Support the Artists to Support the Arts - The Consortium

This week I stepped out of my expertise and pretended to be a businessman. I started out playing manager at Sunday’s Webserver Setup Meeting (the one I mentioned last week), but that mostly consisted of waiting until all my programmers were there and then running up to the store to buy some refreshments.

That still left us with a handful of critical services in need of configuration, so we spent much of this week following up and dividing up our technical projects. It wasn’t easy, but it’s got us rolling again, and I’m looking forward to all the things we’ll make happen out of it.

How to Write a Business Plan

Early in the week I turned my attention from my webserver to my writing blog, following up on last week’s article about document templates at Unstressed Syllables with a targeted look this week at a specific document type: the business plan. I talked about all the parts that go into a standard business plan, and the excruciating research and painstaking planning necessary to get it right.

If that sounds like a pretty personal analysis, it should. I spent the week developing our own business plan, and you can see the resulting Executive Summary that I posted as today’s article on my blog.

I’ve known for a while now that the site would get its first public mention, and I scrambled this week to get the artist profiles ready for our founding five. (You can check them out on our About | The Artists page if you haven’t already)

I also worked with Elyssa, our new graphic designer, in the hopes of getting a prettier site design up for our big unveiling, but alas, that’ll have to wait. I’ve gotten to see some of her sketches and samples of the direction she wants to go, though, and it’s going to be gorgeous.

I spent some time on my writing this week, too. I got behind again and got caught up again with The Girl Who Stayed the Same, and spent several hours meeting with my writing group at Courtney’s house. It was a powerful reminder just how valuable it is for writers to spend time together — and a tantalizing appetizer for the all-day-every-day experience the Consortium promises to offer.