Entrepreneur On The Move - 2 In Search of Entrepreneurial Utopia By Jack Krupansky Well, I didn't come to my senses, so here I am in New York City. I got an office, an apartment, a bank account, my driver's license, and finally I'm starting to get some real work done. There're lots of obstacles ahead, such as getting set up for bank card processing, filing my first city income tax return, and paying my first credit card bill for eating out at all these great restaurants. It's been one disruption after another, but things seem to be settling a bit now. I had hoped to get started on some new projects and make a bunch of new business contacts, but for now all of that is on hold. The move was much more disruptive than I had expected. Not only did it cost much more, but I lost a lot of income since settling took much more of my time than expected. Credit cards are nice insurance policies for such occasions, and luckily some of them are charging 9.9% right now. Before I start any new projects, I want to get more settled, get my income stream from my current consulting client back on track, and pay off that annoying (but effective) credit card debt. The new projects and contacts are what I really want to do, but sometimes you have to draw a hard line and pay close attention to essential priorities. On the other hand, just because I can't afford to act on my ideas, that doesn't mean I can't begin planning them and laying out the alternatives. In the end, maybe that's better because then I will have thought things out and the results may be more effective. Although my top priority is getting my finances back under control, my second priority is to enjoy New York at least a little before getting myself too deeply immersed into heavy duty projects. After all, if my reason for moving to New York was to experience New York, then maybe I should do just that. Financially I can afford to "play" for a few months (maybe a few of my credit cards need a little "balance".) Besides, if a make some progress getting New York "out of my system", maybe I will be able to focus better on a few key projects. New York really does have so much to offer and a lot of it is absolutely free. There is almost always some musical performance in Grand Central Station and the acoustics of the hall can make even mediocre talent seem rather impressive. I am currently enjoying the installation of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. Only in New York could such a simple event turn into such a monstrous undertaking. Over two weeks to decorate a tree?? They have heavy duty scaffolding all the way to the top of the tree (eighty five feet!) Tourists are an endless source of amusement. Just today I heard a man exclaim to his family "Wow! Look at these grapes!" as they walked past a typical Korean grocery. I guess they'd never seen grapes so carefully stacked eighteen inches high. The entrepreneurial spirit is very alive and well in New York. It's quite a site to see two guys quickly set up a table on a street corner and empty out a couple of large boxes of telephones. Like vultures to a fresh kill, a crowd swarms to buy them all for ten dollars a piece. The entrepreneurs then quickly pack up their table and disappear before the police show up! And then there are lots of "Going Out of Business" signs that seem to be up for many months. It turns out that in New York you can actually register a new business as a "going out of business" business with the only restriction being that you can't refill your initial inventory. Enforcement? Can you say "budget cut"? When I get up in the morning and look out my window I see the United Nations and am reminded that everything we do will ultimately need to be considered in a global context. When I walk down the street or into stores and restaurants I am then reminded by the zillions of street venders, shop keepers, taxi drivers, and fellow pedestrians that that global world is not just "out there", but right here in my face. Asian competitors are not on the other side of the world, they're sitting at the next table. The Bosnian crisis doesn't seem so far away when I see the Croatian delegation walking down the hall in my hotel. About the only part of the world that doesn't seem adequately represented in New York is the rest of the America! Oh, right, I guess a lot of the tourists do represent the rest of the US, sigh. My new office is conveniently located in a building in mid-town Manhattan. On the ground floor I have Federal Express, Radio Shack, Software Etc., etc. There are many coffee and sandwich shops within one block. Several really good restaurants are close by. Rockefeller Center is just seven (short) blocks away. Times Square is one (long) block away. The subways and trains are a few blocks away. Banks are everywhere. The post office and nearest copy shop are on the same block. I decided to get an office in a shared-service business center called HQ. HQ actually has seven such centers in New York and others around the country. It is a really nice, high-quality, convenient, comfortable, secure setting and the price is fairly reasonable. I am sharing the space with my consulting client's New York sales guy who has a phone line and voice mail box. Their intent is to occasionally use their half of the office when he is in town and for storage of equipment and literature. We get two hours free monthly use of the center's conference rooms (plus two free hours per month at each of the other HQ centers.) Mail is delivered right to your office. The center offers services such as copying, postage, word processing, etc. typically at a 25% premium. The annoying thing about the business center is that I have to use their phone system and pay their long distance rates. But it is a good system (Northern Telecom Meridian.) The phone costs $90 per month. Each voice line costs $35 per month. I do have a simple analog line for fax and modem that costs another $35 per month. I am anxiously awaiting my first phone bill. One annoyance is that NYNEX charges for every local call. Before I disconnected and shipped my fax machine I had the phone company convert the line to a "market expansion line" (AKA remote call forwarding) which I immediately forwarded to my client so I wouldn't lose any faxes. Once I installed the fax machine in my new office I told the phone company to change the forwarding number to my new fax line. I'll keep it that way for some number of months, probably until various catalog listings for Liana have been updated. When I unplugged my phone, the existing "call forward no answer" service caused any incoming calls to go directly to my existing answering service. I considered converting the line to a market expansion line forwarded to my New York number, but decided to go with a simple "intercept message" ($66 per year) on the old number which tells the caller of my new number. That way, I don't have to pay for the line or the forwarding of the calls from Colorado to New York. The nice thing about my 800 number was that all I had to do was call up Sprint and tell them my new number and presto, incoming calls get forwarded automatically at no extra cost. My worst experience was that my hard disk seems to have gotten slightly mangled by Federal Express. Mangled enough to not boot, but after low-level reformatting (and restoring a thankfully working backup tape) it seems to work just fine most of the time. Occasionally it "clicks" and then I have to power cycle. There's nothing worse than a very soft hardware problem. I guess my only choice is to just buy a brand new Pentium system. I had my first experience with Amtrak on the east coast. It's a five hour ride from New York to Boston, but no airports or airline terminals to deal with! I enjoy watching the scenery go flying by. Was that a submarine at General Dynamics in New London? I expect to go to Washington, DC, soon and that trip is only three and a half hours. The really hard part of any major disruption is deciding when to shift gears and juggle priorities. It's hard enough maintaining focus on the top short-term priorities, but the real key is to incrementally shift a fraction of your focus to the issues that will become important further out. The goals are that changes will phase in gracefully and that the changes really will happen and not end up being mere pipe dreams. Before I wrote that last paragraph I knew what I was going to do tomorrow (purely billable consulting hours.) Now I realize that I need to allocate some time, probably two hours, to begin to do some real planning for what I need to do over the next few months to get some new projects started. I've thought about a lot of potential projects, but I really need to decide which ones should go on my "A" list now. ------ Jack Krupansky runs a one person software business, Base Technology, which develops and markets the Liana object-oriented programming language and offers Windows software development consulting. He may be reached at 800-786-9505, e-mail at jack@basetechnology.com, or on the web at http://www.basetechnology.com.