Writing Boots

If you ran the circus: Advice on running a business, from a dumb writer

"I'm just a dumb writer," my adman dad used to say, with genuine humility that was rare for him.

I've always been just a dumb writer, too. Then about three and a half years ago, I swallowed very hard and bought a publishing and training company, and became a business guy.

I was so tense around that time that my then 11-year-old daughter asked me what was the matter, and then answered her own question. "I think I know," she said. "You're afraid you're going to screw everything up."

I'm not rich yet, but I've had three really rewarding years, I'm almost out of debt, and though I may have screwed some things up, I sure haven't screwed everything up. (Also, I've been wonderfully lucky in several of ways that I'm aware of, and probably just as many ways that I'm not.)

Anyway, a little more than a week before the big annual conference we host—when I feel my very happiest and most secure about everything, because my customers are right in front of me, clearly enjoying the hell out of themselves—I thought I'd "give back," as we capitalists say, by sharing a few things I've learned, in case there are other dumb writers out there thinking about starting a business, and wondering what they don't know:

Get ready to fuck some stuff up. As a writer with writer parents and writer friends, I knew the editorial business, and I knew myself in relation to it—knew how to react to good and bad editors, good and bad pay, good and bad reactions to my work. As a business owner, I know some aspects of the business, and am an ice cream-cone-on-his-forehead-and-licking imbecile in others. It's like going from star quarterback to player/coach/general manager. You're going to do your best, you're going to surround yourself with good teammates who tell you when you're being an idiot, and you're still going to blow some stuff. For instance, if you're trying to grow your business ...

Go where people know you. You think people buy stuff from you because you're handsome and charming. But the homely truth is, you're neither that handsome nor that charming. People buy stuff from you because they know you and have come to like you because you know their business and you always show up and you always come through and you're useful. If you want to grow your business, you're better off deepening your relationship with your friends—or getting them to tell their friends about you—than waltzing shiny-shoed into some world where they've been doing fine without you since Lincoln was alderman. 

Related: People probably won't steal your latest big idea. Why? Because your idea probably blows. And even if it's good—if it can be taken from you and executed by another person, then it probably isn't sufficiently of you to carry the day in a world that, again, has been getting along perfectly well without it since time began. And besides: Stealing an idea also requires executing the idea, which takes absolute assloads of work. Most people have jobs, and no time to execute a new idea, stolen or otherwise. And the unemployed are not typically intellectual property thieves either. So stop whipping out NDAs in the J&M Tavern or at the breakfast buffet at the Hampton Inn, Steve Jobs.

(Also related: People who you're paying to execute your big idea will tell you it's a good idea, whether it is or not. They definitely think it's a good idea, because as far as they're concerned, it is a good idea, because it's getting them paid! Pay someone to help you start a professional basketfoot team in Muncie, Indiana, and they'll become so excited about the idea. And you won't blame them, because you know goddamn well you've earned money on that basis yourself.)

Simmer down in general. When you start a business, every day feels like an Italian opera—which you and your colleagues have to find a way to embrace, the way you would any other adventure (like a writer does!). But don't get hooked on adrenaline. Eventually, routines and procedures and business patterns develop. And if you still need every day to be a crisis and every negotiation to be a drama and every competitor to be a baby-eating dingo, then you should go work in the Trump White House, not try to run a company of employees who want stability and sanity, vendors who want to make a profit too and competitors who can become strategic collaborators if you take the emotion out of it and focus on the customer, who may need you both.

Running a company brings happinesses your dumb writer brain never anticipated. When I was a freelance writer, I used to love not being accountable to anyone for when and how I did my work, because I was free! Now, I find I actually enjoy being hourly and geographically accountable to our COO and other close partners and colleagues, and feel a sense of daily connection and team accomplishment that I didn't know I was missing. Also, I have less anxiety than I used to; I spend far fewer nights staring at the ceiling now than I did when my clients could end my livelihood with one Monday morning voice mail. I feel like I'm building something—something that keeps building itself, because it wants to grow. Also, I can occasionally write off a steak dinner. And now that I play far less golf, I enjoy it far more. 

Terrible things might befall you if you start a business, but it won't be the things you're worried about. Here's what I was worried about three and a half years ago, as I recorded it in this space:

Writing Boots will always be about writing. (Unless it takes a surprising turn and focuses strictly on boots.) But since I'm now a business owner, and my days are as much filled with business stuff as with writing, I bet I'll reflect here occasionally about that trip.

My daughter said gently the other day that she's tired of hearing me tell "everyone we talk to" that I bought this magazine called Vital Speeches of the Day. That night, it was a bunch of chummy soccer parents who I hadn't seen since fall. I told her I'm telling them not to brag about it, though that's surely part of the reason. But mainly, I'm telling them in order to notify them that something real in my life has changed—something significant enough to change me. If we'd had a baby over the winter, I'd tell them that. If we'd moved to the suburbs, I'd tell them that. If I'd had one continuous panic attack since about November—well, that kind of is what I'm telling them.

