So, regular readers will know by now that I'm in the middle of trying to open a new arts center here in Chicago; and regular readers will also know that one of the things I'm doing these days is meeting up with SCORE, a non-profit collective of retired corporate executives, who exist basically to give free advice to people exactly in my position. I had my second meeting with them this Tuesday, in fact, which turned out to be just as simultaneously instructive and frustrating as my first meeting. For those of you who are curious, I thought I'd recount today some of the things we talked about, as well as ruminate a bit on one of the subjects SCORE is encouraging me to ruminate on these days, the idea of "organically grown" businesses.

Okay, so first, a snarky confession - you'll never really know just how frustrating it is to pitch a cutting-edge arts center to a bunch of retired corporate executives in their sixties, until you've actually done it. And that's just the simple fact of the matter, without assigning any kind of subjective opinion about it all - that the generational and technological gap between me and my SCORE liasons (including not only *Ernie from last week, but a new guy as well who I'll call *Burt) prevents these guys from understanding the parts of my plan that I think are the key to the plan actually working. Like, one of the main components of my plan, and the thing that's going to allow us to get away with a lot less advertising than most other places, is to have just this bleeding-edge website to complement the center's activities - customized mailing lists, deliverable via email or SMS; a referrer-style news blog run by our staff and trusted members; a daily podcast, with things like interviews with touring writers, previews of center events, book reviews by our members, etc; a webcast of our live events, so that people can either watch and/or listen for free as they happen, if they can't actually make it to the center; MP3 "gallery walkthroughs," where basically the artist and I walk through a new gallery exhibit with a Minidisc and provide commentary that people can download and listen to themselves, as they themselves walk through the gallery with their iPod on; free blogs for any member who wants one; a special "sandbox" section, where we put up visual and audio files under a Creative Commons license, free for others to download, mash up, and re-release in any way they deem fit; free electronic copies of all our books; oh, and it just goes on and on and on, unsurprisingly.

I get the sense that these SCORE guys just completely do not understand why things such as these are going to be so important to something like a customer-centric arts center, or why they're going to allow us to skip a lot of the more traditional, much more expensive and much less effective forms of advertising that have been around for decades. And that's bad enough, but then of course as traditional business guys they also are wary of any aspect of any business plan that doesn't inherently try to fuck over customers as much as possible; for example, one of the things I've been hounded on repeatedly by them now is my plan to let working artists attend live events for free, in exchange for them donating the publishing rights for three of their pieces to us.

Ernie sees something like this and he'll say, "You know, most artists are more than happy to pay a fee to have access to the kinds of resources you're going to have. Not only should you be charging admission fees to all your artist audience members, you could even charge artists for gallery space, make them kick in a certain amount for the publishing costs of their book, etc."

And I keep wanting to roll my eyes and say, "Well, no, in fact, you're completely and utterly wrong about that - most artists, in fact, completely lack the finances to do what you're saying. And when an artist does have this kind of money, it usually means that they're not a very good artist, because they're expending so much of their energy at their crappy day job in order to have this money in the first place. And that's kind of the main point of opening this center, anyway, is because I know in this deeply personal way just how many con-job artistic organizations there are in fact out there, who exist not really to get artistic content out to a paying audience, but rather to primarily make their money fleecing the artists themselves, and to charge them "jury fees" and "proofreading fees" and all those other sniggly little misnamed tolls which basically scream to a working artist, "We're making most of our money in administrative fees, and are not really planning on actually promoting your project, even if you do end up spending the money to get involved with us in the first place."

This unto itself is not that unexpected; in fact, I'd be surprised if a bunch of retired corporate executives weren't suspicious of some of my plans. What's really frustrating, I guess, is the dismissive attitude you see from a lot of these traditional business guys - that if your company isn't planning on fucking over its customers in every way humanly possible, it's simply a bad plan written by someone who obviously doesn't know anything about business. And I simply don't agree with this; I don't believe that the only two choices in the world are "smart businessman, fuck over customers" and "dumb businessman, respect customers." I believe that it's possible to grant a certain basic amount of dignity and respect to every customer one has, to not fleece them at every waking moment possible, and to still be considered a good businessman. I don't see the two things as mutually exclusive - which can be really frustrating, when you discuss business with people who do believe this way, and who dismiss every point you make with, "Well, you just don't understand how business works." You can't argue a statement like that, because it suddenly turns the discussion into one of education and experience, instead of ideas. Which I think is ultimately bullshit, simply because of what I've observed in the real world - namely, that over the years I've pretty much been able to do most of my supervisors' jobs better than they could, even with one hand tied behind my back, even though those people usually had 10 or 15 years more experience at it than me. Education and experience are important, of course, but ultimately I've met a lot of people over the course of my life with a ton of both, who were still drooling morons; but rarely have I met a person with smart ideas who wasn't smart themselves, and worth listening to, no matter what their age or how many real-world experiences they now have.

