My Business Plan  |  Members

Mountjoy Music Studio's Business Plan

Started my first company at 19 in the late 90s; been funding my activity directly ever since. Here is my advice after a life of consistent self-employment as illustrated by how I run my music studio. Feel free to copy this plan to apply it in your community.

Choose to start a business that requires people physically enter your space to make something... like music. You must CHOOSE this. Do it only if you really want to because its gonna be hard... real hard for a long time... Make sure you're always adding/improving the building, the setup, the services. The goal here is not to make a lot of money right away, but to spend the money you make on a growing local network of suppliers who will give you increasingly favourable rates and terms of trade long term. This is the support you'll need during hard times. And there will always be hard times again eventually.

Work a deal for the building whereby you sacrifice comfort for liquidity. This is something you can only do alone, because the moment you employ/contract someone else their rates will have to include liability coverage plus an exchange fig not yet adjusted down through long and fruitful association, thus raising your early costs. Avoid this wherever possible.

Use the savings for initial supplies and rent-to-own/loan repayment. Commit to helping(taking over the duties of) your new landlady with snow and property maintenance. Put every dollar earned conducting business into either food or more supplies or debt repayment. Do everything you can yourself. Demolition, design, framing, insulating, drywalling, mudding, sanding, painting, electrical, plumbing, cleanup. Redux. Don't worry about the renos bothering customers. They'll understand, and respect the effort. They'll enjoy watching the progress over the weeks and months of repeat business.

Eventually, after watching your income very gradually and modestly grow... nice and stable for everyone involved... you'll notice less spending on spray foam and paint. No more big orders of plywood to pay for. Next thing you know you've paid off that small starter loan. You're a garage sale away from seeing the black again. Time to focus on expanding services, which really means expanding your local network of suppliers.

This entire process of capital production in the real world requires no direct money motive. The money isn't even really enjoyable until after you've already proven its worth anyway. Money is for paying others to do what you can't do yourself or to get a product you need that someone else makes. So to appreciate money properly you have to have some sense of what it really means, and you can't know that unless you apply the money to a production of some sort. The better your sense of money's purchasing power the further a dollar can take you. You improve your ability to appraise purchasing power at any given time by actively studying what really works and what really doesn't in the real world.

Later, when the income reaches profit, you save the profit. Then later still, when the savings reaches your target number you cash it out for the month paying bonuses to yourself and anyone else in your local network by finding useful excuses to buy something from them. eg. paying musicians(old students) for contributing to commercial projects. This is the way.