Okay, so regular readers know by now that I've started meeting up with a group here in Chicago called SCORE, basically a non-profit collective of retired corporate executives, who do such things as give free advice to small-business wannabes like me. I've met up once now with my SCORE liason, *Ernie, and while we are in agreement over many of the things in my particular business plan, we are already in vehement disagreement over the scope of the arts center I'm proposing; in a nutshell, Ernie thinks it's way too big, way too fast, while I think it's not.

But hey, let's face it - if my goal was to simply ignore every contrary opinion in the world about my plans, I wouldn't be bothering to go down to SCORE in the first place. I want opinions about the center that disagree with mine, as long as those opinions are smart, informed, and based on an inherent rationality. (And this, by the way, is where I think both so many startup people and so many artists get so confused about it all - that there's a HUGE difference between someone with a smart, informed dissenting opinion, and someone who simply says, "You suck and this is never going to work." It's of utmost importance, I think, for both business owners and artists to understand the difference between the two, and to learn how to rightly heed the first type of advice and ignore the second.)

Anyway, so one of the things Ernie asked me to do in preparation for our next meeting this Tuesday is this - to spend some time at least contemplating the idea of my center at half the scope it is now, half the activities, half the budget, even if I'm not necessarily ready to commit to such a severe slash of what the plan currently is. And like I said, the whole point of me going to SCORE in the first place is to learn things that I didn't know before; so I actually did do this earlier this week, and sat down and wrote out a new plan that is almost exactly half the scope of the old one. (For future reference, I'll refer to the old plan as the "Full" one, and the new one as the "Lite" one. For those who would like a better idea in their head of what exactly we're talking about: the Full plan calls for a year-one operating budget of $400,000, start-up costs of $80,000, and a total of $200,000 that I would need to borrow to get started; the Lite plan's budget is $220,000, with start-up costs of $40,000, and a total of $100,000 needed to actually open for business.)

It was a painful process, to be sure, one that involved just gleefully hacking and cutting away at what was originally there, like a crazed Nazi doctor in a Hellboy comic or something. For example, under the Lite plan there are no classes and workshops at all; no photographic catalogues of the exhibitions being held in our galleries (although the literary books stay); no studio-produced spoken-word CDs (although we'll still be selling recordings of all the live events taking place in the evenings). Under the Lite plan, we would only produce $10,000 in general merchandise in the first year instead of $30,000; would only get to run an ad in The Onion once a month (promoting our "Evening With..." events), instead of once a week like the Full plan calls for, with a much much heavier emphasis on customer-generated advertising (word of mouth, customer-run events, customer-generated mash-ups of spoken-word recordings, Creative-Commons-style, etc).

The biggest change in the Lite plan, however, is in staffing; namely, the new plan calls for a drop in full-time employees from seven to three, with that alone accounting for half of the budget drop (or $100,000). This is, in fact, probably one of the most shocking discoveries I've made about business in the last year, one that I utterly didn't realize before - of just how much of an annual operating budget goes towards salaries and other staff pay. I mean, it's just right there in black and white, with absolutely no way of denying it - of the $400,000 in the Full plan's budget, over $250,000 of it is for nothing else but paying employees (not only the full-timers but part-timers, hosts, featured performers, sound engineers, a lawyer, an accountant, interns and the like).

Fuck me, man! Before starting my little "personal MBA" program last year, it had never even occurred to me how much employee pay eats up the average company's budget, and especially in the case of a small business where many of their other categories are a lot smaller than a traditional larger corporation. Ernie pointed this out to me last Tuesday, and showed me in pretty plain terms what he was talking about. "You're paying $25,000 to have a full-time director for your gallery," he said as an example. "And what is that director going to do? Pick ten artists over the course of a year, do a little nailing once a month, do a little spackling once a month. It'd be nice to have a full-timer to do nothing but that, but you simply can't afford it."

And he's right, really - when you take as brutally honest a look at my plan as possible, you realize that many of the things I had assigned to a full-time employee are things I could simply do myself as the executive director, and especially if I have a college intern helping out 10 or 15 hours a week, devoted to nothing but that particular subject. So, that's a big part of the new plan, is simply rearranging in a radical way how the center's business will get done; I still have a full-timer for the live events (which still number 600 for the first year - 300 free events in the early evenings, run by our customers, and 300 "prime time" events in our main room, which we will charge money for), and I still have a full-timer for publications and merchandise (who just simply can't be eliminated - there's no way I could take on all this stuff myself and then also be reponsible for publishing ten books, and getting 300 live recordings ready for retail sale, and overseeing the creation of $10,000 in general merchandise). Other than that, though, the new plan calls on me to personally oversee everything else - to pick the artists for our galleries, to be in charge of our advertising and public relations, to be in charge of our membership program. And then to supplement these efforts, the new plan calls for the center to have eight college interns on staff as well, getting paid on a part-time basis ($6 an hour, 10 to 15 hours a week, plus of course college credit), each of them doing nothing but the day-to-day work concerning just one of these topics.

