencing life together.

That kind of bond really can’t be created virtually with strangers, no matter how many people we know in common. Yes, it will probably be handy for me to collect a large number of online nominal acquaintances  who could serve as information resources and be part of a broader market for what I sell. But frankly, I’d rather seek advice from people I actually know and trust.

What matters most to me about rediscovering old friends has to do with business only indirectly, anyway. I’ve found that it’s satisfying and somehow reassuring to reconnect with them now that I know a lot more about the world and people than I did at 20, 25 or 30 – time has somehow allowed us to understand each other better, to see why we were as we were then, to forgive or appreciate or sympathize more deeply than we could have earlier.

When we message each other from hundreds of miles away, we don’t just add another business card to the Rolodex. We join hands. 

I feel safer and more confident, richer, with them back in my life. If that helps my business, it will be because it helps me.

Creatively adapt or die

For 30 years now, I’ve written about different art forms in hopes of persuading readers to think about and discuss artistic creativity and so develop an appreciation for it and the incalculable good it offers us. It’s always appalled me that so many people believe the arts have nothing to do with them – people who watch television shows and movies, who enjoy photographs, music or even just a beautifully decorated cake or a handsome tie.

Many of these same people recognize the value of scientific invention - the creation of vaccines, the designing of better can openers, the devising of suspension bridges and cell phones – because science so often results in practical solutions to everyday problems. But they fail to see that science and art are merely slightly varying ways of applying human ingenuity to human life and experience of the world.

They need to wake up to the fact that we can’t survive without that ability to apply ingenuity. And here’s a word that may help them: adaptability.

We human creatures have taken over the world because we are able to change our ways to suit the climate, times and situations we find ourselves in.

The Smithsonian Institution Human Origins Program defines it this way:

The definition adaptability contains the definition of creativity. Both are essential survival skills.

Many normal Americans would laugh themselves off their convertible couches at the idea that, say, interpretive dance might enhance their survival skills. But they should look at their own lives and notice the ways that they themselves have adapted to change in order to get through their days sanely.

The way they’ve learned to weave a path around the kids’ scattered toys in the den? Dance. The enthusiasm they pretend at boring staff meetings and the cheery hellos they summon for their hated bosses? Theater. The little hum they use to calm the baby or themselves? Music. Their cleverly planted climbing roses and hollyhocks that hide the neighbors’ ugly fence? Art. 

Don’t these skills make their lives safer, pleasanter, better? You bet they do.

The word adaptability first came to me last night while I was contemplating the adjustments I’ve had to invent to survive running a start-up venture from my home - a home I share with a husband, a rabbit and two teenagers whose school schedules, social lives and computer demands frequently conflict with what I need to do to stay in business. 

Changing my own schedule so that I do a lot of my work late at night when everyone else is in bed was just the beginning. I’ve devised hiding places for the paper clips and Post-it notes that used to disappear from my (shared) desk; figured out how to get the electrical cords off the floor by rubber-banding them to the window locks, so the bunny can have a romp in the kitchen in the morning without chewing his way to a flash-fried demise before I exile myself to the office/guest room for the day; learned to live off handfuls of almonds for lunch so I can make meetings and be back for school pick-up at 3; acted positive and sung loud, therapeutic White Stripes songs when orthodontist appointments, school open-houses, music lessons, emergency shopping trips and forgotten gym clothes have totally and utterly blown up my goals for the day. 

And I haven’t bitten off all my hair yet or tried to smother myself with my little lumbar cushion. (Though I’ve come close.) So creativity really works. How do all those Americans think their convertible couches got designed in the first place?

Let’s make a hire

Well, the next few days ought to be interesting. Like every week since about last April, when I finally picked a launch date for my business and immediately acquired a to-do list the size of the national debt, this one has begun its life already crammed with obligations of every sort.

But among the more usual chores, such as seeking out new creative work for The Geniocity Shop and new bloggers for the Geniocity webzine and dealing with administrative stuff, I’ll also be conducting my first-ever interviews with official job candidates.

I’d like these to go well, naturally. So in the hope of not coming off as a complete nincowpoop, I’m working up some good questions and a comprehensive explanation of what the job and its goals involve. It’s not too different from preparing for an interview of a news source – you want to draw the person out, discover not only what he or she has done and experienced, but also what thought processes, perspectives, values, skills and creative ideas have shaped the individual’s character and work. 

But with a job candidate, you also have to be able to figure out if that person’s character and work will fit with the tasks and company culture the job brings with it. That’s what’s going to make the process an adventure for me.  I’m not much worried – more than anything, I’m elated at the prospect of getting some capable help with an important function that I have neither the time nor expertise to handle well myself. 

If I choose right, this hire could make an enormous difference to my company and to my peace of mind. If not … well, It may not be as funny as “Let’s Make a Deal,” but it won’t be ”The Lady, or the Tiger?” either. And at least I can be pretty sure my decision-making process won’t be interrupted by someone promising me $100 if I have a hard-boiled egg in my pocket.

