March 28, 2024

You’re the Boss Blog: The Hidden Costs of Starting a Company

Fashioning Change

A social entrepreneur tries to change the way people shop.

I was at a StartupsUncensored event some time ago where a speaker, Jason Nazar, the founder and chief executive of Docstoc, said: “You can have your start-up and one thing. You can have your start-up and your health. You can have your start-up and your family. Or you can have your start-up and your significant other, but you can’t have multiples. If you try to have multiples, you’ll be poor at all of them.”

I had never heard someone speak so candidly about the lack of work/life balance when it comes to start-ups. As we continue to build Fashioning Change, I am often reminded of his words. Since I started the company, managing interpersonal relationships with family, friends and a significant other has been really hard.

I’ve lost friends because they thought I was crazy to try to build my own company. It took my father a very long time to understand what I was doing. In fact, it wasn’t until Fashioning Change was featured in the December issue of Entrepreneur that he really expressed acceptance of what I had dedicated my life to do. I’ve been in relationships that ended because I was told I’m “too ambitious” or because the guy would make me feel guilty when I couldn’t drop what I was working on to grab dinner — or make dinner.

I’m a Type A personality. I’m competitive and driven. Because the landscape of “shopping for good” continues to grow with inauthentic voices and so-called greenwashers, I’m driven to work harder. Still, I’ve learned that working at 110 percent seven days a week isn’t sustainable and can even compromise what I create. And I have come into a place where I’m on a personal mission to create a more normal start-up work/life balance. Over the Memorial Day weekend, I spent my first weekend in almost three years with no access to a computer or phone.

And I’ve been chatting with other start-up friends, 99.9 percent of whom are men — I do wish there were more women starting companies. None of the men I spoke with have ever been told that they are “too ambitious,” but many expressed overlapping challenges that we all know are common in the start-up world: depression, reckless partying, drug abuse, drug addiction, frustration with family members who don’t accept their work habits, compromised health and failed marriages.

I have one friend whose former wife cheated on him, and he blames himself for working too much and tearing apart his family (they have two kids together). Much of what you see in the media tends to glamorize start-up life (“The Social Network” is a great example). Until recently, the toll taken by the start-up life has gotten little attention.

A friend of mine, Bobby Matson, founded Startups Anonymous with Diego Prats. They are both entrepreneurs who persevered over the challenges of a failed start-up. Startups Anonymous is a Web site that aims to help start-up founders and employees connect anonymously with serial entrepreneurs about the real challenges they face. After being live for just a few hours, the site had received more than 40 e-mails from founders all over the world eager to connect with someone — an indication of how many isolated people there are trying to figure out the challenges that come with building a start-up.

Have you thought about this, too? What have you given up for your start-up? Do you see it as sacrifice or as just part of what has to be done? Have you learned anything about managing your work/life balance?

Adriana Herrera is chief executive of Fashioning Change. You can e-mail her at adrianah@fashioningchange.com, and you can follow her on Twitter at @Adriana_Herrera.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/the-hidden-costs-of-starting-a-company/?partner=rss&emc=rss

3-D Starts to Fizzle, and Hollywood Frets

Ripples of fear spread across Hollywood last week after “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” which cost Walt Disney Studios an estimated $400 million to make and market, did poor 3-D business in North America. While event movies have typically done 60 percent of their business in 3-D, “Stranger Tides” sold just 47 percent in 3-D. “The American consumer is rejecting 3-D,” Richard Greenfield, an analyst at the financial services company BTIG, wrote of the “Stranger Tides” results.

One movie does not make a trend, but the Memorial Day weekend did not give studio chiefs much comfort in the 3-D department. “Kung Fu Panda 2,” a Paramount Pictures release of a DreamWorks Animation film, sold $53.8 million in tickets from Thursday to Sunday, a soft total, and 3-D was 45 percent of the business, according to Paramount.

Consumer rebellion over high 3-D ticket prices plays a role, and the novelty of putting on the funny glasses is wearing off, analysts say. But there is also a deeper problem: 3-D has provided an enormous boost to the strongest films, including “Avatar” and “Alice in Wonderland,” but has actually undercut middling movies that are trying to milk the format for extra dollars.

“Audiences are very smart,” said Greg Foster, the president of Imax Filmed Entertainment. “When they smell something aspiring to be more than it is, they catch on very quickly.”

Muddying the picture is a contrast between the performance of 3-D movies in North America and overseas. If results are troubling domestically, they are the exact opposite internationally, where the genre is a far newer phenomenon. Indeed, 3-D screenings powered “Stranger Tides” to about $256 million on its first weekend abroad; Disney trumpeted the figure as the biggest international debut of all time.

With results like that at a time when movies make 70 percent of their total box office income outside North America, do tastes at home even matter?

After a disappointing first half of the year, Hollywood is counting on a parade of 3-D films to dig itself out of a hole. From May to September, the typical summer season, studios will unleash 16 movies in the format, more than double the number last year. Among the most anticipated releases are “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” due from Paramount on July 1, and Part 2 of Part 7 of the “Harry Potter” series, arriving two weeks later from Warner Brothers.

The need is urgent. The box-office performance in the first six months of 2011 was soft — revenue fell about 9 percent compared with last year, while attendance was down 10 percent — and that comes amid decay in home-entertainment sales. In all formats, including paid streaming and DVDs, home entertainment revenue fell almost 10 percent, according to the Digital Entertainment Group.

The first part of the year held a near collapse in video store rentals, which fell 36 percent to about $440 million, offsetting gains from cut-price rental kiosks and subscriptions. In addition, the sale of packaged discs fell about 20 percent, to about $2.2 billion, while video-on-demand, though growing, delivered total sales of less than a quarter of that amount.

At the box office, animated films, which have recently been Hollywood’s most reliable genre, have fallen into a deep trough, as the category’s top three performers combined — “Rio,” from Fox; “Rango,” from Paramount; and “Hop,” from Universal — have had fewer ticket buyers than did “Shrek the Third,” from DreamWorks Animation, after its release in mid-May four years ago.

“Kung Fu Panda 2” appears poised to become the biggest animated hit of the year so far; but it would have to stretch well past its own predecessor to beat “Shrek Forever After,” another May release, which took in $238.7 million last year.

For the weekend, “The Hangover: Part II” sold $118 million from Thursday to Sunday, easily enough for No. 1. “Kung Fu Panda 2” was second. Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” was third with $39.3 million for a new total of $152.9 million. “Bridesmaids” (Universal Pictures) was fourth with $16.4 million for a new total of about $85 million. “Thor” (Marvel Studios) rounded out the top five with $9.4 million for a new total of $160 million.

Studio chiefs acknowledge that the industry needs to sort out its 3-D strategy. Despite the soft results for “Kung Fu Panda 2,” animated releases have continued to perform well in the format, overcoming early problems with glasses that didn’t fit little faces. But general-audience movies like “Stranger Tides” may be better off the old-fashioned way.

“With a blockbuster-filled holiday weekend skewing heavily toward 2-D, and 3-D ticket sales dramatically underperforming relative to screen allocation, major studios will hopefully begin to rethink their 3-D rollout plans for the rest of the year and 2012,” Mr. Greenfield said on Friday.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=437df2321979118546ae34f1acf57155