 Good evening. My name is Tom Blacker and on behalf of the Maine Charitable Mechanics Association I want to welcome you to Mechanics Hall to have this talk with Skyler Kelly and Sarah and James. We first of all would like to thank our sponsor who is the Warren Memorial Foundation. Without any further ado I'm going to turn this over to Skyler Kelly from Black Point Mercantile who will tell us all about fabric manufacture and the wonderful things they do. Hey everyone. So let's see, first thing first the company is named Black Point Mercantile after Black Point Road in Scarborough where our other founder and partner was living and working at the time he created the brand in 2011. And coincidentally it also happens to be where my great-grandfather painted every summer with Winslow Homer when he was a young man. He studied with Homer for years and years and was actually Homer's only student in the state of Maine Homer when he lived here refused to take on students at that particular studio except for my great-grandfather. So when the opportunity came along and Jeremy asked Sarah and I to join on board with him it kind of seemed like kismet and that's ultimately why we're here today. So Sarah is a trained painter studied at the School Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and in the Netherlands and in Bruges I think is that right? I'll let you talk about it in a minute. And James is a leather worker and sound engineer. I'm a photographer and filmmaker and generalist and I think that's kind of what it often looks like in entrepreneurial ventures at this point in time. Sam actually forwarded me an article a while ago talked about the death of the artist and the birth of the creative entrepreneur. So the three of us all identify as artists but find ourselves working as creative entrepreneurs and I think it's quite true that we have to find new ways to put ourselves out there and that the primary avenue now is business not necessarily art and even then art is a business. So it's interesting that the three of us and also to our customers that we choose to paint on the floor and sell our paintings as rugs, the floor cloth has a really long and interesting history. People started making them in the United States probably 400 years ago as a way to make it easier to clean kitchen floors. It was a convenient material that was laying around and if you had some milk paint or oil paint you could color it however you wanted, create whatever designs you wanted and over time that sort of got pulled up the economic class system into the middle class and the upper class and the merchant class. So you found floor cloths in many, many different environments all the way from the low to the high. There's actually a famous house in Provincetown, Massachusetts that is covered from floor to ceiling in many of its rooms entirely with painted canvas. So it has floor cloths, wall cloths, and ceiling cloths. In the mid-19th century the floor cloth was basically obsoleted by linoleum. It was a much more efficient mechanical manufacturing process and it could be basically just rolled out and sliced off, printed very quickly. I've been to some of the factories where they used to make linoleum way back in the day and the floor cloth was laborious. They were not as durable as linoleum, not as heavy and way more expensive. There were a number of factories in the state of Maine including in Hollowell that went out of business about five years after linoleum came along. Since then it's been a cottage industry and it's really, I think, kind of strange that we're now working on them again and selling them to some of the world's top architecture and design firms. There's a company in San Francisco called Studio Oplus A that has hired us to make pieces for Nike, Uber, Cisco electronics. We have pieces in many of their offices. I think we have a dozen pieces in Nike's headquarters in Beirut which is just really kind of weird to us. We've got clients in Tokyo, Manhattan, Brooklyn, San Francisco, Finland, Sweden all over the place and we haven't done a lick of advertising. It's all happened by a word of mouth. We post a little bit to Instagram here and there, post a little bit to Facebook here and there. Primarily it's just the business comes to us kind of through osmosis. I'll pass it off to Sarah so that she can talk a little bit about what she's interested in and then James maybe we'll talk about the techniques that we use. I think one thing that is most interesting about our business model is that we are reinvigorating the floorcloth. I know a lot of people always have stories about my grandmother's house or in a historic home I've seen a floorcloth. And one of my favorite floorcloths I've ever seen was in Wiscasset, Maine, at the Marston house. I don't know if anyone has been there but she has a floorcloth from the early 19th century that you would never know that it's not plastic because it has been worn so... It's just been with walking on it and probably the elements, the way that the paint and the canvas has been compressed. It just seems impermeable and it looks like it was linoleum taken out of an old home. And to me that when I saw that piece it was testament to the viability of the product. And so now that we are taking this older craft and imbuing it with contemporary styles, motifs, colors and selling it to mostly modern interior decorators, I think that's really fascinating because it's paying homage to an antique and to an old world way of creating something. So I think that's been my favorite part of it. I, like Skyler was saying, I studied painting, I studied old master Dutch style painting. And when I moved to Portland I worked for the Historical Society here. I have a love for historical artifacts and objects and working in the archives at the Historical Society was one of my favorite things. And so the fact that I can practice my art and make a living out of it in a beautiful town that is just saturated with its history is important to me and that I can reinvigorate a product like this just ties in all