Unbranded newsletter 2, part II
The value of quitting, PART I: How and why I exploded my business
TL;DR
The Original Vision
Timing
I Quit
Sneaky Old American Story
The Explosion
Doing my Duty
Starting over
Pioneering some new shit: a business manifesto
(Links in footnotes)
For your listening pleasure, I share with you a soundtrack for this newsletter, Ambient Lofi Beats, by james.young on Spotify.
Text:
Hello again. Continuing the story on the value of quitting and why I decided to explode my business. (If you missed it, you can view Part I here)
First, I should explain what I mean by “exploding” my business, and confess that in a certain way, it’s always been my plan to “end” it. What I had to learn was how to quit my attachment to how it would happen.
I’ve always thought of my business as more than a business. Sure, the point was to make money. That’s the definition of a business. But I seek a creative and spiritual component to everything I do, and House of Who, Inc. was no different.
Here’s the original 3-part vision:
Build a business. 2. Make it successful. 3. Explode it.
Let me explain:
For many years, I had been thinking about and actively exploring the purpose of business. Usually, it’s to make money (traditional profit-driven business). Sometimes it’s to further an objective like curing cancer (mission-driven business). But what about business explicitly as a vehicle for self-actualization? A work of art? A way to change the nature of work itself?
What if, I thought, I made a business to explore the mere fact that nothing lasts forever? Kind of a meditation on life and death. We are used to thinking of a business as a thing that is built and then grows and grows and grows, forever.
Upward sloping line and all that.
But nothing lasts forever. What if the point of the business was to experience it like a flower: plant it, grow it, watch it bloom, and then compost the remains?
Ergo: 1. Build a business. 2. Make it successful. 3. Explode it.
It would be a testament to the ephemerality of life, and a subversive finger to late-capitalistic assumptions that success is always (and only) found in that upward sloping line of profit, progress, and achievement. What a beautiful piece of art I would make: a self-exploding business!
This would take years of commitment, and running business is hard, so a vision of this nature would serve as a lifeline back to my creative soul throughout it all. It would be a fantastic attempt at merging art and business. A truly integrated ArtistCEO would I be!
So I set this vision:
1. Build a business: incorporate it, operationalize it, brand it, create culture.
2. Make it successful: my fairly arbitrary goal of what “final success” would look like was to work with Fortune 500 clients, and be eventually able to save 2.5 million dollars in order to fund a team of 15-20 for a year to make some art.
3. Explode it: Throw a big party, and then close or reinvent the business.
I was excited! Let’s do it!
However, it wasn’t that simple.
“I’m going to blow up this business one day.”
This was a bold choice as a leader, to announce a vision like this. And looking back, I probably would have made some edits in my delivery. But at that time in my leadership, I was a full-on-transparent kind of leader, and I wanted to respect my team enough to let them know what was truthfully going on in their leader’s mind.
But it was triggering. I acknowledge that hearing your boss say she wants to blow up your place of employment could be a little destabilizing.
When I announced all this to my team, it was met with mixed reviews: It scared some people, invigorated others and probably left others scratching their heads, shrugging their shoulders.
That’s the risk we take as leaders. Our visions aren’t for everyone.
But here’s the thing: there’s no such thing as 100% job security. You can lose your job at any time. You can lose your life at any time. You can lose anything, everything, at any time. And you will. I hate to remind you: but everything is temporary.
Everything.
That was the beauty of the vision! Nothing can escape death, not even business.
There are truisms in life we don’t like to look at, but unfortunately, not looking at them doesn’t make them any less true.
In American business, we like to think we’re very important, and very invincible. But previous generations understood this isn’t true. Those who have suffered major losses know this isn’t true. In fact, for much of the world that just went through COVID and watched their plans, future, education, jobs, marriages, loved ones, health, whathaveyou, evaporate in an instant - they, also, know this isn’t true.
I wanted to embody the IDEA of impermanence in an art piece parading around as a business. You feel me?
As business people, we see endings or inverted profits as failures. We often kid ourselves that as long as we just keep making money and grow, grow, grow, that we’ll escape death.
We won’t.
But as artists and creators….we are curious about death. We dance with it. We might explore death, endings, loss, impermanence in our art. Heck, we might even be working in a medium that is inherently ephemeral, like theatre. If it doesn’t last should we say it’s not worth doing? Of course not.
