Hodgkinson Tom - Business for Bohemians: live well, make money

Ready to be your own boss? Whether you dream of launching your own graphic design startup or growing your Etsy store into a full-scale operation in your spare time, Business for Bohemians will equip you with the tools to turn your talents into a profitable and enjoyable business. But if cash flow forecasts, tax returns, and P&Ls sound horrifying, fear not: help is at hand. Tom Hodgkinson has spent his career advocating for laid-back living, and in Business for Bohemians, he combines practical advice with hilarious anecdotes to create a refreshingly candid guidebook for all of us who aspire to a greater degree of freedom in our working lives.

Accounting need no longer be a dark art. You will become a social media maven and a friend of the spreadsheet. You will learn the art of negotiation, how to get paid, and how to hire staff. You will discover that laziness can be a virtue. Above all, you will realize that freedom from the nine-to-five life is achievableand, with Hodgkinsons comforting, pragmatic, and extremely funny advice at hand, you might even enjoy yourself along the way.

For my mother

This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2018 by

The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

141 Wooster Street

New York, NY 10012

www.overlookpress.com

For bulk and special orders, please contact sales@overlookny.com, or write us at the above address.

Copyright 2018 by Tom Hodgkinson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

ISBN 978-1-4683-1594-3

Artists, writers, musicians, and creative types in general tend to have a horror of the mechanics of business. Terms like cashflow forecasts, spreadsheets, and tax returns stir up feelings of, at best, boredom, and at worst, pure terror. We artists would like to be free of the tawdry world of commerce. We want to lie about on a richly embroidered ottoman smoking a hookah pipe while discussing Oscar Wilde. We want to be free. We want to get loaded. We dont see ourselves evaluating a marketing strategy and spending an away-day in an airless office with a flip chart doing a SWOT analysis, still less carrying out performance reviews, firing staff, and producing mission statements.

Can you really be a bohemian in business? Surely the bohemianthe freedom-seeker, the contemplative soul, the poet, the philosopherfloats above the everyday world of commerce and competition, all that vulgar shouting, and bustling, and shoving, forever trying to make your voice heard above the din?

Well, yes. It would be nice to be free of vulgar trade. But most of us need to earn some sort of income. So we bohemians decide that rather than working for the Man, we should become freelancers, independent contractors, entrepreneurs. We want to create something useful or beautiful or both and sell it. This is a noble and wonderful goal. I can think of nothing better.

And this is undeniably the way the world is heading. The success of start-ups such as Uber, Airbnb and sell-your-wares website Etsy is a sure sign that people everywhere are aspiring to a greater degree of control over their working day. They aspire to freedom. And Uber, Airbnb, and Etsy have profited handsomely from this trend.

Bohemianism, of course, is all about freedom, and so is running a business.

But it aint easy. The idea that you can knit a potholder, put it up for sale on a website, tweet about it, watch the orders come flooding in, and quit your job is pure fantasy. Making stuff is easy. Selling it is not.

And if youre not very careful, your creative business, the very thing which you hoped would lead to liberty and riches, will instead trap you in a hell of hard-working poverty. I know, Ive been there. Read this book, and maybe youll manage to avoid making the mistakes I made.

What I aim to do here is to teach the rudiments of small business and help you to make a living doing something you enjoy. When you start up on your own, you find that every obstacle conceivable is hurled in your path. Its hard work. Harder work than you can imagine. And for someone who teaches people to be idle, this was a little tricky for me to get my head around.

Throughout the noughties, I was a full-time writer. But toward the end of the decade, the world of publishing and journalism began to look decidedly inferior. The money did not seem to be there any more. So I decided to go into business. And that has been decidedly tougher.

In March 2011, my partner and I opened a combined coffeehouse, bookstore, and events venue in London called the Idler Academy of Philosophy, Husbandry and Merriment. Nice idea. Lets sit around in a bookstore like Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights and run jolly little salons for the wits of the day. Erm, it wasnt quite like that, Im afraid.

I was thrown from a four-hour workday writing books to a fourteen-hour day serving customers, ordering books, trying to do journalism, sending weekly newsletters, stressing about dirty toilets, and moving furniture around for events. For two years, I woke every morning at five thirty in a blind panic and lie in bed worrying for two hours before crawling to the laptop in my pajamas.

Having been a guru of laid-back living, I found I had morphed into a horrific cross between Michael Scott and Basil Fawlty, John Cleeses absurdly snobbish hotel owner who runs Fawlty Towers with his wife Sybil. Making a coffee for a customer filled me with fear and humiliation. I was branded a pretentious lunatic in an online review a week after opening by an angry customer. I proved to be a terrible boss, alternating between chumminess and rage. I upbraided staff for being late and was accused by one of them of micro-managing, a term I had never heard before.

We found that, while money came into the business and went out again, we ownersmy partner Victoria and mewere the only people not seeing any of it. Staff, suppliers, tutors, landlord, government, bank, the IRS: all had to be paid before us. At times, it is easy to think that you are working only for the banks and the landlord.

Well, this is reality. If you want freedom, then you have to take responsibility, and that means opening the boring post and dealing with it; it means filing your tax return on time.

I have also learned that business is a skill, like carpentry. It must be studied and practised. You will make many mistakes. And it may take you many years to become competent at it. In the old days, an apprenticeship lasted seven years, and that is probably about right for business, too.

My own story is briefly this: I have been job-free since 1997. I spent the nineties running around London. I started my own magazine, the Idler, aimed at people who would really rather not have a job. I wrote a piece in the Guardian called Why I Dont Want a Job, and the following week they offered me one. I become head of editorial development, alongside my friend and co-worker Gav. After three years, we quit to start our own creative agency. Our clients included Channel 4 and Sony PlayStation. We produced magazines and ads to help these brands, and within a couple of years we were earning nearly $330,000, most of which went straight into our pockets, as we had modest overheads.

We spent almost every evening in the Spread Eagle pub in Camden Town, the nearest one to our office. One of my drinking pals was John Moore, a charismatic musician who had played drums in the Jesus and Mary Chain. One evening, the talk turned to Johns plans to import absinthe from the Czech Republic. We fantasized about starting our own business to do just that. Two years later, it actually happened: we kicked off the UK absinthe boom with the slogan Tonight were going to party like its 1899. In the first year, I took home a dividend of $26,000, which was not bad. I soon got bored, though, and sold my share back to our business partner.