Well, hello there! Greetings from the Chicago Loop, where I just finished up my first of what will hopefully be a series of regular meetings with the local chapter of SCORE. For new readers who don't know, I should explain that I am actually in the process right now of trying to open a new commercial arts center here in the city, a fairly radical one that flies against most traditional ideas of how arts centers should be run; SCORE, then, is a non-profit group of retired corporate executives, who exist basically to give free advice to people like me, to look over our business plans, help us target sources of funding and the like.

I've decided not to use anyone's real names that I meet through this process, because of growing problems this summer with hate mailers, so I'll just call my SCORE liason *Ernie instead, because he just looks like an Ernie - a little shorter than average, round face with a close-cropped beard, a jovial voice that can nonetheless be very serious when he wants it to be. And so Ernie and I just got done with a nearly two-hour meeting, first talking about the plan itself and then expanding into what I'm hoping overall to accomplish with my center, and where I see the center going in the future.

It was...ooh, man. Talk about getting smacked in the head with a big ol' sturdy 2 x 4 of reality. Ernie doesn't believe that my arts center can be opened in the way that I'm currently envisioning it; in fact, he flat-out said at a certain point, "You have no chance of opening this center the way you're currently envisioning it." Which is...well, both a trivial and important thing to hear. Trivial, of course, because most people who read the plan don't believe it can be opened the way I'm envisioning it - which is the whole point of the plan being the way it is, so that I can open something no one else would ever think of on their own, and thus reap the rewards of such a thing exclusively. But important as well, because this isn't just some random schmuck doing the review, whose motivation for trashing it might come from a whole variety of petty personal sources; this is a guy who did such things for a living for forty years, who still finds it so enjoyable that he volunteers to continue doing it for people like me. And it's difficult to just flat-out dismiss the things that someone like this says, and undoubtedly dangerous for me as well.

That all said, his criticisms basically took one of two forms - 1) the things about my center that differ from how most traditional centers have done things, which I can pretty much ignore because that's the whole point of opening this center the way I am (with examples that include, "You should open as a non-profit;" "You shouldn't let artists in for free;" etc); and then 2) the criticisms that are actually valid ones, things that I hadn't thought of myself but that are of real use to me. And, just like anyone else in my position, my job is to not just seek out such criticisms, but to also be able to successfully sort them, to understand which things I need to pay attention to and which I can safely ignore.

Like, here's just one really good example - under the current plan, I have all the artists who get involved with the center listed as "customers," and even have a giant section of my marketing plan devoted to explaining how we're going to keep these artists happy, and get them to remain satisfied, productive customers. But as Ernie correctly pointed out, these artists are not actually customers at all - "customers," as it's strictly defined, are those people who are actually providing the revenue the center generates - the people buying the books, the people paying admission fees to attend shows. In this situation, the artists who get involved are considered "service providers," just like what an author is in relationship to a publishing company. These artists still have to be kept happy, Ernie also correctly pointed out, but this falls under the realm of vendors and suppliers, not as part of our marketing plan and steps to keep actual customers happy. And so that was a good thing to learn for the first time, and now will profoundly shape how the next iteration of the business plan looks and reads.

I guess the most frustrating thing about my talk today with Ernie is that he kept insisting that my revenue goals are unrealistically high - "You've got all your products and services maxxed out," he kept saying, "and it's just simply a fact that no company achieves the maximum amount of revenue they can theoretically achieve their first year." But that's just flat-out wrong - my revenue chart doesn't reflect potential maximums, and are instead based on what I think are very, very realistic expectations. For example, of the 20 books the center plans on publishing its first year, we only need to sell 100 copies of each to meet our revenue expectations. And Jesus, even most self-publishing poets I know manage to sell 100 copies of their books, through nothing else but selling them out of a backpack at live shows; with a major organization behind them, and major money spent on marketing and promotional events, I think it's actually ridiculously low to set sales of each book at 100 copies, and realistically think that that number is going to be more like 500 or 1000 per book once the place is actually open. And the rest of the plan is like this as well - I'm only planning on 25 tickets sold per show to meet our revenue expectations, only 15 students per class, only one direct sale per gallery exhibit we sponsor. And yet Ernie just kept saying, over and over, "These figures are unrealistic. You'll never be able to sell 100 copies of each book you publish. You'll never be able to get 25 paid audience members for all 300 shows you're planning on holding your first year." Which is frustrating, because in this case he's wrong, just flat-out wrong, and he offered no justification for this opinion other than, "Well, that's just reality, and there's no arguing with reality."

For what it's worth, Ernie does like the plan itself; he likes how I'm planning on actually running the operation, and how I'm planning on compensating my employees, and even how I'm planning on cross-promoting our various products and services using one small shared budget. He's merely in vehement disagreement with me over the scope of the project, and the larger-term vision I have over how this center should be opened in the first place. And this is troubling, because frankly it's the absolute number-one critique I get of the plan in general, no matter who's reading it - that it's simply too large a project, too grandiose, and can never actually be pulled off by someone in my position ("my position," of course, being someone with no credit, no assets, and no successful track record of past business projects).

