The Orange Moment

Part of being an Artrepreneur is creating. And your art should not be constricted by time. Some of the best work you've done, might have been hidden for 10 or 20 years. Just keep creating. Someday, time will give it context. Recently, I've been rediscovering a lot of early writings on old discs. So I took the time to transfer them into the cloud. This includes a book of poems, photos and short stories several hundred pages long. Mostly from 1993 - 2005, my time in Atlanta, Japan, Hong Kong and LA.  I was searching a lot then. 

Here's an excerpt from the short story "Losing Hong Kong" which is part of the larger tone  "Elementality: Water, Fire, Wind, Air." 

The Orange Moment

By Michael M Clements

I'm losing Hong Kong, slowly but surely, like I did Japan, like I did my youth. It's a process; a natural process. Letting go never takes effort – unless you're talking about love. Instead, the releasing of places in your past – those blocks of time, when, when you were in them, seemed endless, periods that neither had ways out nor connections with events past. They were just "the moment." The current situation. 

But I do remember the countryside in Japan. I lived in a town called Izumo; translated as "the place where the clouds come in." On most days, that's exactly what happened. The most orange day of my life happened in Izumo. Located on the West coast, mid-Honshu main island, Izumo is Japan's oldest settlement – quite a feat for one of the world's oldest cultures. 

But each day in LA takes me away from all of that. Away from the past. Away from green rice fields and mountain-lined seas. Further away from the most orange day of my life, which happened in Izumo, Japan. I know, I  already said that. They told me that in the fall, the winds pick up dust from the Huangzhou River in China. The dust finds its way across the East China Sea, Sea of Japan, or Sea of Korea, or whatever. It's no Spradley's, but still. The crappy yellow river dust flies over to the Western Coast of Japan causing these absurdly beautiful orange sunsets. One day in particular, ever so often, there is an extremely orange sunset. So deep in tangent red and Tangier orange that the world beneath lays bathed in a burning orange haze.  

I was doing the dishes. This light, this warm, heart-numbingly pacifying light, embraced me. I had to go outside. I dropped what I was doing, darted outside and was hit with an epic dark orange, burning, cloud-layered sunset – which was happening over a large rice paddy next to my house. It was almost harvest time, so the rice was tall and green, but not tonight – tonight it was orange.

Sky on Fire,  Izumo, Japan c.1997.  By Michael M Clements with instant camera. 

I sprinted back inside to grab my camera; the entire house was humming in the transcendental glow of sunset. The clichés rang true – time stood still, still stood the time, still the time stood, the still time stood, and so on and so forth.  When I returned outside camera in hand, the sunset had nearly just past its most brilliant point. Nonetheless it was still awe-inspiringly magical. When things surprise us, catch us off guard – that is when life is most beautiful. 

We are predisposed to account for the shift in the environment, thus predicating a reaction by said initial action. For every action there is a reaction, and for every reaction there is certainty for more action. Snap. Photo taken. Later this photo would come to represent my 3.5 years in Japan. A snapshot, a burning yellow-river induced orange sunset. But it is more, much more. But dig too far into the past  and all you will find are picked over bones. The real nourishment of life is not in the past or future – it's in the moment. The orange moment. ~  Los Angeles c. 2004

Published via Genki Media. All rights reserved, 2013. 

The Key to Success

Who ever takes the key, returns the key
Here's something you don't think about when you start a business -- how does your staff get into the office? I mean, you aren't a door person, you can't be there to open the door everyday, can you? And who gets the key or code? In our case, we can't have a fancy keypad for our door -- it's glass. We have to use a key. It's safely in a key box. Somewhere. Yesterday, the person who took the key, forget to return it, which led to a call at 830AM from my team -- they were locked out. So, I woke-up and drove across town to open the door. Whoever takes the key, returns the key is the rule. Sometimes rules don't get followed. Which leads to today's theme....

The Artjamz Dupont Studio, 1728 Connecticut Ave NW, open and ready for business.  Photo by Anchyi Wei. 