And as a writer, I feel almost like I'm announcing a sex change. A writer, no matter what his or her politics, is by nature a watcher, an analyst, a dramatist. A business owner must watch, too—but the next move isn't articulation. It's action. That's how businesspeople express themselves: Not through words, though action. (We know this, yet we wonder why their speechwriters have such a hard time getting them to sit down and discuss what they want to say in the speech.)

"Everything's going to change," my entrepreneur pal Tom Gillespie warned me and promised me as he congratulated me for having done what he encouraged me to do—he and a number of other entrepreneurs in my life, who clearly wanted Mister Smarty the Grasshopper to know what it's really like to be in the middle of the cash flow without a paddle.

Well everything can't change, I told Tom. Even though I'm now the publisher of Vital Speeches, people will still show up looking for what they got from me when I was just its editor—back before I spent so much of so many of my days at the UPS Store, at the bank, on the phone listening and cajoling, on email pitching and interpreting, lying awake in my bed trying to figure out what Authorize.net does.

So I must make time for writing, and to make time for writing I must make time for thinking like a writer.

One more thing to do! No, not one more thing to do. I have no time for one more thing to do.

I must learn to integrate my well developed writing mind with my business mind, such as it is. One way I do this is to cultivate a habit of stepping out of myself and see the business stuff as a drama to be remembered and recounted. I tell my colleagues about this documentary I'm always filming and producing in my head, about the early days of this business.

The documentary sees me in Chicago's Central Post Office haplessly refereeing an argument on my cell phone's speaker phone between the cornfed, sweet-mouthed printer's representative Cathy in Northern Wisconsin and the hilariously truculent Sharon, who has been working in the USPS Periodicals Department for 34 goddamn years and has never been wrong about the postage rules yet! (She was wrong this time, as I found out on a subsequent visit, from her colleague Wanda. But I never told the printer, because I liked Sharon's attitude.)

The documentary records me calling people "motherfuckers" a lot, catches me thanking people profusely in advance for favors they have not yet promised to do for me, sees me squinting at spreadsheets, and zooms in like a National Geographic telephoto lens showing my eyes glazing over like a polar sea.

And you hear the disbelieving pause on the phone as our COO absorbs my offhand mention that, in response to a request for proof of residency by an important prospective vendor, I faxed over an unpaid speeding ticket.

I could go on. I will go on, I hope. Because to the extent that I can describe my life as a publisher as thoroughly and joyfully as I've described my life as a writer, I'll still be a writer.

I'm still a writer. And after three and a half years of being a publisher, the two things don't seem so separate. In fact, they seem like me.

Postscript: This is what my weekly list looks like now (you'll note the only task not completed is tennis).

We help the people who help the adults in the room—and they call US ma'm and sir

The two-dozen men and women who came to the PSA's first Military Speechwriting Training last week were mostly experienced military officers.

But they were green speechwriters, many having received little advice beyond, as one put it, "You'll get the hang of it."

"I'm an operations geek with no speechwriting experience," said one.

"My background is in physics and I'm an engineer," said another.

"I'm an intel guy," shrugged a third.

They'd come to the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs from across services and from New Jersey to Hawaii because, as one explained, "Without any sort of training, you just never know whether you're doing it right or efficiently."

Or as another said with characteristic humor-by-bluntness: "I want to try to learn to not be an idiot."

In the civilian world, by the time you get a speechwriting job, you usually have considerable experience in various, lower-stakes communication roles. Not in the military, as former Air Force pilot-cum-Pentagon speechwriter Sue Ross and former Air Force officer-cum-Pentagon speechwriter Rosemary King could personally attest.

And though military officers are used to doing what needs to be done with whatever experience and resources are available—it's sort of their thing—we thought a couple of days of training could build a foundation under their improvisation, eliminate wheel reinvention and reduce anxiety. We also hoped to create a community of military speechwriters, who might offer one another help and companionship throughout their speechwriting assignment.

Did we succeed? It felt like it.

Here are a few images from the week; a few by me, but group portrait and seminar shots by Kelly Walker of Vaughan & Walker Photography. 

Seminar co-leader Rose King (left) took veteran speechwriter Jackie Fearer—Jackie was there because she writes for veterans groups—and me on a walk to the famous Cadet Chapel.

During the seminar itself, Rose and Sue took our speechwriting cadets on a tour of leadership communication, and how it gets made in the military.

This was not a passive crowd. Especially in the dark arts of getting meaningful communication through the byzantine bureaucracy of the military, these speechwriters mentored one another—and certainly schooled me, to their repeated delight. 

So focused on the matter at hand were our instructors and our students that even at our informal group dinner ...

... the influence of the current administration did not come up—did not come close to coming up—until I quietly and cautiously asked folks I was sitting with whether the president is on people's tongues in military-base social circles the way he is in civilian conversations—almost as a form of small talk.

Not really, was the consensus. I didn't quite get to the bottom of why—these folks are extremely and admirably discreet—but the sense I got was that it had something to do with: Much Trump talk (pro and con) is a kind of national gossip, and people who have devoted their lives to national well-being do not engage in national gossip, either professionally or socially. Not with one another—and certainly not with some solicitous civilian seminar organizer at a dinner party.

