Punk Rock Entrepreneur: Running a Business Without Losing Your Values
128
Punk Rock Entrepreneur: Running a Business Without Losing Your Values
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781621069515 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Microcosm Publishing |
| Publication date: | 09/13/2016 |
| Series: | Punx Series |
| Pages: | 128 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
ATTITUDE
I can't remember the exact moment I decided to start a business. I have always done work on my own, outside my regular employment. Before I even graduated from college with my design degree, I had started picking up freelance work that I could use to pump up my portfolio for when I later applied to agencies. Despite a solid resume and a shiny new MFA, I couldn't overcome a saturated job market. Friends already working in the field reported receiving some 200 resumes for one job posting. There were simply far more designers than there were jobs, and I ended up working whatever day job I was offered. I cut out felt letters for hockey jerseys at a factory, provided tech support over the phone, and worked as a veterinary technician.
All the while, I sought out design clients — less to impress hypothetical agency types and more to do the work I really loved. It was work that I felt compelled to do even at the expense of sleep and social outings. Later, I started offering photography as a service, primarily wedding and portrait work, and eventually I realized that I needed a space online to show people what I did. I set up a basic website to display my photography and design work, and detail my services. It's been growing steadily ever since.
At the time, I didn't think of it as a business, though I was making money and logging as many hours as I did at my day job. It was just a sort of side-hustle thing that I was doing — something that I wanted to do, was skilled at, and had enough equipment to get started.
So I started. I grew up around people who were always working on projects. If a friend wanted to produce a zine, she would draw one up and distribute it. If she didn't have all the skills herself, she would collaborate with other kids — authors, artists, publishers — to get it made. Other friends wanted to go on tour, so they'd call venues, hook up with other bands, and ask their dads if they could borrow the old van. When I would ask my friends what made them do these things, they'd just shrug. Because I wanted to or because I can or because I can't imagine any other way of living. They couldn't picture a world in which they didn't approach life that way.
I grew up in a coal patch in southwestern Pennsylvania, which is not generally considered a hotbed of innovation and creativity. Still, I spent most of my time in high school and college around people who made things — music, venues, zines, art. If my friends had an idea, something that they wanted to put out into the world, they figured out the next steps to make it happen, and then they did it. I met people who believed in doing it yourself, in carving your own path, and in questioning established rules and systems. It's easy to hit an obstacle in your plan and stop there, to declare things to be impossible or, at the very least, just not doable at the moment. But punk kids, and successful entrepreneurs, don't jump straight to no. Instead of making excuses, they ask, what do we have to do to get this done?
The most important business lesson I learned from the DIY punk scene is that mindset. Punk kids have an attitude about, and a certain perspective on, the way the world works. I learned how to get things done, and quickly. I learned how to connect to people and how to be creative in a lot of ways — not only in the things I make but in getting my work out there. I learned that it's generally better to ask for forgiveness than permission, that is, if anyone even notices your bold move. These are the things I hope to impart. You are going to run into obstacles. Whatever sort of business you're trying to create, whatever work it is that you want to do, will not be smooth sailing. How you handle those obstacles can make or break you. There are plenty of grim statistics about how many businesses fail in their first years and how few make it past five years. Failures generally boil down to a lack of planning (not enough people want what you're making, you've drastically underestimated your operating costs) or an inability to handle hardships when they arise. This attitude that I've picked up, thanks to hanging around DIY types, has fundamentally affected how I handle problems. Now, when something goes terribly wrong, my immediate reaction isn't oh shit, we're boned but what can we do about this? Touring is an essential part of getting a band off the ground, so bands have gone to great lengths to make a tour happen. Not having a van is a pretty giant obstacle, but, again, people got creative and found workarounds. DOA opted to hitchhike from Canada to San Francisco and borrowed equipment for their first gig. DRI traded their PA for a van and sold everything that wasn't nailed down to cover gas money. Operation Ivy toured in a 1969 Chrysler Newport — a four-door car — for six weeks. Pat Spurgeon of Rogue Wave went on tour while waiting for a kidney transplant and had to do dialysis twice a day. Usually, this is done under extremely sterile conditions, but Pat had things to do. So, in the best-case scenarios, he'd get a motel room to himself. In the worst, he did his dialysis in a moving van. The band would roll up the windows, turn off the A/C, and put on surgical masks. It would have been easy for any of those bands to say we can't do a tour. But they didn't. Instead, they figured out a workaround to get where they wanted to go.
