RobertSchwabPoet.com: Business plan

I'm dying. I need four, $50,000 angel investors to fund a business I am creating as a legacy for my two daughters. Call it the "New Journalism."

Two blogs: one to discuss small business and politics in Colorado; another to discuss the arts in the state, primarily literary art. But also to offer a markeplace for young artists to sell and license their work.

That's my goal. My doctor, Tom Kenney who works out of Porter Hospital, has given me "two, maybe three years" to live under the spell of chemotherapy. So I cannot guarantee a return-on-investment for my investors, other than to pay off the debt at 4 percent interest as soon as revenues reach the point when I can afford to begin making payments.

But time has already passed on the two-year minimum Kenney has given me. So here is my business plan for making my exit. If you are an angel, I hope it interests you. If you are a reader, I hope you enjoy the way I put it to words here.

THE BUSINESS BLOG: “Schwab on Anything”

RobertSchwabPoet.com is a speculative play.

The small-business blog, "Schwab on Anything," has already been established and is being marketed on Facebook and Twitter, as well as with a distribution list of e-mail addresses of people interested in the writer's work.

Blogs are the new journalism forced on professional journalists following the Internet's destruction of the traditional newspaper business model. Robert Schwab is an experienced journalist who has covered small business in Denver and Colorado for 13 years at both The Denver Post and ColoradoBiz magazine, where he was editor of the publication for more than six years. At The Post, he started a weekly column on small business called "Schwab on Small Business," which appeared on Saturday's usually on the cover of the business section.

"Schwab on Anything" is an extension of that work. It will profile interesting small businesses from around the state and cover, journalistically, small business issues. It will also cover state politics, and occasionally touch on topics outside either realm that are of interest to the writer. The writer has already, for instance, written several pieces about his personal experience fighting colo-rectal cancer, called "In the Chemo Room." “Anything” reflects an expansion of the writer’s interests, and opens a door to comment on such broad political issues as labor, health care and education.

Advertising will support the blog, but ads will be sold at rates Colorado small businesses can afford, offering an alternative to more expensive mass-media advertising available in The Post and on Denver-area radio and TV broadcast stations. Blog ads will be priced at $300 per month for a display ad. RobertSchwabPoet.com anticipates selling 10 new ads per month and retaining at least 60 percent of initiated ads for periods of at least six months to a year. That revenue stream along with the startup capital provided by investors will allow the business to launch a Colorado Business Almanac and Small Business Directory, which will create another, if limited revenue stream.

Business-card sized ads will be sold for $300 per year for a business to be listed in the directory. The ad will appear in various digital sortings: by industry, by service or product provided, alphabetically, and by years of operation. In the latter list the business owner will have a chance to provide a profile of the business (or have it written by the writers of RobertSchwabPoet.com) which can be updated through a password-protected Wiki, allowing the company to update its accomplishments and growth.

(Cash-flow projections will be provided to potential investors as part of a printed presentation of this business plan.)

THE COLORADO BUSINESS ALMANAC
&
SMALL BUSINESS DIRECTORY

The almanac will be another reader-friendly entrance to RobertSchwabPoet.com. On a separate website from the blog, an almanac of business information gathered from all public sources available in the state will be compiled and updated to provide any current or prospective business owner market information important to his or her business. The directory of small businesses, over time, should include a fairly extensive (and hopefully exhaustive) list of competitor participating in a specific market, including information voluntarily given by business directory participants in their self-written profiles.

The front of the book, however, will contain updated information regarding the latest business and market statistics available statewide, including demographics drawn from Census information, all to be used as reference material to judge the business climate in Colorado.

Once established, it is expected that this front-of-book material, too, would attract advertisers from businesses big and small, drawn particularly by low ad rates and widening readership. That increasing traffic would be driven, too, by the self-promotional ads included in the Small Business Directory – and the business-owner’s ability to update his or her own business profile.

There is no way to project the success of this revenue stream. The book needs to be established and to begin to draw readers in order for ad sales to take place. Until then, no projectons can be made.

THE COLORADO ARTS BLOG
&
MARKETPLACE

This separate website will create a conversation between artists in Colorado and art consumers, and will provide a market for young artists to post their work in hopes of licensing their images or selling original property through the site. It will also serve as a marketplace for writer/owner Robert Schwab’s poetry, fiction and non-fiction.

This is perhaps the most speculative enterprise to be described for RobertSchwabPoet.com because there is no such Internet meeting place for Colorado artists of every stripe, or their audiences, and no venue for young (or old) not-yet-established artists to market their wares.

