BaM at 20: Entrepreneurship Best Practices and How To Avoid Them for Fun and Profit.
So, this is how we started, 20 years ago. And it’s is a real grasshopper and ant story — it aligns with the fable up to a point, except here, the ant saves the grasshopper’s ass instead of letting him starve to death like the idiots grasshoppers apparently are.
See, I had not been planning to leave my job, nor get fired. I had made a lasting friendship or two at the former agency, and in most of the decade I was there, it was rewarding work. But by 1999, I was considered a disruptive force, and not in the good way I’d been the ten years before. I was divorcing. My views about the what the internet was about to do to advertising diverged from management’s. So, I was fired. On 9/9/99, in fact. No savings. No house. And a resume with only one agency job on it. With winter on the way.
Sportingly, perhaps, they gave me 4 weeks notice to finish a project, and during that time, Mark sent a 3-word email across the production floor:
“Is it time?”
What the hell. I was completely unprepared to start a firm — to work and not have a salary and meet clients and be in the role of charming client service consultant, rather than in the role of cool, detached creative guy in an ill-advised turtleneck — so I had already started to look to Columbus and Chicago for employment. Amy Krouse Rosenthal had offered me an interview at FCB once, maybe she was still interested. (She wouldn’t have been, as she was already having her McEpiphany by then.) Or there were these things called Internet Startups that were (for that moment) making bushels of money. “The last thing this town needs is another agency,” said several leaders in the local professional federation, armed with the evidence that Indiana was a client pie of finite slices.
I wasn’t a huge Bob Dylan fan, but the words “When you ain’t got nothing/you got nothing to lose” earwormed for days.
As the ant in this analogy, Mark had been thinking a lot about starting something, and for a pretty long while. And saving up. And acquiring things like software and a printer. And doing a lot of research into incorporation and the differences between C-corps, S-corps and LLCs. And over a rare beer at the Chatterbox (rare for him, super common for me) he said, “look, everything I read, everyone I’ve talked to says that if you don’t have your name on the door by the time you’re 35, you never will.” We would both be 36 in December. Positively ancient, we thought.
We made all the final decisions one afternoon in October. I called my dad on the drive home to trumpet our impending entrepreneurship. “So, do either of you know anything about the business side of your business?” he asked.
“Absolutely not,” I answered.
“Just as well,” he said, mostly to the glass of Scotch I could hear clinking on the line. “If you knew what you were in for, you wouldn’t do it. Did I mention we’ll probably be in a recession next year?” which, of course, he was right about, on both counts.
We spent the first few months of our incorporation working in Mark’s dining room near Geist.
We got a great start: Delphi’s Ann Dechow, still a client of our former agency, was an early fan and had offered up some side work that needed to be complete for the 2000 Consumer Electronics Show, just a month away. But no one was sure if Y2K might cause a technical/economic/actual apocalypse before then. So our reputation for solving and executing things quickly was an advantage.
On December 3rd, we got the assignment, presented ideas on the 7th and shipped the first artwork on the 10th. The whole assignment was completed before the new year. It’s a pace we still work at today. Crucially, it meant that we were in profit before the end of the year.
Which also meant we’d pay our first corporate taxes a whole year earlier than we’d expected. Again, if you’re looking for advice on how to do all this correctly, look elsewhere.
But, with actual money in an actual bank account, we began thinking about clearing out of Mark’s house. We got wind that Kevin Foster, a local photographer, had recently purchased a semi-decrepit, built-on-a-1970s-shoestring cinderblock Boys Club building on Indy’s Park Avenue. His plan was to convert the large indoor basketball court in to a photo studio, and supplement his income by putting a tenant in the street-facing side. Kevin would have a consistent client up front, we’d get walk-up access to a great photographer and a space we’d even use to shoot video. It would be symbiotic. It would be perfect.
Except.
Kevin was in mid-renovation when we heard about the space. Actually, late reno. And it looked like… it was the correct amount of rent.
The tiny existing offices, originally used (I assume) to counsel young ruffians to change their demon ways, were being covered in a veneer called Z-brick to perhaps, “class the place up.” It looked like a porn set. So we begged him to stop. Just clear the space and we’d sign a lease and we’d do all the reno ourselves, free of charge. He looked at us like we were nuts. Which we were.
Again. Never do this. Never, ever do this.
One tiny detail we’d failed to consider during all this was, we hadn’t really decided what to call ourselves. On the internet, doing an Alta Vista search for Montgomery and Bradley got you a history of WWII generals. And we realized pretty quickly that bradley+montgomery was a mouthful of syllables; B&M sounded like a railroad line for hauling poop. For the same reason, BM was a non-starter. But that could wait. There were walls to build before we could put up a sign.
It seemed like an awful lot of lumber.
A minivan-load of it, and another of drywall. My brother, also called Mark, once said of any building project, “you wanna plan all it out so well you can carry out your scrap in a five-gallon bucket!” And now, our Mark had done so too, surely. Our job was to convert a plan my mom (an interior designer) had worked out, into a workable, pleasing office space.
We’d build the walls. The reception area. A gallery wall with Bradley’s ingenious system for displaying print work. We’d build our own desks, and the desks of employees we hadn’t met yet. We’d apply our own laminates, hang our own window treatments, Install trendy overhead lighting, update our own sink, wire our own ethernet and paint our own walls, one of which was twenty feet tall. We’d set our own toilet, which is a more satisfying job than you might think. And we’d have to do it all while being our own writers, designers, account staff, accounts receivable and payable departments.
I mentioned up front there would be no good advice here, but I will give you some here. One thing that isn’t taught as part of one’s art school BFA is that stud lumber is a different length than regular lumber — it’s precut so that, when capped with normal 2x4s, the frame is automatically sized to your drywall sheet, saving oodles of time and misery. But we, of course, didn’t know to buy any of this so-called “stud lumber.” So we hand-cut every single stud to length. Our five-gallon scrap buckets began to number in the dozens.
When we had finally completed a bespoke-framed section of wall, we had to install it on the concrete slab, and for this, our Mark had done some valuable research.
He arrived one morning with the tactical assault weapon of power tools: the hammer drill. Large, powerful and slightly sexy, this wasn’t your father’s wee Black and Decker. This was big — and the same PMS chip color of a bulldozer. It was the sort of thing burly men used to build the skyline of New York, the Hoover Dam, the Pyramids! Meant to wield unbreakable drill bits and make Swiss cheese of carbon steel, we’d be back to designing transit posters in a jif, surely. We’d drill a hole through the base of the wall frame into the concrete pad, bolt it into place, and do it again. A hundred times. What could be easier?
By bolt ninety-nine, the sun had long set. Each hole had taken at least ten excruciating minutes to drill. Our backs were strained and our hands were numb from the vibration. Worse, we’d gone through a pile of expensive masonry bits allegedly made especially for hammer drills. As we approached the spot for the final hole, Mark noticed a small black switch on the side of the device.
As men do when they don’t know what a switch does, we flipped it on.
It was the hammer mode switch, which, when engaged, vibrated the bit in such a way that it melted concrete like butter. In literally two seconds. BAM. As advertised. We only used it once, for just that last bolt. And I never saw hammer drill again. Thus endeth the lesson.
BaM, we decided.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