of my passions into one. Yeah, so I hooked up with Skyler and Sarah about a half a year ago in November and since then have been working painting and designing and it's been great. My visual background is pretty varied. I've done some graphic design and the majority of my painting I guess was been around painting on walls in the city. But it's great to work with such a durable medium and such a kind of storied tradition really and kind of bring some new life to it. And yeah, I didn't really have a whole lot prepared to say here. I kind of just jumped in but it's great to talk to you all. Well, so we start off with just a raw roll of canvas and we actually use painting, sorry, like concrete trowels to spread the base layers which will shrink it a little bit and so it gets one layer on the bottom and then a couple on the top and then we'll go from there with drawing the designs on and it's all so the most fun thing and probably the most the thing that kind of makes it really a piece of art is that all of our lines are hand-painted and so there's really no stenciling and there's no taping or anything like that. So really it's a very detailed process which makes it really kind of a one of a kind in everyone which is kind of a lot of the appeal I feel like. So yeah, it's great to kind of feel like you're doing kind of almost a manufacturing job but there's so much more artistic license and kind of energy put into it which is very kind of important to me loving the arts in general so it's a good mix of kind of both production and manufacturing and art and creativity and entrepreneurial endeavor so it's been really great and Maine is a good place and from Maine originally lived here growing up and then moved away for years and said I would never live in Maine again and have come back to Portland about a year and a half ago and it's a great place. There's so much more going on here now and so it's really a good place for us to be. Yeah, it is. We've learned throughout the course of this that really the most important part of doing business is your relationships your relationships with your customers, with your team with the kind of broader network of supporters who you don't always recognize as supporters like we found out that our landlord was a huge supporter of ours and so he sort of became part of our team and we've learned to look out and to find advisors to get our customers to be our best teachers that's been a critical part of the process is just continually asking our customers like how can we do this better we understand that our pricing is difficult to interpret how can we make it smoother how can we make it easier for you guys to get what you want and to really bring them into the process has been I think one of the best things that we've figured out that they're our best teacher. It's really interesting as James pointed out to make a product by hand today it's very uncommon so we've had to find people who share our values customers who understand what it means that someone has found a way to put the time that we do into one of these products and still sell it for a price that's a good value to them that they can if they're a wholesaler resell it for a good value to the end customer finding that balance has been really really interesting and has caused us to look differently at the world and understand its system of values without connecting with folks it wouldn't really matter so the economic side of it, the money side of it is almost secondary like if we can build the right relationships and establish that we share values and then just keep making interesting work then we'll survive and at some point right now we've kind of gotten to the point where we're starting to get orders big enough that it really stretches us that we've got orders that are big enough and lead times that are short enough that we have to start thinking about how are we going to scale up are we going to scale up what's it look like when we put together our version of an assembly line these are really really interesting questions and they're going to take us into some very cool territory I think as we move forward over the next couple of years right now it's still a real challenge to balance our cash flow that's like, that's insane just trying to figure out how to offer the right terms to a customer, how to deliver on time how to get all of your materials ready just so you can run payroll it's insane it's been really really really difficult and there are times there have been months when I've just woken up afraid every day but you looking back on it I wouldn't change any of that experience you kind of feel as you're going into something like this like, I got this, I can do this but in my own speaking for myself what I've realized is that I'm not my heroes I can understand how other people have have achieved great things in business or in art or what have you and try to emulate them but what's starting to work is asking my own questions about my own environment not basing my decisions based on what I think others would have done that's been a wake up call recently so I think we've covered a lot of it there's some things that we do technically that have really never been done as far as I've seen in floor cloths as funny as that is it's like you know talk about innovations where you can but we've done a lot of these patchwork pieces in order to overcome limitations and size of canvas and to overcome shipping costs for example you can't really ship something that's over 96 inches unless you go to freight so it's a major constraint on a business like ours that really subsides by selling one piece at a time so how do you make something and sell it if the customer wants it to be 14 by 16 feet it's a really tough challenge you have to pay $400 to ship it from Maine to Seattle so what we figured out was that we could rather than using an overlap scene which is a super simple scene it takes no time at all we would franchise them and that meant that we could fold it in half and roll it up the other way once maybe I can get