Starting my company*

The main shop floor at Creative Conners, Inc.

I joke that if I knew what I was getting into when I filed the incorporation papers in 2004, I wouldn’t have done it. That’s not really true, I’d do it again. The shred of truth in the humorous lie is that I didn’t correctly imagine what I was getting into when I quit my job and started working out of my basement. Now, having met many entrepreneurs, there are those that start a business because they always wanted to run a business, and others that start a business because they are passionate about a thing and can’t find anyone else to pay them to do it (or perhaps want to do it a different way). I fall squarely in the latter category. In college and early in my career, I had some aspirations of building a business, but those were daydream, fantasy-ambitions about starting a fabrication shop because that’s all I knew about at the time, not because I really wanted to build wood and steel boxes for the rest of my life. I started Creative Conners because I couldn’t find anyone else that believed I had a good idea, but I was unjustifiably confident that I could make something special and scenic automation was a passionate interest for me.

(Well... that’s not even the whole story. The company is named Creative Conners rather than something obviously automation-related like: Make It Move, or Scenic Automation Ltd., or Move Stuff On Stage, because I had two passions in those early days. My first fascination was 3D computer animation, automation was my secondary interest. I spent a ludicrous number of hours trying to breath life into 3D models, and still have a handful of amateurish clips on MiniDV tapes to prove it. Somewhere between 2000 and 2004 I had a soul-searching moment when I realized I was not good at animation, and had a better shot leveraging my expertise in automation. I packed up my Lightwave 3D and Hash:AnimationMaster books, and focused solely on coding the Stagehand embedded system and Avista desktop software. Up until that point, Creative Conners could have either been an independent animation studio, or a scenic automation company.)

I spent about 4 years working nights & weekends on the product. I kept my day-job as a project manager, and had just begun to raise a family. Time was scarce, which is most of the reason it took so long to get the first products ready. Well... that and I was learning a bunch of technical stuff along the way.

The prototype of the Stagehand AC in my Providence basement workshop

When it came time to sell the product, I imagined I could keep my day job and sell on the side. As reality set in, I knew the scheme, that I’d convinced myself would work for the preceding 4 years, was untenable. A big part of the job is selling, marketing, and supporting the product line. In fact, that’s most of the job. Those activities can’t be done part-time and still be considerate to the customer. So, my wife (who is very supportive) and I decided that we should refinance our house (2 young kids at the time, no second income) and use the money to get the business started. I remember my father pleading with me on the phone, as I drove to work intending to quit, not to leave my steady job and ruin my young family’s financial situation. Undeterred, I gave myself 6 months to make the first significant sale, and if it didn’t happen by then I’d go get a jobby job again.

It took about 5.5 months to land the first sale. The money was scary-tight, but that was a good test of my pain threshold and a precursor of the most common challenge I’ve dealt with daily/weekly over the past 15 years. It takes a long time to market a new product and make a sale. I greatly underestimated the waiting. A six-month pipeline, if the product is any good, from first marketing launch to first sale isn’t outrageous in our niche market. To this day, we have to anticipate at least that much lead time when we introduce a product. If sales aren’t significant after a year, it’s a pretty good indication we made a dud. When I am proud of my work, I have a childish belief that the world should recognize how cool my latest creation is and come fawn over it. Of course, few customers really cared that much, and sometimes the creation kinda stunk, and much of the time people didn’t know about it because I hadn’t done a good job promoting the product. (These days the company does a better job because we have talented people focused on promotion).

The thing I wish I had known before starting out is how little time is spent doing the thing I love (automation), and how much time is spent initially selling and marketing when the company is micro-sized, then later managing people and money when the company is a little bigger. Most of what I do day-to-day now is management. I don’t hate it, but I wouldn’t choose it in a Craiglist job posting. The job isn’t “making automation”, it’s “making a company, that makes automation”. It requires a lot of communication, cheerleading, and directing. Those are very different tasks, and I’m not inherently good at any of them: I’m introspective, prickly, and require the admiration of others to stay motivated. Knowing those personal faults, I actively try to work around them; sometimes, I even succeed.

On the positive side, I also don’t particularly like doing the same thing day-in, day-out. I enjoy problem solving. I enjoy experimentation. I like marketing. All of those things are needed to run a small business. I wish I had more focused time for the technical stuff, but to serve our customers well it is more effective to hire people to focus on that while I meet with lawyers, bankers, marketing people, work on growing the company, and handle the never-ending personnel requests and issues that come up. In fact, here’s another one that just popped up. Gotta run!

*This was originally an email response, to the question posed by a student.