There are no days off when you are an entrepreneur 
You want to run your own company so you can work when you want. If you're starting a company because you believe that, don't quit your day job. It's a bit like saying, I want to have kids so I can get more sleep and enjoy more "me" time. Ain't happening. Okay, there is some truth to it -- you do decide your hours, no one is telling you when to clock in, its your company, you have no boss. Well, actually, you have thousands of bosses -- they're called customers. And customers, if you are doing something right, want to know about and interact with your business and brand 24/7, when they want, on their schedule. They have a question about your brand at 8am on a Sunday? They call, they email, they tweet, they write Yelp! reviews. And when you're not "on the clock" but your retail business is open,  what happens when the electrical circuits blow?  Your staff calls..... wait for it.... you! How is that day off now?

So, you see, the key to success is very simple -- make sure trusted team members have the proverbial keys to the castle (the front door, the hoot suite account, the phone line and the info email account)  so they can run the business without you.

A business created with "you" as the key to every door will never fully be open.  And yes, that takes a lot of trust.... which is an interesting blog entry in and of itself.

Inertia Part II

Day 1: On the flip side
Days as an entrepreneur meander like mini odysseys -- you move from one issue to next and often back to ones you visited earlier in the day. As the first day heads into the evening, already three big learnings:

1.) Just because you own a business doesn't mean you know what the heck you are talking about. And you have to be able to know your limitations and be open to learning.  

Entrepreneur dilemma –  it's your business -- the buck stops with you. You're always making choices. You kind of like to be right, don't you? Admit it. Today, I was wrong. It happens. In fact, it happens a lot, especially when you're building something new and going someplace uncharted (for you), doing things you've never done.  If you read my earlier, post, well... I could have added a waiver to our event tickets. The nice peeps at Eventbrite enjoyed their Cappucino and got back to me really fast.

 Hi Michael,

Thanks for reaching out. While Eventbrite doesn't have a button on the order confirmation tool, you can absolutely add a waiver to your events that requires the user to agree to terms and conditions specified by your organization before completing their purchase. This could help your merchant fight chargebacks on your behalf.

Ultimately, chargebacks are fought, executed, and resolved by the issuing merchant and the attendees credit card company, so while adding a waiver can certainly help and heighten the chances that a chargeback will be resolved in your favor, ultimately there is no guarantee as these handles at the merchants discretion.

To add a waiver to your event:

Log in to your account and click My Events
Click the name of your event and then, click 'Order Form'
If you'd like to collect information from each guest--not just the ticket buyer--then select the radio button next to 'Collect information below for each attendee'.
Click ‘Add A Question’, and input ‘Waiver’ or ‘Please agree to the following to complete your registration for our event’ in the Question box.
From the 'Question Type’ dropdown box, select ‘Waiver’ (then, copy and paste your waiver into the open field and be sure that the waiver question is displaying for all applicable ticket types by clicking the check box for Optional Settings)
Click Save and then Save Changes
For more information on this, click here:
http://www.eventbrite.com/t/how-to-create-custom-survey-questions

So, ultimately, the entire situation with the chargeback, I could have taken care of 3 years ago by simply adding this custom form to our ticket. Did I know that? Nope. Who's responsibility is it to know that? It's mine. And this is how you learn to run a company. Because not one entrepreneur is born with all the answers. We get them because we "do"and when we "do", we make mistakes. And if we don't learn from them, we don't grow.

2.) Second learning. Don't leave your keys in your car and close the door when you're loading art materials in it. 
Yep. I locked my keys in the car today. That was fun. Had to call my wife to drive cross town with the extra keys. Thanks honey. :-)

3.) Third learning. Be thankful you have an amazing team 
You can't do it alone. Build a team. Everytime I go to the studio, I'm reminded how lucky I am to be able to steer a company with an amazing group of people. We have 18 people on staff. They are wonderful. The feeling of knowing they trust me, keeps me motivated. As does this.... putting it all together 7 days a week (we're open 7 days a week) so, people can smile and have a good time.

Probably won't be blogging this much everyday... who knows... but... in a nut shell... that's a brief snapshot of at least 75% of a day of an artrepreneur. I won't drone on about the cleaning of paint cans, and stuff. But the studio closes at midnight tonight, so still 5 hours to go. I mean, what could possibly go wrong, right....?