Now, all that said, the SCORE guys are slowly bringing me around to their way of thinking on one important subject, which is the proposed scope of my center; basically, they're arguing that my original plan was just way too big, way too fast, and had absolutely no chance of getting funded adequately and actually opened for business. One of the things Ernie suggested I do last week, in fact, was to reimagine my center at exactly half the scope the original plan was - half the services, half the staff, half the budget. And so I did such a thing, and lo and behold I'm liking it more and more, each time I review it, although it did involve getting rid of a lot of stuff I didn't want to get rid of (like all our classes and workshops, half the books I had planned on publishing, two-thirds of the proposed merchandise, and about 75 percent of my originally proposed staff).

And all of this brings up this really intriguing question, I think, which is: Just how much of an original plan for a small business does one actually try to implement from day one, and how much of it should just be naturally added to the business as time and resources allow? I mean, let's just take McSweeney's as a good example, one of the companies out there that is providing major inspiration for my own center. The fact is that McSweeney's didn't just start on day one with the fantastically manufactured books they're now famous for; if you look at their first two or three issues, in fact, the publications themselves are surprisingly pedestrian (just white trade-paperback books, just like every other book in a bookstore), only with their design and content really making them stand out. McSweeney's didn't start on day one with their full-book division, either, or their sister magazine The Believer, or the live events, or the writing schools that are now in San Francisco and New York (and coming to Chicago soon, by the way - but more on this in a future entry). None of these things got added to the McSweeney's Empire until they were already excellent at what they were already doing (their quarterly literary review and daily website, that is), and until the audience had grown for those things to the point that they would support these new products and services.

So then it becomes an interesting question, one without an objective "right" answer - basically, how much of this stuff could McSweeney's have taken on at the beginning, and still be the success they are now? Could they have started their book-publishing company at the same time they started the quarterly literary review, and had the audience for both complementing each other throughout its history? Or would their publishing company have sat in the obscure "small press hell" if they had done this, with nothing really getting better until they developed the massive religious fan base for the quarterly review that they did?

This is the question my liasons at SCORE are urging me to ponder these days - of where the line lays between what my arts center wants to do, and what we actually can do. And believe it or not, I actually went through this process once already, because the list of things I want my arts center to do is simply unending; I want it to eventually sponsor a nationally-known week-long spoken-word festival, and I want it to grant an annual college scholarship, and I want it to eventually own its own retail center and cafe, and I want it to be able to offer subsidized health insurance to all our working artists who are members, and just on and on and on.

And before ever meeting up with SCORE, I had pulled most of these ideas already and had shuttled them off into the "future plans" section, leaving what I considered a pretty ambitious but ultimately doable plan for what we actually were going to offer in our first year. But the SCORE guys say that even that was way too much, and I'm beginning to agree with them, so now have a plan for year one that almost makes me want to scream, because it's implementing so little of what I want this center to eventually implement. But is it okay to have a company publishing ten books its first year instead of twenty? Or is it better simply not to open the company at all, unless you can secure the resources to do it in the way you're envisioning? That's the question I think every small-business wannabe needs to answer for themselves, and is the question that I myself am trying to develop an answer for these days too.

So what's next? Well, despite how today's entry might sound, the SCORE guys actually like my plan as it currently exists, and are under the belief that not too much needs to be changed anymore in the "here's how things are going to work" section. So, it's suddenly time to do the suck part of writing a business plan, which is basically tracking down all the statistical information I'll need to actually convince someone with money that my plan is doable. And this just basically involves collecting a whole bunch of crappy little data on a whole variety of subjects - how much Chicagoans spent last year on museum attendance, how many books Chicagoans bought last year, how many memberships such places as the Art Institute and WBEZ (the local NPR station) had last year, just all kinds of little details like that. And unfortunately, there's no easy answer as to where one actually finds all this information; the library, of course (and in usual style, Chicago's main Harold Washington library in the Loop apparently contains just a plethora of such information, as well as a very knowledgable staff), but also by getting other artistic organizations to share their info with you, in some cases stealing this information when the competing company in question isn't paying attention, trawling government websites, checking in with watchdog organizations, etc. This is going to be a long and frustrating part of the process, I can tell already, and one that's not going to be very much fun actually accomplishing.

But it's got to be done, right? So, early next week you can expect a first report from me on what exactly the Harold Washington Library's small-business section is like, and whether the staff really is as informative and friendly as I've been led to believe. And in the meanwhile, of course, it's also finally time for me to begin the dreaded "Let's Get Jason's Credit Rating Back to Zero Over the Next Three Years" project - which if I haven't mentioned, I'm fucking dreading, not because the process itself is going to be that traumatic (after all, I only have maybe $500 or $600 in grand total debt in my life, left over from unpaid utility bills, old college charges and the like); but because the amount of Kafkaesque bureaucratic red tape I'm going to have to deal with is going to be unbelievable, and I know already that I'm going to seriously want to hurt some people by the time the whole thing is over. But it's gotta be done, so...it's gotta be done. Sigh.

Oops, out of space for today! Oh, and I still had stuff left to talk about, too. Oh well - check back tomorrow, I suppose, for more endless bullshit and blathering, including news on some cool things some of my readers are doing these days, my report from the second Bookslut event earlier this week, and photos of me helping out the Mud Queens of Chicago set up the "mud pit" for their next event, coming up this weekend. Please, please, I urge all of you - keep on rockin' in the free world.