Starting a business of your own is hard.
I'm on my second business now: Purely Political Consulting.
Despite the fact that it's just me, it is a business. I have real clients, and I have real deliverables. And the important part: I have to make
enough money to pay the mortgage.
My first business attempt was more ambitious. A buddy of
mine and I put together an investment group to purchase alternative newspapers
in 2002. Amazingly, we put
together the money pretty easily.
The hard part was finding a property that wanted to sell. Only six years ago most alts still had
25% margins. Now it seems everyone
wants to sell. (My buddy later started another business of his own too.)
I've had the "newspaper" bug since I was in high school. But
when I got to college and became editor of my school's small student weekly, I
found that I was more interested in making the paper financially viable than I
was in rooting out the hidden stories on campus. That was fine, since we increased readership to other
campuses and cleaned up the paper's books.
After my first business attempt came to a close, I did some
business consulting for a small group of suburban and ex-urban dailies. There,
I came face-to-face with the entrenched business conservatism of the newspaper
industry: If some other newspaper isn't doing it, then we don't want to do it.
And this was in 2003. And their classified revenue was already falling through
the floor. You'd think it was time to change some things up, right?
It drove me nuts, and I ended up heading back to Chicago and
back into politics.
The bug stayed with me. I wrote a bit for Chicagoist.com and developed a new
business plan for a publication. I've been tweaking it and shopping it around
for the right investor.
And then I went to Ken Davis' Chicago Journalism Town Hall. Listening
to the conversation, everyone knew changes were coming to news media, but they
weren't sure how to find it. It seemed to me that this would be the perfect
opportunity for an aspiring entrepreneur.
And this would be hard.
So when Scott Smith, Barbara Iverson and I talked about a
follow up conference, we all agreed that it had to be centered on how to make
money selling the news. Not
necessarily "rich", but well enough to pay the mortgage.
And starting a business of your own is hard. So we're going to have people who've
done that to talk about it.
If you're thinking about taking the leap, please come out to
the Chicago Media Future Conference on Saturday, June 13. You'll be in good company.