Some of these plans were better than others. The takeaway here isn't simply to jump without a net and hope for the best (nor is it to do dialysis in a moving van). It is, instead, to ask what do I need and how do I get it? If that's not a culture you've been immersed in, it can take some effort to change your thought process.
In addition to spending so much time around DIY types, I was also raised by people who made things happen. (My mother once applied for a job while barefoot, on a dare. They hired her.) Yet, I've still heard myself say oh, I can't do that without thinking it through. When I was accepted to give a conference talk in London, my kneejerk reaction was oh, but I can't fly to London. After a bit of time had passed, I thought, why can't I fly to London? I have a passport, I'm not banned from that particular country, and I'm great at budgeting and planning trips. Sometimes it takes a conscious effort to follow up that immediate negative reaction with what do I need to make this work and how do I get it? I did the research on what exactly it would cost, planned a way to pay for it, and organized my travel. I made a workable plan.
Get all the facts before you decide that you can't do something. I can't is an excellent excuse not to do scary things. It's vague, so you can't really argue with it. It sounds as though you've thought the situation through. I can't is just the first roadblock your brain throws out there when faced with a scary task. (It's right up there with this is the way we've always done it.) Usually, my counterargument is what's the worst that could happen? This is generally a rhetorical question, but considering what is the worst thing that could happen can help you to figure out exactly what is at stake. I can't lose this job is an immovable roadblock, but I'm worried about how losing this job will affect my budget is a concrete problem that you can begin to solve. Alternately, you may realize that something is an extremely bad idea that you should run in the opposite direction of (i.e. the worst thing that could happen is I fail at this stunt that I'm in no way prepared to perform and end up in a full-body cast). The idea is not to jump straight to no but to carefully consider where saying yes might take you.
Another trap that keeps you from moving forward is comparing yourself to other people, especially people that you feel have it easier than you. Of course they can go on a three-month book tour, their parents pay their rent. There will always be people out there starting out with more privileges, more resources, more money, more support than you have. But there will also always be people who are doing it anyway with much less.
There are people who are far more hardcore than me in this regard, but because this is my book, you get my story. I have Lyme disease, which has ranged from nearly debilitating to kind-of-a-bummer. I've been working with Weapons of Mass Creation Fest since 2011, as a photographer and later a volunteer coordinator for the media crew. I was planning to do the same in 2012, but then I found out that I would have to get a PICC line placed four days before the fest. If you're unfamiliar, a PICC is a peripherally inserted central catheter — a tube inserted into an artery around your bicep so that you can shoot IV medications straight into your heart. It comes with a ton of terrifying warnings that mostly end with and die. If you get air in the line, you could have an embolism and die. If you get an infection, you could get sepsis and die. But I had worked at a veterinary clinic with my last PICC line, and I figured that a festival full of designers couldn't be any dirtier than that. I started thinking about how I could manage to photograph this festival for the weekend and still juggle my IV infusions.
I had to keep all the medication refrigerated during my three-hour drive to Cleveland, so I packed a cooler full of drugs and snacks, and made friends with the ice machine at the hotel. I had to do infusions every day, so, after spending the day shooting at the festival, I drove half an hour out to the Motel 6 and hung the IV bag off a floor lamp. One of the days ran really late, and I ended up having to do an infusion in the basement of Saigon Plaza, next to boxes of extra takeout menus and Christmas lights. Basements aren't generally a place you want to do semi-sterile procedures like IV infusions, but I've found less appropriate spaces (like an airport bathroom in Madrid, or a moving car). That summer, I shot two more festivals — with that same line. On my way to one, I met up with my dad for lunch. He said, "you know, most people in your situation just wouldn't work."