So I said it was worth doing. I said: it’s worth growing a business just to explore how it ends. It’s worth bending the definition of what a business can… and maybe should be. It’s worth it because it’s interesting, and beautiful.
Isn’t that a good enough reason to do something?
Timing
The scale of my business vision was large enough that I had some years before I even had to face the ending myself (although a business can fold unplanned at any time! Hello, economic instability, leadership incompetence, or lack of luck).
My goal was to save up enough to fund the whole team to make art for a year, or at the very least divvy up the profits to give each employee a nice big payout and a party to end our time together. 2.5 millions dollars. That’s a lot of money for a humble little brand agency.
But we were on our way. I have to say that I was rather proud of this scrappy little business and team that started out grossing just $7,000/month, split between three people. As the years went by, we grew and grew, and wouldn’t you know it: we turned into a seven-figure business with a team of 13. Not bad.
But it was still a long way from squirreling away a cool 2.5.
Then, as we all know, 2020 happened, and much to my surprise, it turned out to be the most profitable, highest grossing revenue year yet. (So many things to say about that...at another time)
But we also know how 2020 made us all feel.
As I rounded the corner of 2021, I felt more exhausted, unhappy and uninspired than I had been in a long time. Oh, you too? The fact that I was making money, growing professionally and exploring the wild idea of business as a work of art and actually seeing it happen - none of that mattered if it meant sacrificing my health and happiness.
Which, unfortunately, I was.
I quit
You want to know what really sucks about being your own boss? You can’t hand in your two weeks notice with smug satisfaction. You can’t walk around the office on your last day thinking “screw this place, I don’t need you people” And you certainly can’t send your boss a nasty letter recounting all the things she did to make you quit.
Why doesn’t quitting feel like an option when you’re a business owner? I’ll tell you why: Because when you decide to walk away (in full or part) from what you’ve been building, it’s not just a paycheck you’re leaving: you’re also walking away from years of sweat and literal equity (and hard-earned wrinkles). It’s like walking away from your child.
But, despite my very inspired creative vision, I was not about to suffer a mental breakdown to save my job.
No one should.
And yet, in America, we do. All the time. Deloitte conducted a survey of 1000 people and 77% of people said they’ve experienced burnout at their current job. American Psychiatry Association’s said 84% of adults reported feeling at least one emotion associated with prolonged stress in the past two weeks.
The majority of people who work--which is most Americans--are doing so at the expense of their health and wellbeing. This isn’t just 2020. This is America.
COVID was just gasoline on the fire. A quick search reveals this ‘stressful, broken’ American workplace is nothing new. (Atlantic 2014, Stanford Business 2015, HuffPost 2016, NPR 2017, Forbes 2018, Forbes 2019…)
And is it any wonder? While we are told of the dangers of stress, we’re also sold shit like this from the very same sources that keep us addicted to this cultural norm.
I don’t want to run a business that supports this kind of culture. I quit.
Sneaky old American story
So we were making great money, which meant getting closer and closer to my creative vision. But in order to do it, we were burning the candle at both ends. At one point, “f*ck the vision”, was what I thought. Except that I couldn’t forget my vision, even when staring down depression, anxiety attacks and deep loss.
“I need to accomplish this vision. I can’t fail.”
Does this sound familiar? It was the same old American story, just dressed in creative clothing. Somehow, because my goal was about making money for art sake rather than making money for money sake, I thought it was free from my classic addiction to work. But I had still fallen victim to the same “achieve at all costs” that I set out to subvert.
I was still using business (even if business cum art) as a measure of my personal worth. If I didn’t achieve the goal of 2.5 and my idealized explosion, I would have failed.
That’s old thinking. I’m here to pioneer some new shit. Which I’ll get to in a second. But first: the rest of my story.
The rest of my story: the explosion
While it would have been really beautiful to have created a business that saved up 2.5 million dollars and then exploded in an art party payout extravaganza, I had to find a way to modify the vision.
Health was more important than success. Even if that success was an art piece. Besides: when making art or creating anything, you don’t get to control the outcome.
So I made the decision to fulfill an essential quality of the original vision, but do it at a smaller scale, letting go of my attachment to exactly what it would look like.
