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.

When take-out is better than homemade

So much of what we need and want has become available in stores, ready-made, that Americans have developed a reverse snobbery about anything made from scratch.

This didn’t used to be the case – only a century ago, people oohed enviously over decorated bakery cakes and department-store clothes, while putting up their own canned goods and knitting their own lumpy sweaters because they had to. Only the rich could afford the fancy stuff made by professionals.

Now, however, we get such a staggering percentage of our goods and services from specialists in the business of providing them that the rare loaf of home-baked bread or the even rarer hand-crocheted baby blanket is greeted as if it were a Faberge egg. It’s become normal for people to have less time than money; consequently, made-it-myself stuff – from kindergartners’ Halloween costumes to crown molding - has become special, chic, the best.

Except in business. I’m not talking about the products, I’m talking about the business: Who in the world thinks keeping the books herself and writing the press releases herself and managing the inventory herself and teaching herself e-marketing late at night has any cachet?

I sure don’t. My artist contracts are not more glorious because I fill them in and print them out myself. I wish like hell I had all kinds of money to rent a big office away from my home and pay experts to speed brilliantly through the jobs I’m still struggling to figure out.  I dream of advertising and sales managers and a real staffed newsroom the way the Cratchit children dreamed of gleaming toy-shop presents and a 30-lb. roast goose.

No, a homemade business operation is not something to point out with shy pride to your dinner party guests as if it were a mahogany breakfront you’d just built or a beer you microbrewed in the basement. A homemade business operation is something you stay abashed and quiet about until you finally get capitalized and can bring in the best, most effective, already assembled, solid-thunk-when-you-slam-the-door type support your cold hard cash and good credit can buy.

Quiet, that is, unless you’re a blogger.

Magic. Or, random panicked adaptation

I’ve been thinking of many analogies lately (most of them unpostable) to describe what I’m having to do to cope with running a start-up during the worst U.S. economic crisis in maybe 80 years.

This one seems most apt:

Wizards’ Duel

Mim represents the economy down the last treacherous flameout. Now, if only I could be sure of turning myself into the germ of success ….

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.

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.

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’.

Political partying

Last night, I went to a fund-raising event for a local politician who’s running for re-election this fall.  Being of the journalist persuasion, I’ve attended such things in the past only as a working reporter for a major daily, so finding myself there as a private citizen with my business cards in my pocket felt a little odd.

But not that odd, as it turns out – the crowd was made up pretty entirely of members of the arts community I’ve covered and known well for years and I quickly discovered that it’s fun to network with people I already know and like a lot, but who haven’t necessarily heard about my new business yet.

I’m capable of making myself converse with roomfuls of total strangers, but I don’t enjoy it much. Ok, that’s an understatement - generally speaking, I’d rather unstop toilets all day than walk up to circles of people I’ve never seen before and engage them in chitchat.

So while I realize that the point of networking is to expand the number of people who know me and my company, it sure was nice to walk into a party and realize that I was never going to be able to catch up with all the people I wanted to talk to before the evening ended. 

It’s also clear that politics offers a great way of connecting with the people likeliest to share the ideas and value the mission my business champions. I have to believe that supporting candidates and issues would be a good guerrilla-marketing strategy for any business that wants to be – or at least doesn’t mind being – associated with certain philosophies and positions.

So I had another V-8 moment in my ongoing self-education as an entrepreneur. Only one problem: Political support costs a lot more than a can of juice.

Whose Livelihood Is It, Anyway?

Thought for the weekend from a brain too exhausted to function rationally and therefore susceptible to hallucinatory moments of clarity: The best preparation for becoming an entrepreneur is not business school, not practical experience, not … Life. 

It’s improv.  A day in business, a night of networking …. 

Entrepreneur: the job description

This about covers it:

Highly creative idea person needed to think up new product(s)/service(s), plus entire workable enterprise to make, sell and deliver them. Substance abuse discouraged. Must have superlative conceptualization and follow-through skills, including vivid imagination, hard common sense, monkish devotion to research and writing, cocktail-party personality, relentless organization, eel-like flexibility, dead nerves, bubbling passion, endless patience, staunch principles, bewitching persuasiveness, low expectations and a bent for practical math.

Own kneepads essential.

Ability to sit, drive, meet, talk on the phone or mouse-click for 12 hours straight an absolute requirement, no exceptions. Fluency in digital technese, adspeak, boilerplate and bankish encouraged. Large trust fund a plus.

Prefer previous experience in these areas: fund-raising, file-clerking, IT, the armed services, massotherapy, bookkeeping, storytelling, motivational psychology, NASCAR, bureaucracy, game shows, data-entry, panhandling, industrial engineering, skunk-wrangling, philosophy, fire-walking, indentured servitude, politics, poker, alchemy, baggage-handling, plate tectonics, improvisational comedy, evangelism, night carrier-landings, parasitology, kung fu and opera.          

So how come so many people apply?

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.