I respect that. I respect them. And this Thanksgiving, Rose and Sue and I are grateful that these folks trusted us to help them help their bosses—who are some of the real adults in the American room—to communicate clearly and compellingly and credibly.

We need these people.

Hey everybody, Chet Burger died last March

For Chrissakes, I saw a note on Facebook yesterday that it was the birthday of the legendary PR man Chester Burger. I wrote to him: "Happy Birthday, Chet. I still remember our meetings more than a dozen years ago with reverence and fondness. They were formative for me."

And so they were.

They came at a time when I was in a careeer crisis. I'd exhausted the editorial possibilities at Ragan Communications, but didn't know how to further my writing and editing career. I was trying to help Ragan launch a consulting operation, and wondering whether that was really worth my while.

For the first and only time in my life, I went to a guru for advice.

Burger, who I'd met on a weird Air Force PR junket a few years earlier, was the nation's very first television news reporter in the 1940s. He'd gone on to become an independent PR advisor to the CEO of AT&T, a little gig he held onto for 33 years until his retirement. Meanwhile he worked for the United Negro College fund during the civil rights era in the 1960s and worked on the International AIDS Vaccine Inititive in later years. In short, a ridiculously productive American man.

And generous. He met with this 29-year-old near his home on the Upper West Side of New York. I asked him what I should do with my life: writing, or consulting? Chet Burger was the sort of man to whom you would ask such a question.

He told me I should go into consulting, because as a writer, you only chronicle history, but as a consultant you could change its course.

In the course of our conversation, he gave me a tiny example of how he used his consulting skills to go about changing things.

In the early or mid 1960s, he was flown to Paris to join a panel review a proposed advertising campaign by the legendary adman David Ogilvy. The campaign was designed to encourage tourism from America to Europe. When Burger saw the ads, he was aghast. They showed Americans disembarking planes in European airports, and all the Americans were white.

But Ogilvy had flown Burger to Paris, and it would not do to humiliate him in front of this esteemed panel. Worse, criticizing Ogilvy's ad would also get the Great Man's back up, and cause him to dismiss Burger's advice. So Burger opened up with an eleborate list of sincere compliments about the ads: the brilliant concept, the bold headlines, the direct and clever copy, the colorful layout, and on and on and on.

"You know, I might add a few people of color to that crowd of Americans getting off the airplane," Burger said parenthetically. "You know, just to balance it out a little. But that's all I can think of, because the campaign is just stunning."

So substantively flattered by Burger that he now wanted to justify Burger's good judgment by bowing to his suggestions, Ogilvy agreed wholeheartedly and ordered the changes immediately.

Not possessing even a fraction of Burger's tact or persuasive genius, I failed miserably at consulting, and went back to humbly chronicling events and crassly commenting on them.

Burger and I later talked about it, as we kept in occasional touch over the years. He read a few of my pieces and said he liked them and we both agreed I'd made the right decision. Meanwhile, I complimented his photography of New York and we always hoped to meet again.

But I learned today that his 91st birthday came almost a year after his death, which I somehow missed, last March 22.

A tardy godspeed, Chet Burger, and may your magnanimous intelligence and wisdom shine in the minds and out through the eyes of everyone who knew you or who benefited from the changes you made in the course of history.

Writing is something to do with your hands

For instance, my friend Bill Lavicka has cancer, and I wrote this piece about him in Chicago editions of Sunday's The New York Times, photographed beautifully by Paul Beaty.

And I helped ace Chicago video journalist Chris Cascarano produce this video.

Godspeed, Bill, and may you now get back all the love you've given to the history of Chicago and the people in your life.

Monster of the Ms. Way

That's the marvelous headline that The New York Times editors did not use for my story in today's Chicago edition, about the most dominant player in women's football coming to play for Chicago's team, the Force.

What is Chicago without Ed Reardon?

Hard-core Murray readers will remember this piece from two years ago, written and published on my old Shades of Gray blog, upon the death of my friend Ed. Supremely confident in my theory that Eddie wouldn't have minded my reminding Chicago of what a cool guy he was, I've republished it on Huffington Post.

A short memoir by a lucky kid

My dad, who died in January, wrote for Car Collector Magazine for 30 years.

They remember him in the March issue, partly with an essay by me.

"Ballet Best-Case," Chicago Tribune

Into their 40s, Joffrey Ballet’s Deborah Dawn and Willie Shives have stayed in a business dominated by people half their age. What’s their secret?

"How to Sell a Man a Hairpiece," Chicago Tribune

Hairpiece-maker Ernie Casper has covered the heads of actor Burt Reynolds, golfer Chi Chi Rodrguez and late baseball owner Charles O. Finley. Now he wants to show you something.

"Hard Travelin'," Chicago Tribune Magazine

Comic Paul Frisbie has embraced the life of a traveling comedian, with all its warts. “When you’re not famous, you earn it every night.”