everybody up here I can show you exactly what I mean but what we've found is that we can't actually fold the pieces so if we've got this specific type of scene in the center then we can fold it in half and roll it up along the scene it's like it's not an earth shattering innovation we didn't just invent a three dimensional CPU or something like that but it allows us to ship things at a much cheaper cost and for us it's kind of a big deal so it's funny you sort of have to recalibrate your expectations about what you're going to achieve I think I'm running out of things to say I think that we've covered hey what's up Nick we've covered a lot of who we are and what it is that we've done I think there may be a couple other things one of the thinkers who's really inspired me is a Japanese art critic who founded the Japanese arts and crafts movement his name is Setsu Yanagi and Setsu Yanagi was really inspired by William Morris he took a lot of William Morris's ideas about arts and crafts as they were being done in England or the movement in England which was a response to mass produced goods of the industrial revolution so he took Morris's ideas and he sort of mapped them onto the Japanese cultural landscape and that resulted in Japan's very distinct approach to mass produced handmade goods he talked about earlier in the century in the 1930s 1940s about finding a way to get the machine and the human hand to work together to produce goods that really had soul but could be accessible to a wider market that weren't luxury items and that weren't so far out of reach that they didn't actually serve a real function in a person's home so that's been a guiding light for me as we navigate how much do we charge for this well it's a painting to be able to afford it and to live with it and for it to acquire patina and to to grow with the maybe family that grows around it so from here on out I'll take some questions what is the time frame for making one of these it can vary significantly something like this and this was really this was one of the very first pieces I made maybe 30 or 40 days after I touched a sewing machine for the first time in my life so this one took me I think three solid days of work so call it 24 hours of time went into this piece and then some things that we've done we did this one piece for Uber which was a 9x12 and it was covered in intricate dots and dashes if you had driven a car back and forth over it like a hundred times like a miniature car it looked like a combination of tire treads and roadway signals Morse code it was very intricate so what we did for that one was rig up a projector on the ceiling and shoot the whole pattern down onto the piece actually in sections and then we painted a section then we moved the whole piece painted another section and just repeated the pattern until we'd done it I think we had to move it six or eight times and that took us I think it took two of us sometimes three of us three solid days of painting from like 9am until 7pm I think that's a really good example of how when you think about the original floor cloth and these repeating patterns that they would paint on the canvas I mean they were doing this by mapping it out and with geometry and so now we have all of these contemporary tools and techniques and so it just when your tools are upgraded your motifs and your products are they evolve much differently so when you see this piece it's very geometric and it went into this really pristine modern space with hard lines and concrete floors and and so I just I think that this is again is another really good example of that juxtaposition between what this old product was and how we are reinventing it and so your question when it comes to how long does it take to create these I'm actually not sure with the original floor cloth what they were using to coat it and protect them maybe it was some sort of like a resin base something and stand oil or a way to put a veneer on it but with us we're using wax and we'll use like an orbital sander and we'll sort of impregnate the surface of the canvas with wax or we'll use a non-toxic polyurethane it's a way-based poly that's actually made from way byproduct from like a cheese factory in Vermont and so depending on what kind of surface or coating that we put on it that'll also change how much time it takes to produce these pieces so we've gotten right now in the wholesale order that we're putting together James and I have been at it for I don't know when did we start really working on it like a week ago? yeah something like that so this was our it was a really good opportunity for us to time to nail down every step and so by the time we produce these 40 pieces that are all identical which is kind of rare we usually only get two styles so 20 identical pieces of each style we usually only produce one piece of one style in a wholesale order so we never really set up ourselves to do a whole bunch of one type of piece in a row and now we're starting to realize we're starting to understand a little bit what parts of the process can be streamlined where we can save a little bit of time where we can put in more time on one particular part and that's been really pretty cool by the time we ship this thing out on Monday we'll have learned so much about our product and we're really excited about that Sarah touched on the wax and the orbital sander like that was something that I figured out a while ago that's like again the aspect of this has been really fun I never would have anticipated it but I've gotten to experiment with all sorts of materials we all have and we've all figured out our own different ways of dealing with how the canvas shrinks or how we find the center and square all the edges I mean there are aspects that draw on our backgrounds in carpentry in painting, in design in just all sorts of different problem solving but the wax is one of the coolest things figuring out that I could use a really really fine grit sandpaper and kind of grind it in over the whole surface and then use a different kind of wax so like