(Oh, well, shit, and I just remembered, there's actually a fourth full-timer as well, which is our computer person - the one who maintains our servers, and makes sure our members' blogs and discussion boards are running smoothly, and makes sure that our live webcast and internet radio station are running smoothly as well. But I'm feeling too lazy to go back through today's entry and fix everything I just said, so I'm just tacking it on here at the end. So - four full-timers, including myself, eight college interns, and all other duties done by members and volunteers.)

Okay, so all of this is fine and good and all, but here's where my brain has really been working in overtime this week - basically, with the amount of money needed slashed in half, to $100,000 total, there are suddenly a lot more opportunities for me to actually raise this money, besides simply getting a single private investor or a bank loan. Like, how's this for a radical idea? Instead of raising $100,000 from a single entity, why not find 100 online readers who each want to invest $1,000? After all, it's not like my readership is a bunch of broke goofy artists like myself (although I certainly have my share of them); the majority of my readers, in fact, the vast vast majority of my readers, are suburban middle-class office workers - tech developers, consultants, insurance adjustors, art directors, copywriters and the like. And for people such as these, $1,000 is still a large amount of money but certainly not an impossible thing to achieve - we're talking about the same amount you'd pay for a new laptop, for example, or half of what you'd pay for a plasma-screen television.

I crunched some numbers the other day and realized that, in theory at least, my center could actually do something like this - that we could pay all 100 investors back in a total of ten years, at a 15-percent interest rate, staggered so that our payments get a little bigger each year. (So in other words, a $1,000 investment would get a person a total of $2,200 back, only paid over the course of ten years, and with the majority of the money coming in the last five years of that decade.) In theory, at least, my center could easily make the money needed to keep to that kind of schedule.

Now, let's not have any confusion over what I'm talking about today - I'm not saying that something like this could actually work (necessarily), and I'm not saying that I'm actually going to do this (necessarily). But man, it's a pretty intriguing idea, isn't it - grid-investing, much like grid-computing or grid-blogging? In fact, theoretically I could see something even more realistic than this taking place - of me getting all weasely and accepting a job as a full-time copywriter, and saving $10,000 or $20,000 over three or four years on my own; then combining that with maybe $50,000 from a single private investor here in Chicago; and then filling out the rest with 30 or 40 online readers, each of whom would invest $1,000. In theory, anyway, I could see something like that being a real, concrete, quantifable and reachable goal.

Most people laughed at me when I said I was going to try to go to Europe using only donations from my readers; but I've done it twice now, and am heading to South Africa next year under the same plan. Most people laughed at Jason Kottke when he announced that he was quitting his day job, and was planning on payinig all his bills through reader donations; but he's been doing it, what, a year now or something, and has still had no major problems. So why not at least consider something like this? Why not at least look more into the idea of raising the money I need through a whole bunch of small investments, instead of one big one? Most people will laugh at the idea, I know, but I'm used to people laughing at my ideas; they've been doing it for almost twenty years now. And there they are, still sitting on their asses twenty years later, watching television and going to their soul-killing corporate jobs, whining about how nothing good ever happens in their lives. And here I am, twenty years later, with two trips to Europe under my belt, 40 published books, a couple of apperances on NPR, and happier about my life than I've been in a long, long time.

Nothing great will ever happen in your life until you take the courage to make it happen. And you will never make it happen until you have the capacity to dream of it happening. I'll never apologize for being a dreamer, and I'll never apologize for coming up with crazy-ass ideas that most people think will never work. It is the one single thing about me that I'm prouder of than anything else; not the books, not the tours, not the audience size of my blog, but simply my capacity to dream of things that don't currently exist, that could exist if someone simply took the time to do it. I will never apologize for this, nor will I ever stop doing it, no matter how many bitter, broken people in the world insist that I should.

Jesus fucking CHRIST - if I hear one more goddamn Hollywood movie executive say, "We don't know what went wrong this summer!," I think my head is literally going to explode. Hey, Hollywood! You want to get people to start going back to movies again? The solution is incredibly, incredibly simple:

1) Make better movies.

2) Stop charging people eleven dollars to see them.

3) Start making commercials again that show us what the movie's actually about, instead of the "45 images in 30 seconds" approach that seems to be so fucking popular among you morons these days.

That's it - it's literally that simple. But if any of you were smart enough to understand this, you wouldn't be in the goddamn mess you're in right now in the first place.