This is what I felt happened to my beautiful initial business plan
Five months ago, on an airplane back from a community arts education conference in Los Angeles, I scrawled down a business plan on little sheets of paper that I had scraped together from my over-packed bag. In my mind, I was taking a fairly sensible approach to raising money, running programming, and ultimately providing a service that the community needed and wanted. These, at least, were those assumptions that we spoke about last week. I typed up the plan, spruced it up with some well-researched quantitative elements, and felt ready to go. For the next two to three months I worked to try and find partners, find a space, and really get it running.
But quickly elements of my business plan crumbled. Liability, clearances, lack of partner interest, competition who had way too many resources to do it better...I'll be honest, for about a month or so I sort of walked away from Workbench Studio, simply because I thought it was a lost cause. It created a pretty large conundrum since I had already said specifically what I'd planned to do to most of my friends and family, and it was still the topic of my project for this class. I felt that sense of experiment creep that the article referenced, only the opposite--I had lived with this set idea for so long that I did not know how to think of it any other way. It felt that doing anything else would be a failure.
Reading the article from this week was comforting, because to hear that almost all business plans have this "major" change was much-needed. A few weeks ago I pulled myself out of my slump and started reaching out to people again. As usual, the majority never responded, but last week I visited a center where they train machinists and explained my vision of a virtual platform and--if possible--some sort of simultaneous workshops to go along with it. Workshops that were smaller and not so literal, ones that could connect the 3D printers at my internship or easy to purchase welding learning kits to the larger more high-liability machinery they run there. In fact, there are plenty of articles that highlight the similarities of CNC Machining and 3D Printing.
To my delight, I am finding that there are several connections that can be made, and organizations are happy to share information that can be featured on the website, as well as provide tours of their facilities. While they are not able to be teachers in the space as I had initially dreamed, learning that we can make connections with educational programs that already exist to make them more meaningful, rather than creating all-new programming, was very exciting. It probably doesn't sound like much of a change to anyone but me, but it's just been a matter of shaking myself from the original business plan and allowing myself to be fluid. Again, this article was a good fit for me this week.
In closing, I want to make a connection to another article I read this week--Microsoft recently celebrated its 40th anniversary, and Bill Gates made headlines for a very celebratory letter that he sent to all of Microsoft's staff. But this did far less to encourage me than something else I found: the history of Microsoft Windows. Here we learn that the first version of Windows came out two years later than promised. Clearly taking the time to get it right did not ultimately harm their success, and I find this encouraging as I rework my own initial promises to get Workbench right, too.
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