bees wax is really soft and then carnauba wax is really hard so you can basically you can try to anticipate how the piece is going to age over time and you can use these different waxes or finishes to to paint in the future essentially one of the most interesting examples of this was a hotel in Hudson New York a boutique hotel founded by this guy who's really really well known in the food and beverage industry in New York City he contacted us about producing two runners that were three feet wide and 46 feet long and one that was three feet wide and 39 feet long first of all like seriously 46 foot long runner I mean that's you really don't get that outside of a factory the only people who produce runners at that scale are big factories so that our tiny little workshop I mean I say tiny we've got 1,400 square feet compared to most factories we're tiny but we had 70 foot long workshop which happens to be an old movie theater and we could roll out canvas paint it and we used beeswax in that instance and we used beeswax and then we buffed it by hand I didn't really figure out the sander at that point they looked great we sent them off a month later I got an email saying hey how do I clean these I say oh well this is how we clean them and then a week later I get ah this isn't going to work we haven't even opened yet and he sends me a picture and they're just like it didn't look good looked really bad so I came up with a solution to the problem I went outside and I painted over another piece that I had beeswaxed and in that process discovered another finish and so after that we started doing a layer of paint then a layer of beeswax then another layer of paint and it allowed us to create this really cool texture so in a solution to a problem we came up with an improvement to our product ultimately I checked in with him another two months later because I hadn't heard back from him and he said no no don't worry about it it's cool they've broken in and then another couple months later we got anything from him and we encountered a photographer by chance who had gone to photograph the hotel and specifically mentioned that the floor cloths were incredible and that they look like leather and that's something I never anticipated I really didn't know that they would age so significantly that they would become so smooth and so darkened by the wear that they would end up looking like leather so I still haven't seen them in person that's another thing that's really neat I think about what we're doing is that we don't know exactly how it's going to change so yeah we were seriously yeah we crossed our fingers a lot so about we use the orbital sander a lot and I'm kind of laughing in my head because I'm thinking about again the original floor cloth you would make it and it would be pristine and you would want it to last as long as possible and make sure hope that the kids and the dogs and everyone isn't running all over it all the time but with us after we paint them we take a sander to our finished painting and I'm thinking about coming home with a pair of jeans did you spend money on jeans I already have a hole in them this is silly and so something that is in vogue and in demand is having products around you that already have a patina or story or age to them so when we take the sander to the painting what we're doing is we're kind of bringing up a sort of like a grave rubbing of the floor that we're working on and with the runners in particular this was I think that was my that's the product that I think was the most special because we sanded them on the thin boards that it's not like a beautiful floor like this it's very jaggy and so when we did the relief process on these runners the boards came through so there's a little piece of portland history in some boutique hotel in new york because as you walk down the hallways you're walking on these ghostly artifacts of the wood floor in the old movie theater on exchange stream and some of our other pieces too when the I don't know if you guys went to the old movies on exchange but when they ripped out the theater seats they left these divots in the in the wood the composite wood floor and so when we distract we call it distressing when we distress our floor you get these little divots in the design and that again is a piece of history of portland architecture that comes through and I think that's it's a really special thing about our products and also when we wax them on top of that same floor the wax goes down more heavily on the parts of the floor that we're protruding so not only did more paint get taken off but more wax got put on and so what happens is when it leaves our studio those areas are brighter but what we know is that over time those areas are going to get darker so we've just now really started to be able to predict what's going to happen to the pieces in the future and what kind of life they're going to have and that I think is one of the that's really exciting for all of us What if you were doing looking back when you started are there things that challenges that you've overcome that could help us or share with us? Yeah I mean it's been super easy we're incredibly well managed our back office is so tight you wouldn't believe you know actually it's been insane I think that one of my earliest missteps in guiding the company was placing too much emphasis on tools not tools that we use to produce these things but tools that are sold to young companies as being a panacea for your management problems or your cash flow problems or what have you Recently I read an article by the head of the MIT Media Lab Joey Ito about accounting and the incredible fact that our system of accounting is 700 years old and it had been on my mind since we began to question why I was having so much difficulty doing something that had been 700 years in the making because I thought about the history of commercial activity in the western world and that it's been done basically up until yesterday with a ledger and a writing desk you don't need fancy tools you really don't I mean the