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.