Edgeworth Building. Richmond, VA, 2002 (flickr)

“Richmond (RIC)” 2010. (photos.chrisbusse.com)

Furniture Shopping in the Alley (2005)

Nature reclaiming a building at Pear & Cary Streets, Richmond, VA. 2003. (since demolished)

Abandoned Brewery (2003) #RVA

BOOM! Brown’s Island, June 1, 2003, 7am. #RVA

This town¹ has an amazing creative class of young professionals, many of whom have setup shop as independant consultants, freelancers, and small businesses providing their services for hire.

Unfortunately I believe this means that alot of this creative talent is also spread thin across the aspects of running a small business that aren’t directly production oriented: marketing, business development, accounting, project management, and other administrative tasks.

These things are no doubt important, but which is better: five designers who have to enter time, invoice clients, collect bills, and balance Quickbooks, or five designers who only have to enter time to be tracked?

There are certainly some companies of this size and scale around locally, but I suspect many of them got to their size through the use of serious investment capital. What I’m describing is more of a bootstrapped merger of many equals. Also, most of these other companies have a very top-down management and ownership structure.

It seems to me that if several of the small creative firms in town were to combine their businesses into one larger shop that they could realize some serious economies of scale.  They would be able to reduce what is, between the lot of them, quite a bit of overlapping administrative management and physical space/equipment requirements.  Each person would have more time to focus on their true passion, the direct production of creative work.

On the surface though, it seems like there would be some problems getting something like this to happen — things like trust, ego, work habits and technology/tool preferences, parity of finances and economic worth, and individual goals would all have to fall exactly in to place. It’s a classic prisoner’s dilema.

If this venture were approached like a traditional business acquisition or roll-up, no doubt a few people “at the top” would be looking to take unfair advantage of the talents of others. If it were approached as a “co op”, then there might not be enough cohesiveness to make the economies of scale pay off (and hold together) in the long run.  A middle ground would need to be found — a relatively flat management/partnership structure aligned toward common goals and fair pay-for-performance income distribution.

The goal here would not be to create a monolithic all-encompassing organization. Something between 20 and 40 people would probably be about the right size.  During the dot-com boom I worked for a company where I was about the 35th employee, and watched it grow to over 200 just in the local office.  All other things excluded, once we passed 50 people and kept growing things really changed.  Never should this be something where everyone doesn’t know everyone else’s name and who they are personally.

An argument can be made that an arrangement like this would make the organization more competitive as well. The people who are most skilled at business development would, if that is where their passion lies, focus on just that. People who are the best designers would have more time to design, the best programmers more time to code. In theory this would lead to a more productive, more focused, more successful company.

¹ I’m writing about Richmond, VA but also in an Onion-esque “area man” context.

Snowy Stairs (2003) #RVA