most important thing is your relationships and that's sort of you know that's been that's come to me too late so I wish that I had known where I had really thought about it right up front that I don't need a lot of tools I just need to be able to communicate effectively and to to know what orders I've got to produce to know what stuff is on hand and to know how much money I've got in a bank and to not pursue products that take my attention away from the physical world right around me because my product is physical and I actually have to ship it and into some virtual space that's supposed to improve my ability to communicate or make it faster to keep my books or what have you when I really could have been doing it all for zero cost basically in a simple ledger or in an Excel worksheet oh yeah so like I mean there was fantasy at the very beginning that I was going to basically run the company like a technology startup and that we were going to take some of the tools and tactics used by you know these cutting edge companies in Silicon Valley so we started to use tools like Slack for example and a lot of other things that they were basically the intention of which was to automate a big part of the business but the so yeah they were all basically automation tools yeah web based tools or apps or I mean just like I mean we live in a world where the app is the solution I mean that's kind of that's how we're marketed to as a people now that like if you've got a problem there's an app that will solve the problem like one of the things for me that's been that's been a pain to work through is that you know the to-do list application doesn't actually do my list you know so it's like it's really no more helpful than just having a whiteboard in the office a lot of the time so it's applications that are marketed to you as being something that will solve a specific problem or automate a specific process or what have you but as a startup you really don't know a lot of what those problems are especially if you're trying to develop a new product or re-segment a market which is what we've done I mean we were sort of in the rug sector of the market but we're really trying to drive a wedge into that because nobody else is doing this in the in the sort of aesthetic community where we're operating it really is a product in what they call white space so we just don't we don't know what tools we're going to need what's most effective you know are people going to buy them from our online store so a lot of what we did right up front was think alright we're going to go for e-commerce and I'm going to set everything up so that it'll be basically automated when somebody buys something from the website it'll generate a work order that'll be like on a screen or pop up on our phone and say like do this now and it totally did not work that way like nobody ever bought anything online I had one I've had one customer in 16 months buy a product from my website that's like that's not how the world is supposed to be working right now what people buy our products when they walk into some place that has one and find out who made it and send us an email so our sales cycle is totally offbeat from how everybody else seems to be doing business so there's that and then undercapitalization is just phew and that's really hard to deal with like when this opportunity came up I'd been working just as a freelance photographer and filmmaker and you know just going from from job to job and thought like alright this seems like a good thing we've got some accounts already like alright I can just dive into this and if I work hard and if we sell things in order to get accounts then I'll get out of debt eventually this will actually work out and I ran some numbers but right off the bat my numbers were way too optimistic you know you generate pro forma and you think like alright so I'm going to be able to capture retail sales I'm going to be able to capture online sales and I just had no idea that I wasn't going to have online sales because we were going to run into problems getting our retail location opened and it was just not going to happen like there were all these things just so many assumptions that I made without running low cost experiments to find out if they were actually going to pay off so so basically you know we didn't we never got a loan or anything like that we just basically didn't pay ourselves and that's that's created incredible stress that part I would take back for sure I would do that differently if I could so I also take back what I said earlier about not changing anything that's the big one if I had we tried to we pursued an investor and they wanted to own the majority of the company that and that wasn't something that we were willing to sacrifice that was one thing that I think we were really smart about we were really smart about that one because they wanted to own like 60% of the company and they were really excited about a product that we weren't interested in making anymore so they would totally wish would have redirected the company turned us into employees and had us making handbags out of recycled coffee bags which is really what they wanted us to do so we stayed true to our values but we didn't find the right way early enough to support our values and that was the solution to that would have been finding new relationships and the way to do that I understand now is to actually ask your customers how to sell to them to reach out to people and say hey so and so recommended that I give you a call because I've got this weird idea and a few people have bought into it it solves this problem is that a problem you've got? oh that is a problem you've got how much would it be worth to you if I could solve the problem this way oh it's worth that much to you this is the kind of conversation that goes on now that I'm having with my customers now they're helping me to solve the problem that I put so much of my time and energy into trying to solve very early on which was how much do I charge for these things and I invented so many