Battling the Midpoint
At this point, I’ve been working on our start up for 3 months. In reality, it was only around a month ago that we had began activating our team. In those months, I’ve built a passionate team that has revised our script twice, finalised most of our cast, ran a large scale survey, built the compensation matrix for partners, are strategising for our crowdfunding attack, are in the middle of planning for our media launch and jumpstarted our company website into development. It’s also been 4 months of left and right rejections, team members that have quit and come back, extended timelines, bloated expenses, a drying savings account and a lot of uncertainty.
By some combination of a hard work and dumb luck, we’ve found ourselves close to what could be called a midpoint: the halfway point where you’re already very invested but still quite far from being able to push boundaries of your idea to what it could be. (Now to clarify, a midpoint is many things to many companies at many points in time depending on your point of reference. But as to not confuse whoever is reading this, I define our midpoint as through the lens of launching our company’s first production.)
Battling the Midpoint Slump
Midpoints are always the hardest for me. When you’re (barely) half way, there always exists a struggle between knowing when to pivot or when to quit. I always feel like I’m behind more than I’m ahead as I battle with the sinking urge to toss things that take longer that I think they should. Though not the type to quit, being able to convince myself that something is worth not running away from is half the battle. It takes a lot of conscious energy to remind myself that learning how to pace and keep my spirit up is necessary to keep my team aligned on the vision at hand and keep our eyes on what needs to be done to make sure we’re still on track.
In Daniel H. Pink’s book “When: The Science of Perfect Timing”, he talked about 5 ways to beat the Midpoint slump: setting interim goals, public commitment to goals, stopping sentences in the middle, not breaking the chain and thinking of people who will benefit from reaching the end. In my attempt to help manage my anxieties as a first time founder, this blog is how I manage the things above.
Identifying Milestones & Celebrating Mini-Victories
I try to humour myself every start of the week by writing down all the foreseeable fires my team and I have to put out. Being a very anxious person, I spend a lot of time making lists, deconstructing where the greatest sources of stress are and either build up a plan to start with the easiest and end with the hardest or just rampage on the most difficult thing I have to do so it’s over with. I found out that it’s also a good way to manage my teams’ stress as well. I have a day for each business unit where they throw all their concerns at me, what needs to be prioritised and we figure out what kind of ammunition we need to get past them. If anything, the most valuable skill I’ve been refining as a start up founder is really to be able to make quick decisions and prioritise what needs to be done in order to manage my team’s time and energy.
You can imagine how many times I’ve suddenly blurted out in awkward, nervous laughter after getting a panicked phone call. “This is why I wanted to build a start up,” I tell myself. Every day is an exciting opportunity to sink or swim, and being everyone’s boss, having to make sure we keep our heads above the water long enough for the boats to arrive. At the end of each week, I try to look back at what we’ve accomplished. There are times I’m satisfied but more often I feel like I could have done a bit more to enable my team to do better. I try to comfort myself with the thought that not all things have to happen that way or the rate that I think they should. Delays, setbacks and problems are part of the roadmap of every attempt at innovation.
Subtle Public Commitment
While I am confident with our idea, most of our team and the company so far andI’m quite open about working on and building a start up, I still struggle with publicly committing to it while we haven’t built a lot of credibility. I always feel like the moment I put our work out there in the open, we’d be easily susceptible to the pressure of showing results, even when we’re not ready for it. In the age of fast pace social media and short attention span, it can get very disheartening to keep telling your supportive friends and family that you haven’t progressed much from when they last talked to you.
I recognise some degree of external pressure is necessary, especially as we approach our media launch. So while I may not be ready to publicly post about this blog yet and the kind of hurdles my team and I encounter on a daily basis, I am starting to post more on social media through my instagram story highlights, post about books that I read to keep me on track and the freelancing career I have to balance on the side in order to earn enough to sustain my lifestyle while our business isn’t flying yet.
Remembering who it’s for
The goal of every business owner is to be able to build a system under them that can function sustainably financially and operationally. There are growing pains to every new venture and for us it comes specifically in terms of learning how to work as a team and in the operational infrastructure needed for the team to function. As a start up, we seek to do more than just earn money. We seek to solve a problem that inherently we find important and necessary to solve. For our team, we all have a singular goal of solving the problem of creating a sustainable, multimedia production format that intersects multifaceted forms of artistry and culture designed to enhance the audience experience and immerse them in worlds away from their own.
The problem with a start up is that while there are roles we hero, the scope of each team member fluctuates as more unforeseen needs arise. My job as a founder is making sure our team doesn’t burn itself out with all the fluctuating responsibilities through managing the load of the team while making sure we have enough resources by trying to make ends meet when we’re not doing as well financially. If at the moment we can’t afford to compensate them what their corporate equivalents can be, the least we can do it make sure the work environment is bearable, encouraging and growth-focused. At the end of the day, our first customers are our people.
The second customers are those from local artistic community. In hopes of a successful pilot run, we desire to be able to continually provide creatives an opportunity to engage and collaborate with us to create unique productions that are truly immersive through brilliant storytelling, production techniques and a theatrical performances for our audience.
The third, and the most fickle of the three customers, is the general audience, who may or may not even know that is is a kind of show that they would want to experience. In light of trying new and difficult things, we hope to be able to introduce our audience to the world that will serve as their gateway to other types of art in our community: theater, architecture, culture, design, dining and so on.
There is much work to be done. My team and I have established that there are many aspects to our company and format that we’re unfamiliar with and we know that will have a lot of roadblocks along the way. As we battle our midpoints, I hope to be able to read this post again when we’re at our hypothetical milestone and still feel the way that I feel now, that what we’re doing is important, necessary and worth it.
If you want to get updates about our company, visit our website at https://tipsytales.ph and join our mailing list!