Bloggers from the various arts will be paid for their contributions to the ARTS BLOG, and a one-percent-of-sales fee will be charged to artists to facilitate the online showroom they will have at their disposal.

As traffic increases on this blog and marketplace, it is anticipated that ad sales will also be possible: to music venues, to artists, to publishers, to bookstores, to galleries and other business vendors trying to reach the growing artistic community in Colorado.

MARKETING & TECHNOLOGY

Print and Internet advertising to market these three venues will be purchased once the sites are established as a viable product for readers and small business owners.

Invested capital will be used to make these purchases. Radio and other advertising also might be possible, depending on revenue streams generated by the business. Technology services also will have to be purchased to set up the various websites, directories and Wiki. Invested capital will be used for those purposes as well.

Conclusion (minus financials)
This is the legacy I hope to leave to my daughters, one of whom is a visual artist, and the second, still in college, an undecided potential aid-worker, lawyer, writer or businesswoman, with a bent toward international arenas. I have two to ten years to make my business happen. I think that’s more than possible, and an opportunity to establish two lasting institutions to serve Colorado for the foreseeable future.

(Relevant financial information will be provided to interested investors.)

Post shows its colors

The Denver Post finally shows its true colors today in an editorial calling on Colorado's two senators to vote against the interests of most of their constituents by voting against, and killing, the nation's closest attempt in its history to reform health care in America.

The Post's myopic editorial suggests that the latest negotiations over items in a bill yet to emerge from a Democratic caucus - namely a compromise with unions and an already failed attempt of one senator to gain something from the bill for his state at the expense of other states - is reason enough to kill the whole historic effort only days away from its finish line.

This is exactly what the insuance industry would like to see happen, and would validate their investments in ferocious lobbying to kill the historic movement.

Legislation is the art of compromise, and to see a compromised bill get passed to further the health of an entire nation should be no surprise to anyone.

The art of lawmaking is to create a format that benefits the most people even if measures must be tweaked to get the best results some time in the future.

The Post, like a lawmaker, should consider doing the widest possible good for its readers before bowing to the ideological and business interests that it serves by calling now for a surrender of the greater good.

Hardball over health care

I come here in advance of my next intended post (RobertSchwabPoet.com: a Business Plan) to remark on the politics of Democrats trying to pass a health-care reform bill in time for the president to claim it as an accomplishment in his first State of the Union.

Hardball, to say the least.

One example: Massachusetts election officials say it might take them weeks to certify the election results of the upcoming special election to replace the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, which the Associated Press points out could preserve for Obama the 60th vote he needsin the current Senate to pass a health-care bill without a Republican filibuster.

I read about the move in an Associated Press item packaged in the Denver Post next to a piece about Colorado Sens. Mark Udall and Michael Bennet's protests of the closed-door negotiating between members of their own party to combine separate bills passed by the House and Senate.

The closed-door negotiations are as much an indication of the hardball politics Democratic Senate leaders are imposing on the negotiations, which include Obama at the White House.

Republicans complain that the non-traditional approach to melding the two bills harks to the smoke-filled rooms of lore, but they don't remind their listeners of similarly harsh tactics used by the Congress when Trent Lott and Dick Armey were ruling the roost.

It's true that opening the negotiations to television cameras would make make for a truer "Democratic" result. But no Republicans have indicated any willingness to buck their disciplined ranks to vote for a final bill, so crafting one without them seems the more efficient path.

Bennet rightly criticizes the lack of transparency. But I doubt it will keep him from voting for the historic bill. It should not.

Bill Ritter's exit challenges Dems

I don't think Bill Ritter likes me.

I endorsed him here (November 23) almost a year before I hoped he would be re-elected governor, yet before two months have passed, he ups and quits the race.

He told us he has failed to give the proper priority to his family over the past year of worrying over that re-election, and that by dropping out, he could discount re-election politics and make the right decisions for Colorado in the last year of his term.

I know nothing of the family failures, but I agree not running frees him up politically to make some tough decisions for the general good of Colorado. But he never made very good political decisions during his term anyway. That's why he faced a very tough re-election bid. (You can read my early take on it here in ColoradoBiz.)

Still, it puzzled me when I heard and read everything said and written about Ritter's surrender to the political forces of the day. Ritter ran for the nomination of his party for governor in 2006 as a stealth candidate, someone no one expected to take the slot on the ballot, yet someone who was well respected for having done the work necessary to earn it.

At ColoradoBiz back then, I refused to endorse Ritter because I thought his campaign reflected "blue-ribbon" positions of the national Democratic Party, and not individual stances specific to Colorado. Funny, he made a joke during his bow-out press conference that his personal decision not to run was not the product of any blue-ribbon commission.

