Learn from your mistakes. Fail, fail again, fail harder. Any of these apply to me.
For my previous company going bankrupt to have any sustainable, positive outcome, I will need to learn from it. And as I get older, I discover that I learn by doing. Repetition builds quality. Not that I want to go bankrupt again, mind you. I want to get better at creating my own, sustainable source of income. And my main path to do so is through creating an independent company.
So, how do I go about starting a new business? Some thoughts, in a somewhat random order:
Partnership
I know how to work, but I get better in partnerships. Luckily, I know just the guy for that. Having been through the exact same bankruptcy as me, former partner Ronald Mulder is as hell-bent on improving his entrepreneurship as I am. And we know how to work together.
Focus
This should not be something you do when provoked. It should be a constant effort. But having nothing better to do than start over has made it very easy to throw out the old and start with a clean sheet.
Eliminate noise: I am ferociously unfollowing on Twitter, un-friending on Facebook and disconnecting on LinkedIn. This is sometimes awkward. But it needs to be done in order to make those networks ‘work’ for me.
Increasing attention to the areas of interest. In my case: it is not Social Media that is interesting anymore. It is the impact it has on the behavior of people. It is not startups per se, it is creating sustainable value through modern networked organizations. Or something (still working on that one).
Talk, connect
Ronald and I talk a lot about what we want to bring to the world. We also talk about what really interests us, and what combinations would be made possible from that. But most importantly, we are starting to talk to people we think are doing interesting stuff right now. Because eventually, those conversations will create our market.
The awesome painting of The Don, in our former office, by @rode_egel (Eric Snelleman)
Boom. We’re bankrupt. Filed for it ourselves, to cut of the land lord, mostly. But also because we finally realised that we were fighting a lost cause. And now we’re free again.
Lesson 1: Forcing the future does not work
Back in 2008, when I joined Ritzo and Ronald in De Ondernemers BV, we had great confidence in our potential and in the future of our company. We had hired Richard and were planning on hiring more people (Anita and Marije). So we needed a bigger office. We had every intention of growing a bit more. So we decided to look for an office that could house this growth. And almost as soon as we had moved there, the recession hit. The big leads to bigger projects vanished almost immediately.
So half way 2009, we had layed of all three employees and were back to three people owning a company and renting a beatiful but very large office.
We thought we could force our future by hiring smart folks and creating a nice, inspiring work place. We thought this would radiate to our potential clients. Instead: it left us with a huge commitment.
Lesson 2: Work for the right reasons
So we got to work. We banged away at finding new opportunities, finding new clients and creating enough revenue to survive. We were very inventive, coming up with solutions for problems that our clients did not yet knew they needed. That cost us a lot of time and money. We went out of our way to accept work that would pay the bills, no matter the content. For another year and a half, that worked. Mostly.
And then, after two years Ritzo gave up. He no longer could motivate himself to go through the monthly anxiety of finding out whether or not we would be able to pay ourselves a bit of salary. Ronald and I were exhausted as well, but decided to carry on with the company, without Ritzo. We knew we had to change our focus.
The need to pay the bills for our office basically corrupted our drive to create meaningful work. Instead of getting paid for real added value, we found payment that would cover our obligations. And we drained our creative resources and motivation in the process.
Lesson 3: Do not pretend to be something or someone, be who you are
Throughout these four years of continuous agony (admitted: there were still events that excited and inspired us) I felt the fear of losing face. Whenever I was asked about how the company was doing, I would try and come up with the most positive version of our story that I could think of. The company’s name added to that: calling yourself “The Entrepreneurs” basically implied that you would not shy away from adventure and potential discomfort.
But we had found out pretty early that we weren’t employers. We had a hard time with ‘having employees’. We only just knew how to motivate ourselves. So that part of entrepreneurship kinda sucked.
At the same time, we were very driven to evangelize entrepreneurship. And I still am. But I now realize that we might have inadvertently projected an image of successful entrepreneurship, when our actual monetary returns on our own projects were still very meager. Instead, we might have done better projecting an image of Entrepreneurship Evangelists, because that is what we were.
Having goals, ambitions and a story to tell are different from realizing them. Which is okay, as long as your audience can tell them apart. But more importantly: you yourself should be able to tell them apart, lest you confuse yourself. And then confuse your clients.
Conclusions
It is often said that lessons need to be learned, not studied. I now know what it feels like to file for Bankruptcy. I no doubt will run in to some of the ramifications of the public’s perception of Bankruptcy in the months to come. And I now have learned to value focus and lean entrepreneurship even more.
Here’s hoping that this will, in fact, improve my skills as an entrepreneur.
I don’t know if you can relate to this, but something odd happened when I got really involved in music. I kinda lost interest in great music while I was busy being ‘in the music industry’. Argh!
Musicians don’t dance
Ages ago, when I first started going to concerts, I was one of those kids who would try to get as close to the stage as possible. I’ve seen quite a few famous musicians up their nose (or skirt) that way, and was mightily impressed most of the time. Mind you, no dancing was involved as we were all crushed against the barriers bij the crowds behind us. Which was fine by me, I was kind of shy that way.
Once I started playing in bands myself, I would regularly state that musicians don’t dance. Because it wasn’t cool. And I would often find myself mesmerized by the sounds, skills and performance by the band I was watching, trying to ‘get’ how they did it. But I could still enjoy music, both live and recorded. As a matter of fact, I remember some instances where I actually got chills down my back during concerts, and the odd sensation of tears welling up every now and then when the band dit extremely well.
Music Industry people have no taste of their own
As I got involved with Lopend Vuur (the Dutch indie music blog that Ard Boer and I started in 2006), my focus shifted from creating my own music to finding interesting, engaging music that was ‘worth our time and attention’ on the blog. I adopted a new set of criteria, apparently. Criteria that were more geared towards how others would appreciate the music we selected, I presume. I hardly noticed, apart from a tendency to want to go out to see bands live less often than before. But that could also have been caused by getting older, getting into a relation, getting involved in a more intense work life…
I did joke about it to some people. Whenever someone would ask my opinion on the latest hottest bands, I regularly said that I knew all the local bands, but none of the international bands that they were referring to. When we founded New Music Labs, and my music involvement became even more businesslike, it even got to the point where I lost interest in a lot of the ‘classical’ albums. Stuff that I had liked all my life went into a dark little corner of my mind.
I did enjoy some new music, though. My appreciation for regular guitar bands waned, but my interests in Rap, Drum ‘n’ Bass and even Dubstep increased (but I still wouldn’t dance to it).
Happy accidents do happen, even to musicians
A lot happend, in 2010. New Music Labs evolved, changed gears and Ard and I decided in the summer of 2010 that we would leave him at the steering wheel. I would take a step back and manage the shareholder’s interest for De Ondernemers BV (my main company. A difficult step, because I did (and do) love the fact that I was able to start a company about music. But Ard is the real dealmaker, and New Music Labs will undoubtedly excel under his guidance.
The other thing that happened, though, were Podspeakers. As a present for my 40th birthday, I got a wad of money that allowed me to finally complement my home hifi-system (NAD) with a pair of decent speakers. And I was rewarded with a whole new experience, one (I realized then and there) that I had missed for some time: awesome music!
Since then, I have once again enjoyed a number of great live shows, and listened to a lot of great music, from CD or through Spotify. And last week, Jeff Buckley brought tears to my eyes. The curtains have been lifted.
