Abandonment isn’t a creative solution

I knew I’d have to learn a lot of things when I started my business. But I never expected to learn that I couldn’t trust friends and colleagues to keep their word.

Since embarking on Geniocity.com two years ago, I’ve had my three most important teammates walk away from their commitments to my company at critical moments. I’ve also had two creative partners in an important, long-term, artistic effort drop it flat, had a significant vendor break his verbal commitment at the last minute and discovered that several friends who promised help or involvement were never going to follow through. None of them were my employees – they were creative collaborators and fellow entrepreneurs. Equals. 

I made every effort I could think of to give each of them space, encouragement, understanding, time, to assure them of my commitment to them and our mutual success and of my willingness to adjust to their current circumstances.             

It made no difference. Most of them, I’ve basically never heard from again. Two communicate once in a while, but the working relationships I had with them have died.

I guess the obvious thing to assume here is that something’s wrong with me.

And I’ve tried to figure out what. In nearly every case, these were people I cared about deeply. We’d either started as friends or become that way after working together and shared similar missions, tastes, senses of humor. I enjoyed their company and they seemed to enjoy mine. I thanked them, praised them, stood by them, apologized for any inconvenience I thought I caused them, asked about their health, listened to their many troubles, helped as much as I could, cut them slack, bought them coffee and worked furiously to make our mutual dreams come true. They gave every appearance of sharing my devotion to our projects and of liking to work with me.

Right up until they bailed out.

Those who gave reasons all had different ones – financial stress, an ill family member, pressing business of other kinds, depression, legal troubles. All legit, I guess. But the fact remains that when the start-up and artistic processes got tough, when obstacles arose, they quit.

That staggered me. I’ve had to pick up the responsibilities they dropped and try to carry them all myself . But what hurts most is not that they ignored their promises – even their contractual obligations, in some cases - but that they dumped our friendship along with our collaboration. Starting a business was supposed to be fun. I was going to work with some of the people I liked best in the world on something we really cared about.

Instead, I find myself on my own, grimmer and more determined than ever to make this business succeed, to give my artistic projects life and to resist distrusting others and my own judgment. None of it’s easy.

Was I naive? Am I wrongheaded, inept, offensive? Is my idea bad? Am I a poor judge of character? Simply unlucky?

I don’t know. Another longtime friend sent me a message last night, saying he might not be able to follow through on his part of our multiyear project that’s finally nearing completion. I hope I won’t have to hear that someone else I’ve loved and counted on will solve his problems by letting me down.

Starting at the beginning

Literature has taught me that great fiction can start in medias res, in the middle of things. It’s a device that makes an intriguing mystery of the past and a puzzle of the present, allowing the connections between them to be illuminated in tantalizing flashbacks.

It works beautifully on the page or screen. But in real life, it give me hives. Especially in business.

And that’s because it’s not orderly.

I like order. I like it a lot.

Not the kind that demands on-time trains and phalanxes of people walking and thinking in lockstep. I couldn’t care less how other people conduct their lives as long as they and their habits don’t interfere much with what I need to do.  I don’t want to have to organize and track them. I just want to manage me.

The order I need is a composed beauty – or at least a fairly tranquil neatness – of physical space and a logical chronology of task. Chaos and agents of chaos are threats (and never as brilliantly fun/scary in real life as Heath Ledger’s Joker was in “The Dark Knight”; alas, poor Ulrich, his was too short a knight’s tale), but I can live near them as long as they don’t encroach on the borders of my carefully arranged desk, room or car. (And I have. If you could SEE some of the office pods at The Plain Dealer …!)  

In fact, I’m somewhat obsessive-compulsive about my space and methods. Oddly enough, that’s likely why being artistic matters so much to me – writing and music are probably my attempts to impose some kind of meaningful emotional and intellectual structure on the world. 

Carrying the tidiness over into my life makes me a mild curiosity in the messy, expulsive, determinedly unregimented arts world.  But being O-C is indispensible in business.

When I was in the earliest thinking stages of what became The Genius Group LLC, the parent company of Geniocity.com, I was absorbed by the challenge of taking steps in the right order. I didn’t want to get to a certain point and realize that I should have done something three moves back and then have to stop and do it – and maybe three other things – before I could move forward again. I wanted to have everything in place at the right time.

Yes, sure, I knew the process couldn’t be constructed that perfectly (O-C. Not delusional. Ok?), but planning ahead certainly did help. I especially wanted to be careful not to create any legal problems for myself by failing to set up the proper framework for what I wanted to build or being fatally ignorant of things like tax obligations.

So first, I got a pretty clear idea of what kind of business I wanted to do and with whom I wanted to do it. Then I talked to a lawyer. (Most of them will give a prospective or new client a free first hour of consultation). And after thinking a lot more, based on the information I got, I and my partners signed up with a law firm and created a specific kind of company with our lawyers’ help and advice.

Getting great lawyers was the right first step. It was also the best and most important step I’ve taken as an entrepreneur, closely followed by getting a great business advisor and a great accountant. Their help, expertise and timely reminders are essential, even for someone who’s naturally orderly and especially for anyone who’s not.

I suppose there are plenty of successful businesses run by people who throw all their papers on the floor and forget appointments and jot sales orders on their hands, but I can’t imagine how that could work. I constantly plan in my head what I have to do first, second and third this day or this week so the things those steps trigger can transpire at the proper moment. Having this stuff work out (sometimes) as planned may not be as psychologically satisfying to other people as it is to me, the Felix Unger of my generation, but it does make life more productive and at a somewhat faster rate.

And when stuff doesn’t work out and nothing happens on time? I rant, droop, whine, eat, watch movies, read, sleep, take walks and try again. All in the proper order, of course.