Guerrilla girl

Hot and sweet! I guerrilla-marketed today and already have some response to show for it. Does anything  satisfy like instant gratification?

What I did was post free notices on a local Northeast Ohio subscriber list announcing Geniocity.com’s search for artists and ad salespeople and got replies from promising people almost immediately. This was a relief, as I’ve been pricing paid advertising in area publications and finding it well beyond my means.

The next thing I need to learn how to do (among dozens, alas) is to use Facebook and LinkedIn effectively to reach resource people and markets. For the last 18 months, I’ve been going through what amounts to a self-directed crash course in Internet use, trying to educate myself at odd moments about a system and culture that other people have been immersed in for 20 years. I’d say I’m still at the “Have you seen the pen of my uncle?” stage in mastering the language, but fluency may be mine one day.

In the meantime, I’m also trying to attract press interest by making direct appeals to individual media people I know and trust. That effort seems to be off to a good start, too.

And so, happily, is the weekend. Let’s celebrate with a tune! Bombs away ….

Setting a new insecurity standard

There are far too many days in the course of entrepreneurship when you feel marooned on a one-palm desert isle with chaos surging all around your tiny powdered doughnut of a beach.

Over the 24 hours from Tuesday night to Wednesday night, though, the chaos around my particular isle rose and swamped my last dry patch of sand and I have been clinging ever since, metaphorically speaking, to the slender, swaying, slippery stalk of my sanity.

It started - doesn’t it figure? – with a technology problem. I was informed by letter from one of my online service providers that my site needed to be in full compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and that I needed to arrange for certification. They recommended I sign up with a particular service that would scan (or scam? I was worried) my site and determine if its data security measured up.

Never mind that my tech advisor said these requirements are impossible to meet in a shared-server environment – I was evidently going to have to get this site scan or risk being fined for (scary, scofflaw, resisting-arrest kind of word) noncompliance.

So I signed up for the scan. Or tried to. With my tech experts unavailable, I had to fill out a questionnaire about all the servers and domains and waiters and city-states (or whatever) that my site uses and I tried hard to look up all the correct names, but after I submitted it, I realized I had put in one name that was probably wrong. The questionnaire wouldn’t let me go back and change it.

Then, after it got me to pick a scan time and lock it in irreversibly, then it told me I needed to get my server to agree to the scan in advance. Great – I had signed up on Sunday night for a 1 a.m. Monday scan.  

So by then I was pretty sure my site was going to go into convulsions and disappear after the scan, which reported to me the next morning that my site (but possibly the wrong part of it, thanks to my incorrect data entry) had FAILED – really failed, we’re talking an F-minus here – to meet the PCI DSS standards, even though we had just bought our own SSL and the store no longer got slapped with those ”you are moving to an insecure site” pop-ups when people tried to order things.

I was suffering from a cold and was not in a happy frame of mind, anyway. Being menaced with the prospect of an insulted server, underachieving site security and the PCI DSS police arriving to demand the deed to my house did not improve my disposition. I was bewildered, unnerved and not a little angry. My efforts to concentrate on my blog and my consulting work resulted mostly in a lot of empty coffee cups. 

But the computer world was not done with me. Tuesday morning, I tried to put up my daily blog post and found that I could not get into my own blog page. Now all my “1984,” persecution-complex paranoia churned into overdrive – everything was conspiring to undermine the cracked foundations of my confidence. The scan had melted my blog access (!?) I urgently needed to get to the bank … but the bank was closed for Veteran’s Day! I needed to advertise and social-network and call artists and interview bloggers and hire a salesperson and set up online bookkeeping and start a consulting project, but the antihistamines resisted. I especially needed to POST TO MY BLOG, but I still couldn’t get into it. Not all day.

Creative and innovative? I was barely lucid. 

By 11 Tuesday night, I had every tech whiz I knew (meaning pretty much anybody but me) trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with my computer system or my waiter, er, server, or any other thing that might be to blame. Nothing could be done.

I went to bed feeling as if the world were doing a slow, disintegrating topple into ruin. First, our national security, then the environment, next the economy, and now our telecommunications system, my bank account and my business … all, all into the dark pit of cosmic dust.

I woke up with only a very loose grip on that palm trunk, I can tell you. Without even eating breakfast (a truly shocking departure, for those who know my routines), I sped to the bank and deposited money, sped back home again and – after eating, couldn’t stand it anymore – logged on to discover that my blog page would now LET ME IN. The tide of chaos seemed to ebb a bit.

In a burst of manic energy, I put up my post, answered my e-mail, did the household chores, sent out want ads and press releases, showered, dressed, had lunch (I’m incorrigible), called media people and artists, made appointments, began the consulting work, fetched home the children and cooked dinner.

And I’ve nearly completed my Thursday post. So I guess I’m recovering. Probably I’ll be OK as long as I don’t see the letters PCI DSS again.

Oh. Shoot …..