Inertia

Day 1: Welcome to the compliance jungle 

Doing a blog about artrepreneurship (that's art + entrepreneurship in case you were wondering ... I like to make words up) has been on my mind since I started ArtJamz in 2010. With each day comes the excitement, thrill and frustration of starting, owning and growing a company from scratch. Especially when you are bootstrapping like we are. After each day passed, I would say to myself, "man, I wish I would have documented what happened that day, I mean, even Ronald Reagan gave a few sentences a day and he was president. And that (whatever) that just happened was insane." Well (best Ronnie impersonation).... today is the day. Mainly, because sometimes the back-end compliance, finance, taxes, HR, licenses, permits, staffing, utilities, lawyers, accountants, contractors, social, digital, online, web, app accounts, and hundreds of other a sundry things keep you from doing what you actually got in to doing in the first place ... being an entrepreneur.  Why today? Here's today's fun dealings in business ownership...

MERCHANT SERVICES and Chargebacks

Ah, the joy of merchant services. Authorization companies. Processors. Here's a little diagram to help you:

Easy right? Now add in the fact you need one authorizer and one processor for online and one for card present. Oh, you do? And they each have a fee. (of course). And they hook you by saying your rates are like 1.9% - 2.4% per transaction. But, funny thing is, my card present are always 3.0% and my online are 4%. Call and ask them why? "Oh, that's because people are using affinity and reward cards". Of course, they are! Who DOESN'T use a reward card? File that under "The things merchant services sales people don't tell you...." "Well, yes, the rate is 1.9%, but really only if someone is using a debit card with their left hand between the hours of 500 to 515AM in the mountain standard time region, during a solar eclipse, on a leap year... then it's 1.9%. Otherwise, it's about 4." 

But I digress. Today, it was "the chargeback' that lead me to blog. We have a 48 cancellation policy. It's on the event ticket, it's on the order form before you order the ticket, it's on the order confirmation page, and it's on the ticket. Four places. Is this enough for Visa? No way! You have to have a separate page with a button for customers to click saying "I agree to the terms and conditions." even though it says it in 4 other places. Our first chargeback was reversed. I took the time to send in all our event screenshots and emails with the customer. Yeah! We won. Not so fast. The customer sent in another chargeback claim, on the same case. Now Visa tells us we need a terms and conditions button on our ticketing page. I guess they missed that last time when we got the chargeback reversed? So.... I call Eventrbrite, the company that we've been using for 3 years for our online ticketing. Since, I'm using our own payment processor (authorize.net), they basically wash their hands and say "Not our fault." I ask them... "aren't you in the ticketing business? I mean your website boasts 98,080,306 tickets sold. Wow. impressive. You would think somewhere in the process of selling almost 100 million event tickets someone in your hip and techy SF office would have figured out that Visa requires event organizers to have a terms and conditions button that customers click, in order to protect the event organizer from a chargeback; and that 'order form' you give us doesn't cut it." Eventbrite rep ...silence. Maybe by ticket 100 million they will figure it out. When I speak to my merchant services rep (who sounds like he's working for Visa.... I thought they were supposed to be on my side?) I ask him, how come I don't see these terms and conditions boxes when I buy a movie ticket or something. He calmly states, that those sites do so much volume that it doesn't matter to them. Great. So it's just the small businesses that it hurts. In our case, in this instance, we had a sold-out event with 50 spots. We pre-purchased goods, champagne and food for each person. We turned away lots of people since we were sold out. We had our cancellation policy in 4 different places. That person doesn't show up. We lose out of pocket for the stuff we had to buy for that person, we couldn't fill their spot since we held their spot for them, we put our cancellation policy in 4 places. We get hit with a chargeback that effects our credit. And we the small business lose money since according to Visa, our Eventbrite page didn't have a separate terms and conditions button ... which Eventrbite doesn't seem to know or care about, since, although we are using their service and spending close to $500-$1000 a month on them, and have for three years, we are SOL since we don't use their payment processor. Thank you Eventbrite, I do hope your Cappucino maker in your SF loft office is working. Really. Anyway, this is just one day in the life of a small business owner, entrepreneur and job creator. It's only 1:30. Lots more fun to go today. Still have DC Sales and Tax, Pepco and Comcast to call regarding bills and accounts. Welcome to the compliance jungle.