Despite the best, most-detailed plans, you will absolutely face many challenges when you start your own business. I'm pretty sure that's what Cy Curnin was referring to when he sang, 'one thing leads to another.' Just remember to keep your head down, focus on the bigger picture, and forge ahead. Because, just like Gloria Gaynor, you will survive. Unless you've been living off the grid for the last 37 years, you're almost certainly familiar with the "If You Give..." children's book series by Laura Numeroff. The first book in the series, "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" is the story of a boy named Oliver who gives a cookie to a mouse named Quinley. The mouse asks for a glass of milk. He then requests a straw (to drink the milk), a mirror (to avoid a milk mustache), nail scissors (to trim his hair in the mirror), and a broom (to sweep up his hair trimmings). Next he wants to take a nap, have a story read to him, draw a picture, and hang the drawing on the refrigerator. Looking at the refrigerator makes him thirsty, so the mouse asks for a glass of milk. The circle is complete when he wants a cookie to go with it. And that, my friends, has been the story of my life for the past two weeks. A non-stop, exhausting ordeal of one thing leading to another. I had the idea to start a poster business. But you can't just start a business. It has to be blessed by the powers-that-be in your state of residence. So I registered my business with my state. But you can't just register a business if you're going to sell something. So I registered my business and applied for a vendor's license. But you can't just register a business and get a vendor's license. You have to make sure you're approved by your local zoning laws to operate your business. So I registered my business, got my vendor's license, and received clearance to do business in my village. And we're cleared for takeoff! Almost. If you're going to print and sell posters, you can do it one of two ways: you can use an external vendor to do the printing and pay nearly half your profits to that vendor, or you can invest in your own equipment and keep more money in your pocket. Easy decision to make. More money in my pocket means more money for the dogs. Printer ordered! If you're going to print large posters, you need to get a large printer. Preferably one that looks like it's capable of landing a spacecraft on the surface of faraway planets. One that takes two people, a hydraulic lift, and an industrial dolly cart to get inside your house. If you're going to buy a giant printer, it's almost certainly not going to fit on any surface you currently own, despite any measuring, measuring, and measuring again that you may have done. So you're going to have to buy an industrial workbench that's capable of supporting 3,000 lbs. In the meantime, your printer will have to live on your dining room table, which is the only space in your house able to support such a monstrosity. Warning: you will pass this contraption every single day, multiple times a day, for weeks and its hulking size will mock you. When you get your industrial workbench (capable of holding 3,000 lbs.) assembled, it's time to move your humongous printer from its current resting spot of your dining room table to its new home and start doing test prints! Unless the outlet you are planning to plug your oversized lunar-landing module is in the room of an old house and is only set up to accept two-prong electronic devices. If that's the case, you will have to navigate the veritable minefield of local tradespeople to try to find someone who is reliable, honest, comes highly recommended, and has time to come to your old house to install a new three-prong outlet. But, surely, once you have your new, upgraded outlet and your workbench (capable of holding 3,000 lbs.), you can move your gigantic printer to its new home and start your business, right? Almost. If you are an artist who wants to create art that is based on real-life subjects, you will almost certainly need to use reference material to capture the likeness of those real-life subjects. I mean, yes, I have seen a billion dogs in my life, but there's no way I could capture their likenesses just from my memory. Fortunately, if you are an artist, you probably have access to some excellent stock photography sites. So you might spend hours searching for and downloading images of, say, more than 40 different dog breeds that you are planning to use as inspiration for your work. Now we're cooking, right? Almost. If you are an artist who uses stock photography, you probably know that there are licenses that go along with the use of that photography. HOWEVER, you might not be aware of the fact that if you plan to sell items that are inspired even a tiny bit by those stock photos, you need to have a commercial license to use those photos. Easy peasy. Get a commercial license, right? Well, commercial licenses can run anywhere from $400 into the thousands. PER IMAGE. OK. Well, you're not really using the image as-is. You're using it as inspiration. That should put you in the clear, right? WRONG! If the photographer sees your merchandise and can prove that you have used his or her photo, even as inspiration, you can be held liable for damages—sometimes into the hundreds of thousands of dollars range! But how likely is that? I mean, the e-commerce world is pretty big and you will be a small fish. No one will ever know! Which is probably true, but in a world where facial- and image-recognition technology is improving by leaps and bounds every single stinking day, can you risk it? Remember in our last post where we talked about the risk of a poster business being fairly low? This just seems like one of those know-when-to-fold-'em, know-when-to-walk-away, know-when-to-run-type situations. So, if you're an artist who uses the internet, you can Google stock photography sites that make commercial-use images available for free. And those actually exist! So now you can spend hours re-searching for and re-downloading images of, say, 40 different dog breeds that you plan to use as inspiration for your artwork. NOW we are almost certainly ready to rock and roll, right? I honestly don't know what to tell you. The good news is that I'm too tired to care at this point. But I think we're on the right track. The photos have all been downloaded, and my templates have been created. Now all I have to do is watch a saved YouTube video to see how to operate my NASA spacecraft and do some test prints. I fully expect things to go completely wrong. Either the color will be wildly inaccurate or the printer won't work. Or maybe it'll be so powerful, it'll knock out the electricity to the entire block and plunge us all into a weeks-long blackout. I'm not even sure that would be so bad right now. Despite all the hassles and hoops, I'm still excited to be on this journey to help some dogs. Right now, I'm aiming to have the store fully operational by the end of October. October 2022 or October 2023, I'm just not sure which one. But I'll certainly keep you posted. Until next time, WOOF! Associated song: One Thing Leads to Another by The Fixx
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