So many people do not start their own business because they are afraid to fail. Don't worry, you will. It happens. You will fail terribly. You will make stupid mistakes. We all do. You'll screw up. So did Steve Jobs. Even Abraham Lincoln. Everyone you know and that has lived on this planet has found themselves in a real pickle or two. In an effort to show you how to overcome the fear mistakes, here is a detailed account of how our so-called failures and rush decisions eventually led to success.
Back in 2000 I was a spunky wide-eyed graphic designer thinking about cramming a diamond ring on Jaime's finger. It was in this climate that Jaime and I decided to start a company. We didn't have a game plan, or a clue as to how this would actually make money. We figured we would make a swanky portfolio website for her photography, my illustrations, and our paintings...
"What should we call it?" She asked.
"Hell if I know."
The fact was, we weren't even engaged yet, so there was no family name to fall back on. And we frowned upon the idea of calling it something like "Foster Studios" due to the barrage of egomaniacs we'd been dealing with while learning our trade. (Of course we'd later add "Foster's Cafe as an extension of Boojazz, but more on why that happened later.) And besides, a website with a address like www.theartofmichaelfosterandjaimemcdonough.com is just plain bad.
"What if we used our nicknames?" Jaime questioned.
"You mean, Boo Boo and Jasmine?" Boo Boo was my nickname due to my tendency of being accident prone. Jasmine was an old carry over nickname from her days running a Bally's Total Fitness.
"Let's shorten it to Boojazz." She said.
And thus, the birth of our corporate identity. We did not do a ounce of research. And besides the fact that people keep calling us "BlueJazz" at times, it's been a very successful choice. (We always say, think of a ghost playing the saxophone to help new clients remember.) It's a "B" word, so it places high in alphabetical company listings but not obviously so. And we even (via the internet) found another company called "Boo and Jazz Design" in Belgium, thus we now had a jokingly referred to "international office" was established, complete with the occasional fan-mail from Belgium, which we could not read.
After we mangled our first website with 300-dpi graphics that took sometimes weeks to load on AOL 3.0, we began our push into the world of corporate America, while getting married in the process. Many mistakes were made, mostly due to our naivety. Jaime went to the newspaper office bragging about her new camera, a Canon Rebel, and it wasn't too long before she realized "prosumer" equipment was frowned upon in the newspaper industry. She quickly upgraded to a Fuji S2. I ended up spending $4000 on my first iMac, mostly due to my lack of liquidity and missing loan payments. Later, once business picked up, we hired the wrong accountant, whom treated us like a much larger company than we were at the time, and over-taxed us greatly. We've bought the wrong equipment for the wrong reasons. Our relocation to Seattle in 2007, while our business was growing in Chicago, was consider by many close friends to be a bad idea. Even this article you are now reading will be considered by some to be a bad idea, letting your competition know about your goofs. Goofs happen, get over it.
Our mishaps were offset by our willingness to work hard and be truly outstanding at our profession, which is necessary since Jaime and I are uncomfortable with sales pitches, thus our high quality of work needs to do the talking for us, and provide us with opportunity. Perfect example... back in 2003, we never even considered offering wedding photography until we booked our first one, my second cousin by coincidence, whose husband saw Jaime's photography in an art show at Borders, none of which even related to weddings. He just really liked her work, called her up, realized we were going to be related, and they booked us, no questions asked. Our work went over so well, we booked twelve more weddings just from referrals from that one wedding alone. Thus, we entered the wedding business.
Of course, since we decided to shoot weddings, we were going to do it right. We studied techniques and other studio photography for weeks on end. By this time, most top studios were online, and research was much easier to accomplish. And since we were just married, we knew exactly just how serious we need to take it. Also, our dealings with disgruntled vendors during the planning our own wedding made us realize just how important customer service is. We treated our clients as friends, and ended up becoming good friends with them long after the wedding.
Around 2005, it wasn't until I began working full-fledged into graphic design and business building that I began reading books about entrepreneurship. It was then, with great terror and intrigue, I realized that every start-up book pretty much outlined in detail the exact opposite process we underwent starting our own company, which by then was quite successful. I was baffled. Statements like, "Never start a company with your better half until you're officially married." "Have a solid marketing plan before you begin." Or better yet, "If you do work with your spouse, keep your duties completely separate to avoid conflict." These all seemed so alien to us. According to many industry experts, our throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks business mentality should have failed us long ago.