You can substitute my situation, Lyme Disease, for things that are more applicable to you. Most people with kids wouldn't give up their day job to freelance. Most people wouldn't start a business when they have a perfectly good job. Most people wouldn't sell their car to get a record pressed. Most people wouldn't.
In fact, most people would say that they can't, but that's not entirely the truth. There's a cost to everything — maybe it's money, it's time, or it's having your parents tell their friends that you're "in computers." It's important that you know what your plan is going to cost you. Often, this analysis reveals the things that you'll need to give up to get what you want. You should go into things with your eyes open. I didn't just hop in a car and hope for the best. I had to spend some time planning. I had to identify the things that I'd have to give up in order to make my plan work and decide whether I was okay with it. Maybe it turns out that you don't want it that badly, and that's fine. You're allowed to consider the sacrifices you'll have to make to grow your business and decide that it isn't for you. But you don't want to have that realization after you've quit your job, taken out a loan, or signed a lease on a storefront. Doing research and planning is a crucial step, so that you don't have to learn the hard way that it isn't what you want.
Once you've decided you're in it, a great first step in your plan is figuring out your MVP. If you don't spend a lot of time around start-ups, MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product. The idea is to make something that has just the core features that are necessary, and nothing more. No bells and whistles, just a solid, functioning thing. You create this MVP and ship it to a small audience, and then you get feedback to improve your next version. It's an iterative process in which you generate an idea, prototype it, present it, analyze the responses you collect, and plan from there. This strategy helps you avoid spending years creating software only to find that no one needs or wants it.
The concept is familiar to the punk scene, though I've never heard a musician use the term "MVP." In punk, it feels more like what's the least we can get away with? (Sometimes, one-minute songs are all you need.) Using the MVP process, musicians write and practice songs, play them live at a show, and find out what works and what doesn't before going into the studio to record. Basement shows are a great example of an MVP. If you don't have a venue, find a space with electricity. Bands have played in delis, in laundromats, in back rooms of warehouses, in parking lots, in churches, in VFW halls, and on people's lawns. Flatline, a small-town band, has played shows in a three-car garage, in a field, and in a Taco Bell parking lot. You may not be able to book traditional venues, or you may live somewhere that doesn't have traditional venues, especially for smaller bands.
I went to school for design, and took nearly every studio art class that was offered. I learned a lot about what artists call ad-hoc spaces — ad hoc is Latin for "for this." It's a makeshift solution that is designed to fulfill an immediate need. There was no gallery on campus, so we had to find a nearby space that we could modify into a gallery. Whatever you're calling your process, what you're really doing is determining those core features that are necessary to your product, your service, your event. And once you determine those core features, then you start to get creative about achieving them.
When The Replacements released Stink, in 1982, they couldn't afford to have the album jackets professionally printed. So they carved the word "Stink" into a potato, inked it, and hand stamped each one. Maybe you can't afford to print an album cover, but you can buy a potato and some stamp ink for well under $5. Figuring out your MVP gives you a very clear idea of what you do — and don't — need to make your business work.
"Punk rock is really all about trimming the fat and getting rid of what you don't need. I'm a full-time musician today and do 150-200 shows a year because of what I learned in the punk scene. A lot of musicians are crying today that there's not money in music. Maybe you can't afford a jet and Lamborghini, but I have a house and live pretty comfortably, and I never went into music for those other things in the first place. When we don't need tour buses, hotels, high-end food, cocaine, strippers, and fancy rides, we don't use them, and that means money saved. It's all economics, money in and money out. I'd rather be able to live my dream punk-rock style than be on a sinking ship of debt trying to be Guns and Roses in '89." — Adam Joad, Scattered Hamlet
When I started to ramp up the photography end of my business, I spent a lot of time reading blogs and articles about all the start-up costs I'd need to cover: You're going to need a serious computer with this kind of processor and this much RAM. You need this software, that lens, this camera system. Get a studio, a big one, with a real office — you'll need that. And supplies — we're running a business here, you'll need thousands of dollars in overhead.