So we did this:
1. Build a business (incorporate it, operationalize it, brand it, create culture.) - check! ✅ After 7+ years, House of Who, Inc. had become a California corporation with a 13-person team that created recognized branding work for household companies and Fortune 15 brands around the globe with a 7-figure gross earning potential. Good enough for me.
2. Make it successful (make 2.5 million dollars). 👌Look: $2.5 million was a rough estimate of what we’d need for a year based on projected operating expenses at some imagined apex. By my CFO’s estimate, it would have required about 5 more years. I didn’t have 5 years at this pace left in me. However, we had already paid people time to make art, and had enough in savings to give payouts to every single staff member based on current salary and years of service -- this equated to 15-30% of an annual paycheck. I’ll round to 25%, or a quarter of a year. So we’ll explode at roughly 25% of the original envisioned size and profit scale. Not bad.
*This took some release from my ego, but eventually I was ok with quitting my original plan and going with this ‘25%’ plan in the interest of being flexible, sane, and adapting to the realities of creation.
3. Explode it (Throw a big party, and then close or reinvent the business.) ✅ We funded people to make art projects, we held an internal good-bye party, and we sent out checks. Boom.
Was it everything I ever hoped it would be? No.
Did it satisfy my deepest creative longing? No.
Did I try my best and give it my all and I trust it’s enough? Abso-friggin-lutely.
Doing my duty
There’s a very well-known passage in the Bhagavad Gita that I think is worth referencing (here’s my favorite translation if you’re interested). It comes from the heart of the story, when Arjuna drops his weapon in the middle of a raging battle, refusing to fight.
कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन |
Do your duty, but don’t concern yourself with the results. The fruits of your actions aren’t for your enjoyment.
Please look at that first part again:
Do your duty, but don’t concern yourself with the results.
Being creative means being flexible. Being creative means quitting what’s not going to work and adapting so that it will.
Being creative means accepting that sometimes your baby is uglier or less impressive than you’d hoped. But it’s still your baby.
And thus I exploded House of Who v1.0… at 25% smaller scale than I wanted. I quit the idea that 100% size was required for success, and decided that success was just doing my duty, without promise of results.
My duty was to explore business as a vehicle for creativity, and I did just that.
So what’s next?
Starting Over
Well, once I blew everything up, I asked myself this question:
Starting from scratch, knowing everything I’ve learned over the past 7 years, what business would I create today?
Over a single weekend, I made a list of all the lessons I’ve learned, my ideal org chart, job description and plan for a feel-good business.
And then I started over and made that one.
Here’s highlights from that list:
Don’t work with people who make you feel shitty. This means clients, employees, vendors… anyone. No shade, no blame, no reason needed: they’re just not your people.
Give your team and clients the benefit of radical, compassionate honesty - even if it means they ‘break up with you’.
Don’t work with anyone who isn’t fully stoked about what you have to offer. It should feel like a win-win.
Hire the right people, not the affordable ones.
Hire people you trust, but trust yourself more
Find balance between listening and leading; an overly-egalitarian leadership style can be just as detrimental as an overly-authoritarian one.
It’s never too late to come into joy.
Integrity breeds confidence.
What worked then might not work now.
Have the courage to evolve.
Change is inevitable.
Quitting has value.
I’m now running a new business. Oh, it happens to be called House of Who, Inc. Yes, it’s a branding agency. But the structure is different, the mission and vision are different, the positioning is different, my job description is different ...it’s a new business.
It’s a new chapter. In the business, but also my life. Made possible only by quitting the not-working and the willingness to turn the page.
Pioneering some new shit: A business manifesto
When an artist realizes their work is no longer aligned to the spirit of the vision, they revise their creation, or the vision, so that they do align.
I hereby declare: A business person should do the same.
When a business leader realizes their efforts and vision are not in congruence, they should revise.
The way an artist might: with love, creativity, and curiosity. With a willingness to blow shit up if need be.
It is the process of letting oneself create and recreate the path. And let the process create and recreate us as we walk it.
This is life (and business) as a creative process.
UP NEXT:
More on Life as a Creative Process & How To do Business like an Artist by Identifying Masculine Goals vs Feminine Alignment, and How to Balance the Two, Thank You. You’re Welcome.
Article links:
Ambient Lofi Beats, by james.young
NYT: American are among the most stressed people in the world
Forbes: How to use workplace stress to triple productivity