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Introduction

April 2016

Artists, writers, musicians and creative types in general tend to have a horror of the mechanics of business. Terms like ‘cashflow forecasts’, ‘spreadsheets’ and ‘VAT 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 don’t 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 bohemian – the freedom-seeker, the contemplative soul, the poet, the philosopher – floats 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, sole traders, 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 ain’t easy. The idea that you can knit a tea cosy, 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 you’re 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, I’ve been there. Read this book, and maybe you’ll 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. It’s 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 towards the end of the decade, the world of publishing and journalism began to look decidedly ropey. 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, bookshop and events venue in London called the Idler Academy of Philosophy, Husbandry and Merriment. Nice idea. Let’s sit around in a bookshop like Nancy Mitford at Heywood Hill and run jolly little salons for the wits of the day. Erm, it wasn’t quite like that, I’m 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 lavatories and moving furniture around for events. For two years, I woke every morning at five thirty in a blind panic and lay in bed worrying for two hours before crawling to the laptop in my pyjamas.

Having been a guru of laid-back living, I found I had morphed into a horrific combination of David Brent and Basil Fawlty. 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 punter. 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 owners – my partner Victoria and me – were the only people not seeing any of it. Staff, suppliers, tutors, landlord, council, bank, HMRC: 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 VAT 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 Don’t 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 turning over £250,000, 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 John’s 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 we’re going to party like it’s 1899.’ In the first year, I took home a dividend of £20,000, which was not bad. I soon got bored, though, and sold my share back to our business partner.

Then I got bored of running a creative agency. I woke up one morning and decided to quit and write books instead. My partner and I moved out of London. We rented a remote farmhouse and stayed there for ten years. I wrote five books, including How to be Idle, which sold in twenty countries around the world, from China to Korea, Finland to Estonia. I chopped logs in the afternoon, grew vegetables, kept pigs and continued to edit the Idler. It was a great life. The books did pretty well. Two became bestsellers, and I still get nice cheques every few months from foreign and UK sales.

In 2000, Victoria and I launched a new festival project, the Idler Academy. We took over a tent at the Port Eliot Festival and ran a programme of classes, talks and medieval music performances. Our first lesson was called ‘How to sew on a button properly’ and was given by a Savile Row tailor.

This was great fun. On holiday over the summer, our well-to-do friend Robin Birley, who runs London’s most luxuriously appointed private club, put the idea into our heads of starting a full-time Idler hangout in London.

Suddenly, we found ourselves remortgaging, borrowing money from the bank and taking out a lease on a shop in a quiet corner of Notting Hill. We ran this for five years and built up what you might call a strong events business.

But wow, it was tough. This was the real thing. We really did not have a clue what we were doing. We had every problem you can think of: angry staff, angry Inland Revenue, negative cashflow, naysayers, new competitors – the usual stuff. We managed to increase our turnover from £150,000 in the first year to £220,000 in the fifth year, and also made a small profit.

Following a conversation with a friend of mine at Etsy, we decided to produce two online versions of our courses. We hired a filmmaker and filmed six lectures on ancient philosophy – the Stoics, the Epicureans and the rest – with our philosophy teacher, Mark Vernon. We bundled them up with a few pages of nicely designed notes and access to an ‘Ask the teacher’ forum. We put them on sale and sold one hundred in a day.

Our online courses are beautiful and useful things which people love. The idea attracted our first angel investor, and we went on to produce a series of sixteen quirky, funny and very English courses with top experts in their fields. Every course is now in profit.

Then we embarked on a fund-raising campaign to expand our digital offering. We also decided to stop renting a shop, due to a realization that it is in the wrong location – and to save a gigantic overhead.

This book is the fruit of five years’ experience at the frontline of running an education, retail and publishing business, and of twenty years of self-employment.

My mantra has always been ‘Just keep going’, despite feeling like giving up every other day, because I know that we’re doing something that brings meaning and purpose to people’s lives. Our customers, our fans, our community, our readers – love what we do. I enjoy it. And those are the three words I hear again and again among entrepreneurs: just keep going.

No other path offers the same sort of freedom. It’s not about making a vast fortune and being some sort of amoral hedge-fund manager who is interested only in money. It is about creating something that improves the world, is fun to do and provides enjoyable, satisfying work for you and others. As Robert Louis Stevenson put it, ‘My idea of man’s chief end was to enrich the world with things of beauty and have a fairly good time myself while doing so.’