Had I followed any of that advice, I might still have a successful business, but I would be buried under a gigantic mountain of debt.
When I officially started my business, and filed all the paperwork to make it nice and legal, I had a three-year-old laptop with Photoshop CS3 and the tiniest desk known to man set up in a corner of my bedroom. I had a consumer-level Nikon camera (the cheapest DSLR they offered at the time) with three prime lenses. That was it. I determined that this was my MVP — I had a camera system that could cover anything, and I had a computer that, while slow as hell, could edit those photos. It cost me time, but when I started, I had much more time than I had money.
Eventually, I started making money. I posted client and personal work to the site, and updated the blog. People started finding me, and later, recommending me to their friends. I started investing some of the money I was making back into the business. I've upgraded the camera system more than once since then, and I've purchased software that isn't strictly necessary, but it saves me a huge amount of time. Nearly a decade in, I still don't have some of the things that those articles told me I couldn't start a business without.
The DIY attitude helped me to work through these processes — identify what a project will cost, the least that I'll need to get it off the ground, and how I can realistically go about supporting it. If you take the time to get creative and really think about all your options to produce something, often it's a lot less expensive or a lot easier to achieve than you might have thought.
The next time an obstacle or an opportunity presents itself, and your immediate thought is I can't do that, try to follow it up with ... but what if I could? In the end, you may still find that your initial response is correct, that a project just won't work out. But you may find yourself with a plan that allows you to overcome that obstacle or achieve that goal, and that's certainly worth the time it takes you to ask a few questions.
CHAPTER 2BUILDING A NETWORK
Networking is often met with resistance. Understandably, most people associate that word with a roomful of vaguely intoxicated people in suits, passing out business cards to other people who want only to pass out their own business cards. That sounds horribly unpleasant, but so many people starting out in business view it as a necessary evil. Aside from being boring as hell, it's also a really inefficient way to connect with people.
When I started out, I researched strategies and advice for networking. Many suggest setting a goal for how many cards you'll pass out at an event, maybe 25 or 50. Let's say I'm feeling really productive, so I aim for 50. (We're gonna do some math here, stay with me.) At a three-hour event, that means I get to spend just shy of four minutes with each person I'm handing a card to. That barely gives me enough time to introduce myself and explain what I do, and then I've got to be off to "meet" someone else, or I won't make my quota for the night. Did you have a project that's really interesting? Who cares? I have cards to pass out.
Even if I decrease my quota to 25 cards in that time frame, I increase my interaction time to barely seven minutes. This is also assuming that I stick to my plan the entire time. Put down that coffee. Coffee is for closers. You don't need to eat, we're here to pass out cards. In seven minutes, I can do a pretty solid introduction and maybe ask the other person what he does, as long as he's not long-winded. Yes, you make blankets for orphans. Tick tock buddy, I don't have all day.
So you may have completed your arbitrary goal of handing out all those business cards, but you've failed to inspire anyone to follow up on it. They don't know you, or care about you, or likely even remember exactly what it is that you do, aside from abruptly leaving conversations. If your goal is simply to get your information in front of some strangers, you'd be better served to burst in and fling cards into the air like confetti. At least they'd be likely to remember that.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Punk Rock Entrepreneur"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Microcosm Publishing.
Excerpted by permission of Microcosm Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Attitude,
Building a Network,
Give a Shit,
Adapt or Die,
Make,
Who the Hell are the Ramones?,
Build Your Own Space,
Find Your Juggalos,
Sell Out,
Use Your Whole Ass,
We Live Our Lives Another Way,
Have Some Audacity,
Resources,