Guest Post: Playing Office: What I’ve Learned From Starting a Business…Twice

Jan 16, 2012 by The Chickster Team    3 Comments    Posted under: Austin Art, Bookworm Reviews, She's Crafty

The Chickster team asked me to write a post about starting a business, about what it’s like to be a first-time business owner. The problem is that I can’t in good conscience do that because this isn’t my first time owning a business.

Fashion Galore was a clothing design and distribution company I owned. I was seven. Despite the boss’s diminutive stature, crying fits and lack of conflict resolution skills, FG persisted for many years. I had it all: pens and pencils, books holding imaginary records, even letterhead, a.k.a. throwaways from my parents’ business. I would shut myself in my mother’s study to scribble plans, count fake money and hold meetings with my investors: Snowflake, Meow and Baby Deer—a bear, cat and (baby) deer, respectively—their hard, beady eyes drilling me for information about the viability of my endeavor.

I enlisted my family in this corporate world I built around me: fashion advice from my mother, investment advice from my father. In a momentary lapse, I even put the fate of my little business in my older sister’s hands, slipping a handwritten document under her door that read, “Will Fashion Galore go out of business? Circle yes or no.” I’ll give you one guess as to what she circled. Fashion Galore was no more.

Twenty years later, I find myself in a disturbingly similar situation. WriteByNight is not, thankfully, on the verge of annihilation—and if it were, I wouldn’t make the same mistake again, lesson learned—but for our first year or so in business, I found myself reminiscing about Fashion Galore regularly. I’d shut myself in my mother’s study—I was working out of her Florida home at the time—to scribble plans, count fake money and hold meetings with potential investors: flesh-and-blood people this time, their hard, beady eyes drilling me for information about the viability of my endeavor. What can I say? Some things never change.

In short, I felt like I was playing office, just like I had when I was seven. The good news is that I had learned a few valuable lessons from my first attempt at starting a business, which I will summarize for you neatly here:

1. Screw the doubters. There will always be mean, big-sister types telling you that what you’re working toward is not worth your time. Often, these discouraging voices come from within. Your only hope is to shut these negative messages out ‘cause they won’t do you any favors. All that matters is that you believe in your ideas. Your strength, confidence and determination, that’s what counts.

2. No doesn’t necessarily mean no (except in dating in which case no always means no). More likely than not, you’ll experience a few roadblocks on your path to professional success, especially when you’re just starting out. These roadblocks can take many forms—a partner who isn’t on board 100%, an opportunity that isn’t panning out as you hoped it would or a client for whom you can’t quite close the deal—but what they’ll have in common is that they’ll feel like losses. The key word to remember here is “yet.” The partner isn’t on board yet. The opportunity isn’t panning out yet. The client won’t commit yet. You have many productive days in front of you in which to turn those nos into yeses. Nos are not forever, and don’t you forget it.

3. Imagination can become reality. At some point, playing office became running an office, a real one. At what point exactly this shift occurred, I can’t say, and I guess in the end it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it happened and that I found inside me the sticktoitiveness that allowed me to ride the pretend train into the real world, despite the bumps. And the motion sickness. You can do the same.

I’ll tell you what, chickadees, when I go to work every day, I still feel like a kid, but it’s not because I’m playing pretend. It’s because my work feels like play. I’m doing what I love, and I can’t imagine a better feeling.

Justine Tal Goldberg is an award-winning writer and editor of both fiction and nonfiction. Her short stories have appeared in Anomalous Press, Whiskey Island, Fringe Magazine, and other publications. Her journalistic work has appeared in the Texas Observer, Austin Monthly, and Publishing Perspectives, among others. She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College. She owns and operates WriteByNight, a writing center and writers’ service headquartered in Austin.

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