That is a noble aspiration indeed. I have written this book to help those of you who share it.

1. How Do You Want to Live?

Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.

– G. K. Chesterton

Periodically, I go to visit my tycoon friend John Brown for business advice. John made his millions from publishing magazines, the best known of which is the adult comic Viz. As the cricket plays on a huge screen and assistants bring us glasses of water, he sits behind his spotless, minimalist desk in an office on the Portobello Road, boasting about his successes, and then he abuses me. ‘The Idler is not a business!’ he shouts. ‘It’s a lifestyle!’

What does he mean? Well, in tycoon circles, to write off your project as a ‘lifestyle business’ is a terrible insult. People who choose, for example, to move to the countryside and work there, and not to slave away sixteen hours a day in a City skyscraper in the pursuit of riches, are snootily dismissed by the twice-divorced and usually very boring money-getters as ‘lifestylers’. The tycoons consider any business that does not make a ton of cash as nothing more than a hobby.

The tycoons are not interested in one bookshop or one café. They are interested in nine hundred bookshops or cafés. They want scale. They want to turn a thousand pounds into a million as quickly as possible. They have no passion for any particular product. They have a passion for making money. They love business. And their business could be dog food, oil, insurance or spare-bedroom rental: they don’t really care.

But we bohemians, we’re different. We want to enjoy our work and enjoy our everyday life and make a living from it, all at once. We want to be creative. We value freedom over money. We’re those naive souls who want to turn our ‘passion project’, as the rather nauseating phrase goes, into a business.

But what sort of business will this be? Self-employed plumber or Richard Branson? Victoria and I are often asked, ‘Is this something you are doing just for fun, or do you want to build it up into something you can sell?’ In other words, is this just a hobby, or are you ambitious for it?

So the first thing to ask yourself when going into business is: what is the point of all this? Do you crave vast wealth – or freedom? Do you want to communicate a message? Do you want to have three-day weekends? Do you want to have fun? Do you want to help people? Do you want the satisfaction that comes from creating something of beauty, or of utility? Do you want a lie-in? Pop stars often say that their motivation for starting a band was that they wanted to find a way of earning a living that didn’t involve getting up at eight o’clock every morning.

What is Your Idea of the Good Life?

The ancient Greeks had a concept called eudaimonia. It meant happiness, in the sense of fulfilment. And, in a literal sense, it meant being at one with your daemon, or inner spirit. Happy people are those who have found their purpose, or what was called their ‘natural genius’ in the eighteenth century. You need to think about what your ‘good life’ would consist of.

Many people are content with running a lifestyle business, with being a sole operator. They are the small shopkeepers, the consultants, the taxi drivers, the builders, the plumbers, the painters and decorators. What these lifestylers have in common is that they enjoy their work – more or less – and earn a sufficient income to make ends meet. And, for many of us bohemian types, that is all we need to attain our own particular version of the good life.

The café round the corner from our office is an example of a lifestyle business. It’s run by Alfredo and his son. They don’t make millions, but they enjoy serving customers and they get by. To run your own small business of this sort is, I think, quite a noble aspiration. It is a rich life and never boring.

Lifestylers come in many shapes and sizes. I have a friend who makes a decent living as an independent tailor. He has no overheads, no office and no ambition to launch an international fashion label. He enjoys making the odd suit. His costs are very low and he enjoys total freedom.

Then there are my friends Gavin Turk and Deborah Curtis. Gavin is a successful Brit artist, and the couple also run a brilliant children’s education charity called the House of Fairy Tales. We often find ourselves in charge of adjacent ‘stalls’ at summer festivals. From simple beginnings, Deborah has built a sizeable organization which brings joy to thousands every year. I don’t think they have made a fortune, but they can live.

Finally, I should mention the example of another former journalist, Jean-Paul Flintoff. In addition to doing fun stuff like writing novels about Queen Anne, he has retrained as a life coach. He charges a very high hourly rate and has a handful of customers. This means he can do work he enjoys and he has time left over to pursue more speculative projects. For Jean-Paul, being a sole trader means freedom. He has no ambitions to take on any staff.

