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.

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?

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

Not farewell. I want to say a fond au revoir to Abby Maier, who is leaving her job as the leader of Cleveland’s COSE Arts Network to start a new life as a mom in rural Vermont. Though she will no longer be representing COSE on Geniocity.com, Abby will be returning to this site in 2009 to blog about creativity from the artist’s point of view.

That’s a point of view she knows well. Before joining COSE, Abby earned a degree in art, specializing in fabric-based work. She’ll resume that creative side of her life in Vermont and – because not all inventive art occurs in large metropolitan areas – will give us some needed perspective on what’s happening creatively in the vast areas of the U.S. that aren’t paved and overpopulated.

Just as her own artistic background informed Abby’s work at COSE, so her COSE experience and close connection to the issues, policies and practices of arts entrepreneurship will enrich her commentary on how artists function creatively in small towns. 

Geniocity.com owes Abby more than a “see you later” and a thank-you for her posts. We are deeply grateful for the help she gave us, as she did so many other COSE Arts Network members, in pursuing our entrepreneurial dreams: finding resources and advisors for us, keeping us regularly tuned in to COSE’s many helpful networking and educational events and cheering us on.

As the pioneering first leader of the Arts Network, Abby helped COSE create something unique in this nation: a place for artists at the table of business, a place that honors and supports the economic role  artists play in the Greater Cleveland community. The city may not be wealthy right now, but it is rich in a kind of arts-business innovation that the rest of you around the world will want to give a second look. Abby and COSE, along with Cleveland’s Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, are making this part of Northeast Ohio a home of unequaled resources for the arts and those who practice them.

So I wish her well and wish her back at Geniocity.com soon. Abby, you’re the best.