Mr Jones and (Unsuccessful) Me
Entrepreneurship is like piloting a plane being hit by bird strikes every morning
A song jarred me from my sleep this morning and triggered a cavalcade of memories, plans fulfilled and abandoned and a host of other thoughts, triggered stupidly by a Counting Crows hit from back in the day.
“I was down at the New Amsterdam
Staring at this yellow-haired girl..” 🎵
I was dancing and smiling. The lights in the nightclub caught my eager 16 year old face a few times out of the darkness. In front of me, another girl I probably cared so little about.
“Mr. Jones strikes up a conversation
With a black-haired flamenco dancer..” 🎵
I thought about my own smile bout as much as she was fixating on it.
“You’re smiling,” my brain whispered.
I wake up suddenly to realise it was all a dream-memory. A dreamory? Something from nearly 20 years ago. My first thought on this Tuesday morning was that neither my face nor my heart could remember the muscles required to smile like that again.
“Mr. Jones” by The Counting Crows Now 20 years Old, was the headline on some obscure magazine’s website that I now remembered reading before I fell asleep the night before. There’s something powerful about music being able to transport us not just to a memory of where we once were, but also to who we once were. After all, we are not just one thing or type of person all our lives.
I wondered what the dancing, fun 16 year old version of myself would think of his new self. He was now on the cusp of 35 after all and massively unsuccessful*. The funny thing is, I was never not following that stupid advice — to follow your f*cking dreams.
Taking the Plunge and Treading
Back in 2012, I decided to start my own company in a un-yet burgeoning landscape of small, specialty marketing firms as social media had just begun to trend across our small city. I was a good writer, studying graphic design, and had a wealth of experience with small business. I could show people how to market their business. Who else could be better?
I didn’t realise however that my own skillset for other people — would not extend to myself.
I did a horrible job marketing my own marketing business — but I managed to cobble together an impressive array of clients by networking; from the tourism and hotel segments to print, design, fashion and fast food. Soaring to a peak in our fourth and fifth years I would become complacent with the BIG businesses I had landed. I depended largely on referrals and word of mouth. I strategised so well — winning a major newspaper and a major solid corporation as my biggest clients. Bills were paid; on time. I was financially independent and could do as I damn well pleased. I was able to travel — upgrade my car, improve things at home, help my ageing dad out a bit. I even paid my way through graduate study in another field and moved out of home. Man, I was swinging it and winging it. All was well.
Cramping Up
In 2015 our major corporate client called to say that they would have to cut back everything including us and the landscaper. “This is ok, this is fine,” I surmised — something to give me more time and focus on changing up the agency a bit. I could always read these signs so well.
I was master of my ill-fate, captain of my sinking ship.
We moved the focus from working for clients, to working for ourselves. We built some serious in-house brands and made our pitches to have them funded so we could begin to execute our own creative products. We even landed a television food super star and were taking her from the TV screen to the social media screen for the first time. We still had the newspaper as an anchor client — people would always need the news and newspapers.
Until they didn’t.
Sinking in the Perfect Storm
The newspaper would leave in 2017 due to the continued economic downturn. Our in-house projects were just finding their feet but we could no longer keep treading without an anchor client. We could have floated if we didn’t take on the weight of these in-house ideas. The weight was more than we could float — we were sinking. I was in debt, with many major moves waiting to be done on payment and I was going broke fast. I had overextended, gambled on myself and lost. Nothing feels worse.
But I had strategised so well even for this — and I could fall back on the major network of people I knew and my writing to pay myself while I could while away with our last batch of clients to keep the remote team at least going. Our freelancers in places as far-flung as Caracas and Miami would understand.
It took less than three months for both of those personal back ups to fail.
A short time after, my last client walked— I was haemorrhaging money, staff, talent and now was physically at the point of letting blood.
When I thought I hit rock bottom, it really was just plateaus. Except these weren’t ground-level bottoms, just plateaus. It could always get worse.
A good day is when it doesn’t get worse. It’s like sitting on the Titanic, hearing it creak about to rip into two and thinking to yourself, “Well, at least I’m not in the water.”
Lighting the Darkness
Few people seem willing to talk about the real issues in entrepreneurship. Depression, anxiety, esteem issues and addiction are all fair game in the Hunger Games of self-employment, startups and entrepreneurship. The loneliness that persists even or especially when successful that is just as often equal to the loneliness when you are not. The mornings where you lie in bed near comatose — unable to make a decision as a result of having a brain short-circuited by having to be the boss, the HR lady, the sleuth accountant, and savvy salesperson and successful businessperson all at once. The nights where fear — not the kind that drives you but the kind that is fear itself, takes hold of you, wondering where your next dollar or miracle would come from when you know you have as much luck in finding that miracle as you do finding the second piece in your pair of socks in the dryer.
But we keep going.
Hopefully one day I read this and barely even remember this moment. Hopefully, Mr. Jones isn’t too much older by then.
Keep dancing my friends.
*What do you consider success — is it a Richard Branson point of view or more Maya Angelou. /// VOTE on the One Question Google Form
Kieran is a seven-year contributor with a Caribbean-based newspaper, Editor of Failed Millennial Life, a content & marketing strategist and a graduate of the Institute of International Relations, UWI.