Now, the danger is that by doing something noble and interesting and not just contenting yourself with selling crude oil or dog food or pizza – as the real titans do – you could be condemning yourself to years of sweat and toil for scant reward. If your work is, nonetheless, fulfilling, this may not put you off – in which case, you have achieved eudaimonia. And that’s no small achievement: Aristotle thought of eudaimonia as the highest possible human good. Not a bad end for a self-employed plumber.

It could be, though, that attaining your version of the good life requires a little more than running a lifestyle business. This doesn’t mean you have to be a money-obsessed tycoon; bohemians are the driving forces behind plenty of what John Brown would refer to as ‘real’ businesses.

For instance, a very different example of a successful bohemian in business is my old friend Dan Kieran, a successful author who worked at the Idler for a while. When the bottom fell out of the publishing business, he found, simply put, that he needed a job. But instead of applying for one, he and some friends developed a new crowdfunding publishing idea, Unbound, and went around raising investment. Dan had a simple pitch: ‘When I was a writer, hundreds of thousands of people bought my books,’ he says. ‘I realized that I didn’t have the name and address of a single one of them.’

With Unbound, he would build up a database of people who were prepared to spend real money on supporting books. Dan has ambitions far beyond lifestyle for his business. ‘I want this to be massive,’ he says.

Dan turned out to be a brilliant salesman. He raised two million pounds from angel investors and his company now employs over fifteen staff. He has become a CEO. He takes a reasonable salary, goes to work every day and is building something which will potentially not only have value but also produce a lot of beautiful books and provide authors and his staff with a living – which is a great achievement. When I asked him whether he found it stressful being beholden to his investors, he said that it was simply part of his job. ‘They are funding me, and I have a responsibility towards them.’

Then there is a sort of halfway house between the two types of business, such as that operated by Nigel House from Rough Trade record shops. He does what he loves, which is to introduce his customers to great new music. He opened the first branch in 1976, and there are now four: two in London, one in Nottingham and one in Brooklyn, USA. This is still a small business, but it’s real, it’s growing; Nigel employs thirty staff. Recently, he has attracted investment. He told me that an investor said to him, ‘Rough Trade is not a business; it’s a passion.’ It’s not a business in the way that selling office furniture is a business – but Nigel still has to be businesslike about it.

You couldn’t say that Nigel has made a fortune from what he does. That may come in the future, though, in his words, ‘My wife says to me it’s always “jam tomorrow” with you.’ But he just adores music and his everyday life. He loves being behind the counter selling records, making recommendations. His life has purpose and meaning, and this has been more important to him than making piles of cash. And so he is still there, pulling up the shutters just off the Portobello Road in the morning, with a pencil behind his ear and in a Thrasher T-shirt.

It is this that all the above have in common. They are doing what they want to do. They have taken responsibility. They are not slaves. The freedom is more important than the money. These entrepreneurs have taken control of their lives and worked out – often after many years of trial and error – a system that suits them.

How Well Do You Know Yourself?

Now, you may not have the right personality to be a CEO. After all, it’s not a great job. You sit there while people hurl problems at you all day.

Acceptance of that fact is not an admission of failure. In fact, it is the key to deciding what the good life entails for you. You must find out who you are and proceed on the basis of that knowledge. Everyone in business will tell you again and again that there is no point struggling to do things which are against your nature. If you decide to grow your business, as time passes, you will find professionals to do the things you’re not so good at.

‘Isn’t it obvious,’ said Socrates (according to his friend Xenophon), ‘that people are successful, when they know themselves, and failures, when they do not? Those who know themselves know what suits them best, because they can distinguish between what they can and what they cannot do. By doing what they know about, they meet their own needs and achieve their ends; while by steering clear of things they don’t understand, they avoid failure and mistakes.’

When it comes to the Idler, I now have ambitions beyond a lifestyle business. I’d like to communicate these ideas around the world. I want to grow. I want to build a trusted provider of quirky British educational resources and entertainment. I want to sell more subscriptions to the magazine. What I want to create is a business that improves people’s lives and which makes a profit. The real pleasure for me of doing Idler business is the impact on the lives of our readers, customers and fans. They love the fact that we exist. We help them to find happiness. And that is the whole point.

In terms of my everyday life, I just want to carry on working. My ideal day would go as follows: I like to work on my own in the morning, doing creative stuff – writing, editing, dreaming up new products. That can be done in the library, at home or in a café. And in the afternoon, I like to hang around in my office and work with my team. In the evening I want to go home at seven, drink beer, chat to my family and read books. And I want to be not in debt and not to worry about money.