Obviously, it hasn't. So then we began to wonder, are we a fluke? Are we weirdoes? Well, maybe... so in reflection we began to ask ourselves, what did we do right?
As it turns out, a lot things. Mostly we did not allow ourselves to be intimidated by that phantom of insecurity that weighs upon someone when they venture off into the unknown. We felt secure enough to move forward and most critically, change when we needed to. Our relocation to Seattle gave us the ability to service our Chicago clients even better with our access to people with hands-on web development knowledge. Since the move, we kept all of our Chicago clients and even added a few new ones. The ability to match your talents with the needs of the public, and change as the times change is the most critical technique of running your business. Period. That doesn't mean you should skip the business section at Barnes & Noble. Every book you read offers a "silver bullet" to successfully run your company, but in actually... they are just one bullet in the machine gun you'll need to keep everything firing. And you'll need a lot of bullets. Read at least one book a month. You'll need the knowledge to curb those critical business killing mistakes that all of us are capable of making. Always be learning, always be working, always keep on top of your game. You'll need it to overcome the obstacles you'll encounter, and there are gobs of them waiting to pounce when you least expect it.
We've fallen into other industries during our time at Boojazz. Most recently, video, in the same manner as the wedding industry. One highly successful project blossoms into an entire new division. Due to our ability to adapt, we discover new needs in the creative industry, and we fulfill that need with the best possible quality of service we can offer. Thirty years in the no-frills Chicago marketplace completely embeds in someone how to be effective, practical, and top-notch. It's the all-or-nothing mentality many of our competitors lacked, and thus our business grew steadily. And we'll still lose a client every now and then, usually in the beginning stages of a working relationship when each other's expectations are a complete mismatch. Recently, we simply could not get on the right foot with another studio, and they chose another vendor. Of course, we've been around the block enough times to know that a bad fit is a bad fit, better to move on before you become embedded with one another and real problems occur, for all parties involved. That's hard to do in the beginning of your business, when every dollar counts. But we've seen piles of start-ups fail by choosing the wrong clients to work with, ones that chew up all of your time energy and valuable resources. Be choosy, and be careful who you tie yourself up with, it can kill you in the end. But do not panic, many initial mistakes we made led us to the right people later on. That lousy accountant we had forced me to become much wiser about company expenses. Eventually I got out of the office and found another accountant, (by accident nonetheless, as it was supposed to be this referral, but I walked into the wrong building). This accidentally discovered other accountant I had never met and thought it was the one my friend referred but wasn't eventually became one of my most valued graphic design clients. Try explaining that in a book. Of course when I think about it, America was sort of discovered along the same lines, wasn't it?
I simply cannot stress the importance of adaptability enough. Since we planted this seed way back when... Foster's Cafe started as a way to reach out to other advertising firms that wanted to hire me as a freelance designer, and were wary of giving assignments to other studios, as other studios can easily steal clients. Foster's Cafe was a nice compromise with not using your name but still getting your real name out there. Since then we've grown enough to where people know Boojazz and our solid reputation, but we still keep the two companies separate for the sake of our clients. We have four separate divisions within the company. Boojazz covers photography and video, Foster's Cafe does graphic design, and the offshoot of the Cafe division is our fine art department, where we sell our paintings in art galleries across the country. We also like the name as everyone keeps asking, "When does the cafe open?" And it leaves the possibility for us to open a coffee shop / art gallery in the future. Of course we have a children's book and a sit-com (based on our real-life working from home experiences) that we are developing in the meantime. Our diversity has taken us into new directions we never imagined possible as two kids hoping to make a go of it many years ago.
In short, mistakes will be made. And every good business person knows this. You simply cannot win all of the battles, you just need a lot of heart and soul to carry on after disaster strikes. You need to smile brightly even when the ship appears to be sinking. Over the years sour clients and bad people are going to pound on you. Don't let them get to you. Once you lose your heart you lose your company. Have a ridiculous amount of confidence in yourself, and if it runs low, just look at how our government is run and you'll instantly feel better. Keep that confidence in check with an equal dose of humility. The key is confidence in yourself and your capabilities even if the world has decided you're a complete moron. Besides, the world isn't that smart to begin with. And in the end, do not be afraid of mistakes, do not let the possibility of mistakes intimidate you, just learn from them and move on.