Of course not. This decision had to be individual and inevitably was specific to Colorado. But that was my problem with Ritter. To me, he seemed to speak always from a political platform that was almost alien to him. A platform never upheld by his own, strong, personal conviction.

His decision to quit, based in his concern for his family, seems to come from such strong, personal conviction. I applaud him for that.

Now Democrats face the challenge of picking a candidate who can puncture the cartoon balloons Republicans cannot help but draw around their own staid-and-failed, limited-government policies. How, for instance, can you build highways with no money? Some Republican, especially those re-endorsing TABOR, needs to answer that question.

Ironically, Democrats are going to have to use Ritter's successes to convince Colorado voters that governing and government are honorable pursuits worthy of their support.

For that reason alone, the new governor's race should be an engaging political campaign.

Herman Malone, an evolving provocateur

Herman Malone is a provocateur. He wants to incite the Colorado business community to eliminate racism from its ranks.

Al Lewis, who writes in the Denver Post for Dow Jones Newswires, once turned down an opportunity to write about Malone's book (and mine), "Lynched by Corporate America," because he decided the word "lynched" in the book title was too provocative to be used atop Malone's story.

Yet over the years of a sometimes controversial and always entrepreneurial career, Malone has made it his business to be provocative, and it would be unlike him to give up his principles in the face of press criticism. (Or even the absence of it, since Lewis essentially kept a review of Malone's book -- and mine -- out of the pages of the Post.)

But I write here now about Malone's business for the same reason I co-wrote our book with him.

Black-owned businesses in Colorado are being discriminated against now; they were discriminated against when Malone's story of discrimination by U.S. West started in 1992; and they probably will continue to be discriminated against in the future, at least by the state of Colorado, because Colorado has taken no steps to eliminate discrimination in the state purchasing process.

And there is a documented history of discrimination against minority-owned and women-owned businesses by state purchasers.

Malone's primary business, RMES Communications Inc., self-described on its website as "Your Interactive Multimedia Solutions Provider," sells Internet-based business and entertainment services through kiosks at Denver International Airport.

It used to provide pay phones at DIA, and still owns a few there, using the most advanced model of public pay-phone available, but pay-phones are a dying business now, eliminated largely, but not entirely, by the ubiquitous use of private cell phones.

Malone said RMES posted more than $2 million in revenue in 2008, although 2009 sales have been hit hard by the tough economic and travelling environments caused by the recession.

"We continue to evolve," he said, describing how he has moved the company into digital signage, music downloads, and social-networking applications for travellers as well. He's also hoping to expand RMES kiosks into public-transportation facilities, perhaps into future Fastracks stations for example.

But all that work of RMES is largely being delegated nowadays to employee family members.

Malone is concentrating now on a public-speaking career, taking the message of his book and a personal message about contracting and surviving prostate cancer on the road to businesses and business-student audiences.

"I will be talking about two things that stop people in their tracks," he said. "Racism and cancer."

He has found that race infects the treatment of cancers for both black men and black women, just as it has infected business conducted across America, which is basically what his story is about in "Lynched by Corporate America." The book is the first and only one ever written about discrimination in contracting against minority-owned businesses.

The former U.S. West, now Qwest, has taken steps to eliminate the discrimination against black contractors that is documented in Malone's (and my) book. But the recent $9 million local settlement of an employee-discrimination lawsuit filed against Idaho-based grocer Albertsons, over allegations of ethnic slurs, graffiti and abuse of African-American and immigrant employees at a distribution center in Aurora, illustrates one of Malone's primary speaking-tour messages:

Racism is still alive in Corporate America, and it eats away at the nation's business community just as cancer devours its victims of all races -- from the inside out.

"And I have a solution," says Malone. "The solution I am talking about is a very simple one. We've got to talk.... We gotta' talk about our differences."

Citing President Barack Obama's "teachable moment" of having a beer at the White House with Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley over differences roused by the policeman's arrest of African-American Harvard scholar Henry Lewis Gates Jr., Malone said the only way to end racism in America is by talking about it. The only way to eliminate discriminatory treatment of cancers is by talking about how that discrimination occurs and what treatments work best, he says.

"So I'm going to be talking about all the things you see every day in the news," Malone said. "We've been afraid to have those kinds of discussions.... I want to be part of that dialog."

Yet, for Malone, his speaking tour is really just an extension of the provocative business career he started when he opened Rocky Mountain Electrical Supply (the previous name of RMES) back in 1976. Marketing remains a key ingredient.

Malone says candidly that sales of "Lynched by Corporate America" are not what he had anticipated when he paid for publication of 3,000 copies.