That’s pretty much it. I’m not bothered about cars, skiing holidays, big houses, clothes or any of those baubles. I am happy when I am making things. If I make proper money, I will spend it on taking people to restaurants and on what are now called ‘experiences’, not on stuff.

Bohemians and idlers often, paradoxically, have this in common: their work is the most important thing in their life. This was true for Picasso, and it is true for Richard Branson. It is true for me. I will never retire. I will continue reading and writing till the day I die.

The key difference between the lifestyle business and the ‘real’ business is accountability. If you grow beyond a lifestyle business, then you are accountable to other people. You have to pay wages and you have to report back to your fellow directors and to your shareholders. You cannot suddenly decide to go and live on a Scottish island for six months. There is a thing called governance, which means the process of getting things done. It means that you create a board of directors. You have meetings. You apportion tasks. You are held to account.

This sort of accountability, and the feeling of selling oneself that may seem to go along with it, does not suit all bohemians. I recently went to interview singer-songwriter Cerys Matthews, who had huge success in nineties band Catatonia. After a few years, she told me, she had to get out of the music business, because she no longer felt free:

Cerys: The kickback of the success is that it becomes a business, a commercial enterprise, and there’re responsibilities involved. There are people getting wages because of the success you had.

TH: So you went in for creative freedom and not having a job or a boss, and then you found you were trapped.

Cerys: You are a cog in the system.

This is possibly what drove Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain to early graves. They could not handle being cogs. They could not handle monetizing their content. That was not the reason they become bohemian singers. The strolling player may not be temperamentally adapted to being in business. Other bands – let’s say, Coldplay and U2 – are very happy being CEOs. Damien Hirst is another example of a happy artist/CEO: he loves the responsibility of employing loads of staff.

So, if you don’t want to be a CEO, if you don’t want all that responsibility, then you may decide to stay small.

Or take one step at a time: first, it’s just you; then, you find a partner; then a staff member … and so on.

Nothing Wrong with Growth

If, like me, as a good bohemian, you have a soft spot for the gentle, ethical economics promoted by people like E. F. Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful, then you might have heard the idea that growth is a bad thing. The argument goes roughly like this: the pursuit of growth for its own sake is wrong. It is based on false logic, because you cannot keep growing for ever. Companies that are publicly shared are forced to grow because their shareholders want the shares to increase in value. Otherwise, they wouldn’t bother buying them. And that turns the company into a ravenous monster which puts share price above customers, quality, ethics and beauty. The ethical economists set themselves up as enemies of the Chicago school of economists: Milton Friedman and the rest of them.

Obviously, there is a lot of truth in the argument that there are natural limits to growth. The problem is that you are made to feel guilty if you admit that you, too, would like a business that grows. You feel that an eco-warrior like George Monbiot is going to wag his finger at you and accuse you of wasting natural resources.

But growth is natural. After all, a seed grows into a seedling, the seedling sprouts and produces seeds for regeneration, the seeds are dispersed and the plant dies. Animals and humans grow. Your business, if you choose to create one that is more than just a lifestyle, can be seen as a growing and ever-changing plant that you are tending, watering and cultivating. In fact, ‘cultivation’ may be a better word than ‘growth’ for the process we’re talking about: the cultivation of a small business.

Growth is good. Of course I want to ‘increase my estate’, as they said in the old days. I think the more important issue may well be the pace. Investors look for a rapid rate of growth: they are excited by a steep upward curve. They call it ‘hockey stick’ growth. I think that is actually very rare, and what we are looking for is some sort of ‘slow business’ idea. We need to create a business philosophy that is sensible in that you make a profit, but which does not drive you to distraction with silly pressures. A small step each day. People in business are always trying to hurry you for a decision. Take your time. Sleep on it.

Write It Down

My advice now is to go for a long walk and think about your life. Then come home, sit down with a notebook and write down what you want to do and how you want to live. What brings you pleasure, and what brings you satisfaction? What would your ideal day look like? That is the first step. Once you have done that, read the second chapter, which introduces you to the fundamental concepts of good business.

By the same author

Tom Hodgkinson

BUSINESS FOR BOHEMIANS

Live Well, Make Money

PORTFOLIO PENGUIN