ludicrously complex solutions for this seriously I was inventing algorithms in order to calculate the number of linear inches that I was painting and sewing alright here's what I want to do I want to paint I want to visualize as I'm painting down the line I've got the paintbrush going down the line that I've drawn and I'm seeing 75 cents rack up every time I go an inch so it's literally going kaching kaching kaching kaching kaching kaching so how do I calculate how many linear inches there are in a piece so that then I can sell my customer oh well there are this many linear inches piece in this many linear inches of him so the cost of the rug is going to be $17,000 obviously like can you understand that people? No it was the dumbest thing that I spent like a month I spent so long working on this problem when I really could have just asked my customer like hey how much is this worth to you so those are a couple a couple of the really numb things that I've done Tom you know a little bit about our business are there and we've made a lot of mistakes so maybe there's something in particular that you would want us to shed light on? Well the only thing that I would suggest and we talked about this before is just going out and getting work in capital and having a good business plan that allows you to demonstrate where things are going and being realistic in your performance those are the goals to at least that I think you're absolutely right the realism in performance was that was maybe our major major failure and we didn't get very good feedback on it we went to see a number of people and we talked with a couple of potential investors like we talked with a loan officer from the bank we talked with CEI we talked with these investors who one of whom is like a Wall Street analyst who specializes in evaluating evaluating companies and none of them gave us straight feedback actually on these things I think maybe we're asking the wrong questions but we also live in a culture where nobody really wants to offend each other and often speaking plainly and giving real positive constructive criticism is something that a lot of people are afraid of because it leads to what feels vaguely like conflict and we're very I don't know it's conflict is a very uncomfortable thing for a great many of us myself included so it was tough because we put our numbers in front of people and say this is what we're going to do we've identified the space we're going in this direction and we we're going to capitalize on all these opportunities and we never got somebody to just look us in the eye and say that's stupid like pick one of those things and in fact don't even pick any of those things that you say are going to be revenue streams on your proformas pick up the phone and find out like if you can get some more clients it's great that you've got a little bit of revenue now but seriously just start calling people that was yeah I wish that we'd somehow tease that feedback out of people and I know now how to do it how to solicit that feedback it's just a tough lesson to learn the hard way so yeah working capital alone would have been huge we eventually found some another thing the banks were they absolutely totally refused to give us alone if we had three years of financials then they might have been interested but they really were not interested at all in giving us even a small amount of working capital so that's what it is but there are some tools out there I mean I spoke against some web-based tools but people have reinvented invoice factoring in a way that really makes sense for businesses like ours so we found this one company called fundbox and they approved us for a line of credit for $2,500 in five minutes and it allowed me to overcome all the gaps in our cash flow due to net 30 terms that customers often kind of like just expected us to take that was another big thing I've negotiated cash on delivery for everything right up front but I kind of came into the business with some clients who already had their expectations set at net 30 and then that sort of rolled on to some other people other accounts so I would have you don't pay for 30 days so I would have yeah exactly yeah so I didn't know now I'm passing on the same thing so people think that they've got four weeks to pay you because you're a firm that can just absorb that and you can't as a startup that's like a great way to shoot yourself in the head so we eventually found fundbox and they make it super easy like I've got a $2,500 credit line I click a button and they deposit money into my account against one of my invoices it's magic so that has bridged the gap in a lot of circumstances it's allowed us to keep functioning it's expensive it's like it's a really expensive form of credit but they also they allow you to pay it off really quickly so if you take the full term in order to pay off that loan that they're giving you it can cost you like $100 for $3,000 but if you pay it off early so basically if you predict if you say to a customer alright this is net 14 I expect payment within 14 days and you only have to pay two of the weekly payments before the check comes in and you can just take care of the entire debt then you pay $16 on a couple thousand in order to bridge that cash flow gap so that's really helped us out I mean we're young people like in our early 30s who are dealing with student loans and having been freelancers credit card debt and stuff like that so it's sort of you don't come into this perfect and then it gets increasingly difficult as you go along as you make more sacrifices so I guess if I were doing it again there are things that I would have taken care of first I think you really have to think very carefully about entrepreneurship and to think about the kind of family that you want to create because it is an offspring it's it develops a culture kind of with you but also independently of you it's weird the way I feel about my company is that it's kind of got a mind of its own it kind of has a personality that I don't really control and that personality