| A Work in Progress By Hal Brown Tom Culley wants to be the "Blair Witch" of business publishing. Marketing for "The Blair Witch Project," last year's hit horror film, began on the Internet months before the film hit the theaters. When the movie arrived, it had a built-in audience, enticed by snippets from the film's Web site. The tactic has been widely copied in the movie industry. Culley, a Rowayton-based business author, consultant and columnist, is no respecter of the recently diminished Internet stock boom, but nevertheless is using the 'net to boost his book "Business Alone: Truths & Consequences." Culley is writing the book and posting it on his Internet site, BusinessAlone.com, one two-page mini-chapter a day, for the next three months or so. Culley began writing a weekly business column three years ago. He's had a varied career, which includes graduating first in his MBA class at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business despite having no undergraduate degree; consulting with McKinsey and Co. and Nestle Corp.; and spending several years as an independent businessman, a private consultant and a work-out artist for troubled businesses. Culley said the rush to, and from, Internet stocks in the past couple of years has made too many would-be independent business people unclear on the concept of how to do business. Small business owners have suffered, he said, because big business sold them a bill of goods with "the new economy" based on the Internet - a mindset that was "utterly dumb, utterly stupid and utterly dangerous." Not that big business meant harm, he said; it just operates in a different world. Everyone knew about the house of cards many Internet stocks were built on, Culley said. "But there are major contradictions and conflicts between the two worlds, what I call the business establishment and independent business. Just about every piece of wrong advice that can be given was given over the last two or three years," he said. The advice came from big business "somehow or other, because in that particular world there's a fear of thinking for yourself, there's a fear of expressing yourself too clearly, there's a fear of the politics, and [Internet stock trading] was paying off. The stock market bubble was an expression of it, but that wasn't the underlying economic problem. It was that a simpler, easier version of business was being preached that everyone wanted to believe in. "There are a series of disciplines that are necessary for someone going into business on their own," said Culley. "They don't have the protection of a big corporation, they don't have much money, they don't have much time, they don't have much staff, often they're on their own ... This is nothing new, but over the past few years they've managed to sabotage that discipline which is necessary for both survival and success and preached a whole different story, which was all tangled up in the dot-coms, the telecom success stories, the entrepreneurial hotshot stories, IPOs... "It all got bundled into a new business fiction, and the fiction was that you don't need to follow the disciplines anymore. You can raise as much money as you want. You can move as fast as you want. You don't need to look at the bottom line and so on and so forth. And they transferred that story over to people going into business on their own, and many people bought the story and started acting in this undisciplined loosey-goosey manner. There's only one thing that can happen if you do that - you go bankrupt. There's almost no other consequence." Culley said his book's timing is fortuitous, given the stock market's downs and ups. The world of business publishing is trendy, and books on the basics had been passe lately, until tech stocks crashed, he said. "The kind of book that would tell people, 'Look, in your situation we don't care what Jack Welch and General Electric are doing; we don't care what the guys at AOL and e-Bay are doing. In your particular situation there are only certain things that matter to you, and they're of life-and-death importance' - that kind of book for the last two or three years wouldn't sell. It's too boring. What was going on was terribly exciting, and, of course, greed took over." Books from bigwigs, he said, generally are ignored by small-businessmen, who for the most part "have no intellectual interest in business." "They may simply want to be told what are the most important things they should be worrying about, so most of the books are not of interest to them, or they are too ponderous," he said. Culley wants to convey the mindset necessary for small businesses. "My focus is that you are on your own and you have to remember all of the time you're not in a corporation, you're not in a bunch of guys with a venture capitalist behind you, you are alone," he said. "No. 2, if you are alone, you must think for yourself." The small-business mindset, he said, was "totally sabotaged" with the rise and meteoric fall of tech stocks, particularly Internet stocks. Take profit for example. "The concept of profit got completely prostituted over the past two or three years," Culley said. "With the dot-coms profit was the least important - that could come later on, which is a complete perversion of the very idea of profit. If I can get over to someone in a few words or paragraphs - get over to anybody, even someone with minimal business experience - that here's why profit matters to you personally, here's why it's life or death, here's why if you get it right you can be off and running in six months and if you don't get it right you can fail in six months,' if I can just help them think it through so they say, 'Yeah, I can understand that; I get that,' then the rest is very easy. To get the rest it's very easy to go out and understand [profit and loss] statements and make sure your accounting is up to date and watch your costs and watch your revenues and your gross margins." Culley said he's "been gnawing on this book for over a year now, a year and a half." "It's gone through dramatic changes as I've tried to understand this concept that I've been working with, and it's finally become clearer and clearer. I finally have a structure defined; I have roughed out sections; I have notes. A lot of it I've said in one way or another in my columns. Really, this is a forcing mechanism for me. I've set a pace at the rate of five mini-chapters per week. I've got to finish, otherwise I have egg all over my face, and I don't particularly want to have egg all over my face." Culley hopes that his Internet project will prompt the sort of feedback he receives from his business column. "The hope is that [writing the book online will inspire] people to say, 'I like this enough I want the end product for myself.' So we set up a system where they can pre-order. If I have, like, 500 to 1,000 or 2,000 pre-orders, then I know there is demand for the book." There are other advantages, too, including a slicing of the writers' bureaucracy surrounding the publishing process, at least potentially. "No.1, I have no great love for publishers - they're pretty awful people. They're nice people individually, but their business model is pretty horrible. Testing the book with the end reader there are no agents, no publicists, nobody in the way, no publisher - there's not even an editor," Culley said. "If we get the ball rolling and we get enthusiasm and it starts making waves in other parts of the country, if at a certain point we have enough orders in hand and enough confidence we can actually see it, with modern technology it's extremely easy to self-publish. The problem with self-publishing is the risk. You put all the money out to print up all those books, then you find out they don't sell. "This way, if we went the self-publishing route, we'd almost be printing to order. We'd be waiting to know how many we have to supply. Or, if we have enough evidence that there's enough of a buzz going, there are publishers who could look at that and say, 'We're interested.' Then you can negotiate with the publishers from a position of strength because we already have evidence there's a market for the book. "It's a new way of trying something," Culley said. "It's certainly unique in the sense that nobody's ever done it going from beginning to end." |
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