And so suddenly you get into that frustrating game played in the high-tech industry on a daily basis, which is - how grandiose exactly is too grandiose? In other words, where is the cutoff line between being a visionary, of trying something risky that no one else has ever thought of trying, and being too unrealistic for one's own good? Everyone laughed at Amazon when they first went into business, and everyone laughed at Google when they first went into business as well, but neither company would be in the position they're in now if their founders had actually listened to what the people around them were saying. But then again, everyone laughed at Pets.com when they first went into business too, and it turned out they had every right to be laughing at them.

This is a fine line that has no real answer, which of course is the most frustrating thing of all about trying something experimental, something that's never been proven before can work. Your detractors could very well be right, and there could very well be aspects of your business plan that are simply destined to sink the entire operation. But your detractors could very well be wrong too, because they're jealous or because they simply lack the vision that you have, which of course is why you are opening this company and not them. And as the person with the vision, it is your job to understand where this line lays - of when a critique makes actual sense, and is something you should legitimately worry about, and when a critique is merely motivated by ignorance, or jealousy, or simply a lack of courage on the part of the critic. Like I said, there's no right answer to any of this, which is what makes this the singlemost frustrating thing about being an entrepreneur with an original vision.

In general, though, I can definitely state that it was a great meeting today, full of insights and all kinds of things that I've really been needing to hear for awhile now. And man, can I just take a moment again to say how refreshing it sometimes is to hang out with businesspeople instead of artists? I love the fact that Ernie is a no-nonsense guy, and that he just lays things on the table as plainly as he can, no matter how offensive it might be to the receiver in question. The arts world, it sometimes seems, is so often based on these very delicate political situations, and of using hazy altruistic statements to mask a lack of knowledge of basic business issues. "Making the world a better place" and "helping our fellow humans" are certainly great thoughts when it comes to one's life actions, to be sure, but really do me no good when it comes to the nitty-gritty of actually opening a commercial business. It was great and really refreshing to get to sit with Ernie today, and to have him go through my plan one page at a time and say, "Okay, this is great, and this sucks, and this really sucks, and this is really great." It's the kind of feedback I'm craving right now, and the kind that is actually going to propel me forward in the start-up process.

So what's next? Well, Ernie wants me to start by slashing my business plan in half - to 20 pages maximum, to be precise, down from the 47 pages it currently is (which is actually quite an accomplishment already - the original plan a year ago was over 100 pages long, believe it or not). He also wants me to visit another client of his, a ceramics studio and arts center that by coincidence happens to be in my neighborhood. (It's Lill Street Gallery, if anyone happens to already be familiar with them, which is not actually on Lill Street - it's at Montrose and Ravenswood.) Ernie admitted late in our talk that he's having a hard time even picturing what I want my center to be, precisely because it's so complicated and grandiose in nature. And since this Lill Street Gallery does many of the things I want to do myself (like classes, an on-premise gallery, a membership program, etc), and since Ernie actually does have a mental image already of what Lill Street does, he wants me to stop by and check it out, and see if I can't maybe describe my own center to him at our next meeting in relative terms to what I saw there. And we've made plans to meet up again a week from today, which means I've got a busy week ahead of me - a lot of slashing and burning (er, editorial slashing and burning, that is), lots of deep thinking again over what precisely I'm hoping to accomplish, a field trip out to an already-open center and the like. So we'll see what happens next week, I guess, once I've incorporated the changes to the plan that Ernie has suggested. But man, I'll say this just one more time, because it deserves to be said one more time - thank God for groups like SCORE. Thank God there are people out there willing to help out a clueless little small-business wannabe like myself, who are willing to be patient with stupid basic mistakes, willing to deal with admittedly strange little business plans that seem completely unworkable when first read. Thanks, SCORE, for helping this one random American out.

Okay, two weeks now since I first started listening to podcasts on my Treo, and I'm still no closer to developing a stable list of quality shows. Sigh! Is anyone else having extremely difficult problems concerning this subject? I mean, I'm used to coming across vast fields of raw information, and being able to distill them quickly into the things I find most interesting; it's not unusual, for example, for me to spend a Saturday afternoon checking out all 50 or 60 blogs that a blogger I admire has listed in their sidebar, just to see which five or six of them I might want to subscribe to myself. But here's the thing - with a blog, I can easily scan 10 or 20 entries on the front page in just a matter of a minute or so, to read just enough of each one to get a general sense of whether I'm going to like this blog or not. But man, there's no doing this with podcasts, that's for sure - a lot of times the only thing you'll know about a podcast before listening to it is simply the name of the show, and in most cases you have to sit down and actually listen to one of the episodes to determine whether or not it's any good. And you can't just listen to the first minute or two, either, because what if that particular episode just happened to have a bad start that week? And so you have to listen to the entire goddamn 30 or 40 minutes of the thing; and 30 minutes per new podcast is just not cutting it with me, as far as quickly finding a stable of good ones.

I'll tell you what I'd really like to find, is a website that actually reviews podcasts, who listens to random episodes and gives their opinion on whether or not they're worth subscribing to. But Jesus, this is the web we're talking about here - I have to imagine that there's dozens of such sites already in existence. So I guess that's what I'm really looking for; recommendations from readers on good "podcast review" sites. Know of any? Send them my way at ilikejason at hotmail dot com; I appreciate any recommendations you can give.