I think is the way it's perceived by our customers so it seems to be this unique entity that comes partly from me, partly from Sarah, James and partly from our other partner Jeremy, but also from our customers and so it is independent of all of us so I see the corporation as this really interesting metaphor and just like you would have to think really hard about the kind of life that you would want to give to a child you have to do the same thing for a company and if you want to give a great life to a child then you really have to have your house in order you have to have your affairs in order you have to be able to be totally emotionally available and accessible to that person and I think the same thing is true for a company so I would have worked harder to put myself in a better position before I did this I guess, or maybe the next time I do this, the next company which I kind of have I guess with Kino I'm now the president of a non-profit too, we are bringing a film based movie theater back to Portland so where the movies on exchange used to be which we've been producing product from for almost a year now where we built a projection booth and we just got a really great 16 millimeter projector on loan from Bart and we've got 250, 16 millimeter prints to draw from and we're going to start screening movies every month for the public which is kind of a huge deal because there's nowhere in southern Maine to see a film projected on an actual photochemical film at this point other than occasionally at the museum but that's what we'll be dedicated doing and this venture is going much more smoothly than the first one I think James has really been thinking a lot about entrepreneurship lately because this is the second startup that he's worked with in the last year really so I wonder if you've got anything that you wanted to say about how having been part of two of these teams what you've learned and how you would do things differently I mean, I think with us three we're kind of all we're all from the artistic kind of background so we all like to think big and kind of dream big and I think for me what I've learned well what I've learned just in working over my lifetime is just that a lot of times it's really about kind of doing the small things and doing all the small things right and kind of getting past thinking about the big picture focusing on the small picture because it's just I mean if you don't do the small things you're not going to get to the big part ever or at least not very easily and I think that for the three of us we all kind of have that artistic dream and kind of fire which keeps us going which is great and it's great for an artistic company but I'm really kind of reining it in and focusing on you know if we want to do this we need this little tool and we got to make sure this thing works right and you know we're advertising this but are we able to produce it in this amount of time that we're talking about and you know it's easy to have made some things and be like okay cool we can do that you want a hundred of them let's do it but it really takes kind of really kind of letting go of the big grandiose kind of dreams and really kind of focusing on the really small day to day important things so one of the most important lessons I've learned I guess not about entrepreneurship but I've obviously my heart is in another era my mind is in the past and I think about I when you were talking about the company gaining its own character and its own persona I completely agree with that I feel like without it's totally out of my control and that it's been this huge snowball going down a mountain and I'm just running after it trying to bat it in the right direction to make sure it doesn't fall off the mountain or hurt itself and I think a lot of that has to do with running a business in today's society where cyberspace has such a huge influence because it can be our company we can run it the way we want the products we design we make them by hand but the moment that the internet is involved all of a sudden people are writing about you and about your product and who they think you are and then other people appropriate that information and then all of a sudden it's disseminated everywhere and it's nothing that actually came from your mind or your heart and so you can really lose control over your brand's identity when it's out there and when it's out there on the internet and that's something that's so different about running a modern day company as opposed to businesses that you guys have run or that you worked for it really changes things a lot in these web base tools I mean you could you could essentially be totally hands off and have a successful company that is just selling products left and right and you're on the beach in Maui with a pina colada in your hand not doing a thing it's really wild and even though I've sort of grown up in this generation I can appreciate and be awed by how the internet has affected small industries and big industries but I think I don't know if anyone has any other questions it's probably a good time to open it up for questions or I heard someone talking about earlier that they had made a floor cloth themselves was this did you make multiple or was this a hobby no I saw the poll saying oh my gosh you were talking about I mean I think it's easy to think about how the internet you can be totally hands off and it's possible but I think it's easy to think about how the internet you can be totally hands off and it's possible but I think and what we're learning right now is that it really takes before you get there it does take a lot of hands on and like really we're not going to get to those places without lots and lots and lots of hands on real like sitting down and working for hours and hours and hours and not getting up and not going anywhere and you know I mean I guess what I've learned as far as being a part of startups is that it really does at the end of the day take a lot of just hard work and if you're ready to do that I think that's that's what it takes