But during the three years since the book was published, Malone has studied the book-publishing trade. "Ninety-nine percent of all authors' sales are less than 5,000 copies," he's learned. "The problem is you need to have more promotional dollars.

"You've got to have that -- or a publishing company that is willing to invest those dollars.... The other way you [can market the book] ... is that you do public speaking, which is what I'm embarking on right now."

Marketing. It's an essential business ingredient Malone has been teaching me ever since we first sat down together to begin writing "Lynched."

As for myself, I'm only beginning to learn the lessons he teaches.

Small business catches the president's eye

"Obama Offers Help for Small Businesses," shouts the headline atop The New York Times story that inspired me to get back to business with this blog.

I've been covering small business for most of the last third of my nearly 40-year journalism career, and I have to wonder how much national resolve is actually behind the words atop Jackie Calmes' story. If the president is serious, small business could show the nation the way out of the economic quagmire we are in.

Calmes covered President Barack Obama's speech at the Brookings Institution on Tuesday about job creation. Obama suggested eliminating capital gains taxes on small business investment -- as if many small businesses have money lying around to invest or still have it invested after the two-year stock-market crash; extending a stimulus-bill tax break through 2010 that allows small firms to write off $250,000 in qualified investments; and providing increased tax deductions of capital expenses.

My experience with small businesses suggests that no small-business owner worth his or her salt would turn down any kind of tax break made available to them; but that most owners would also view proposed tax incentives to increase hiring a kind of a "cart-before-the-horse" proposition.

Many owners, too, would simply complain that the paper work necessary and accounting expense of filing for the tax breaks eliminates the true incentive to taking advantage of them.

What small businesses need in terms of relief from this recession is lots of cash and a stimulated consumer and business marketplace for their goods and services.

Obama said his Treasury Department would step up loans to small businesses using unspent TARP funds. The assurance of such loans might indeed incent a small business owner to add an employee or two to his or her workforce.

But credit relief for consumers and existing small businesses -- how about a reinstatement of the credit-card-interest tax deduction? --might open more wallets more quickly to increased consumer and business-to-business buying and spending in 2010.

And more buying and spending, after all, is the best kind of economic stimulus a country can enjoy. Even, I might add, if it's government doing the spending.

My point, here, however, was not to suggest ways to extricate the economy from its worst recession in 50 years. It was to point out that Obama has small business on his mind.

The president never made small business much of an issue during his campaign, but since taking office, it seems, he has drunk the potion that opens one's eyes to the value of the job-creation engine that the nation's small firms have always been.

If more liberal lawmakers would taste the potion, too, this country might just pick itself up fast enough to keep from crying about a continuing economic downturn next Christmas.

And conservatives, by then, might be joyfully aghast at how fast Obama's administration is making progress at cutting into the huge deficits inherited from the last president's reign.

Back to a capitalist future

"In American history, fundamental shifts in the economic orthodoxy usually did not occur until after there was a large and painful calamity.... The awful consequences from such an experience discredited the prevailing wisdom and suddenly opened the way for new thinking."

-- William Greider, "Secrets of the Temple" (1987)

Yes, I'm still reading Greider's book, and it still keeps telling me the lessons learned during the 1982-1984 recession are being used by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to solve the nation's current economic crisis.

Ronald Reagan was president during that time, and Paul Volcker, now a financial advisor to President Obama, was Fed chairman. Volcker had squeezed the economy so tight that interest rates as well as unemployment rates had reached double digits. The quote atop this blogspot represents Grieder's conclusion that even that stiff a punishment for the American economy was not enough to convince politicians to regulate Wall Street strongly enough to prevent another financial collapse.

That recession, by the way, was the worst then since the Great Depression, just as the Great Recession now that we are all living through has topped that harsh mid-80s downturn.

And once again experts are begging Congress to rein in Wall Street traders, to reform the national financial regulatory system, to protect consumers and Main Street business from the ravages and risks of an unfettered market, and to eliminate taxpayers as the default bailout for failed money managers.

And once again lobbyists are hissing and pissing away at any congressional resolve to prevent a "next time" from happening again.

Greider's opened door for "new thinking," in fact, is closing fast. The monied establishment that increased it's wealth so greatly during the Bush administration -- to the great expense of the poor and middle class -- will try to convince Obama's experts that Wall Street itself is smart enough to heal itself. Don't let your congressmen and women buy into that argument.

Wall Street for the sake of Main Street needs to be put on a short leash. No talent needs to be paid so much that it forgets the greater good. Capitalists in America should be required to have a conscience.