TheBanyanTree: Another Day in Business

[Monique]

	“I am,” she announced to the air, or at least I assume it was the
air she was announcing it to you, since she was gazing off into the
distance, “an artiste! She can do the rest of it, that’s what she’s good
at.” I was the she referred to, just an ordinary non-artiste who could take
care of the things the artiste did not have the time nor inclination for.
	The business development consultant looked at her askance. I look
using askance in a sentence, which is why I’ve written it here. It adds a
certain panache, don’t you think? Anyway, he looked at her askance. He was
gathering information to be used later.

	He asked questions, and she (the artiste, I mean, not the other she)
responded quickly and without hesitation, but not always addressing the
basic question. Her responses were more along the lines of, “Of course, yes,
that is exactly what I plan on doing, I know that, I’ve done that,” followed
by anecdotal evidence which may or may not have been related to the
question.
	“Have you managed people? It’s different when you have to manage
people.”
	She motioned at me again. “That’s what she’ll do.”
	“I,” I spoke up, “am just the bookkeeper.”
	Just the bookkeeper. That’s me.
	It is the artiste’s plan that I get her set up in her own shop, with
her own employees, her own subcontractors, that I write her lease, her
contracts, that I manage the cash flow, the business, the employees, the
subcontractors, and leave her to the business of being an artiste.
	I’m not sure if I should be insulted or just chalk it up to another
instance of naivete winning out over common sense.
	The artiste left the room for a few minutes, ostensibly to go to the
rest room. That’s what she said anyway, and I have no reason to doubt her.
	The business development consultant asked me, in her absence, “so
are you moving your business to her location? Are you going to be there all
the time? What is your role?”
	I sighed heavily. I often sigh heavily. Sometimes it’s related to
the matter at hand, sometimes not. This time it was.
	“I won’t be onsite, my office won’t be there, we’re still working on
that, she says that, but she can’t afford for me to do everything even if it
were a good idea, which it isn’t.”
	“I have some concerns,” he said,” and I nodded.
	The artiste returned to hear him say he had some concerns.
Naturally, being an artiste, she wanted to know what the concerns were. As
he named some of them, she rose quickly to her defense. The artiste is,
though naïve in the ways of business, highly motivated.
	“You can’t,” he attempted to tell her, “Just call yourself a great
artist and think everyone else is going to do the work. It’s your business,
you need to know how it works and you need to manage it.”
	I restrained myself from loud applause. It wasn’t easy. I have been
telling the great artiste that this is her business, not mine, and that she
must manage it. 
	She quickly agreed with him. Half an hour before she’d said she was
the artiste, and others could do the managing (others being me,
specifically), and now she was saying that of course, she didn’t think of it
like that at all . . . 
	I wondered if she’d been paying attention to anything that she’d
said previously. 
	When the consultant talked about the property lease, what should be
on it and what should not, she dismissed the problem by saying, and I quote,
“That’s okay, Monique will take care of it.”
	Let’s get this clear. Monique is not a lawyer, nor is Monique even
particularly well-versed in real estate matters. We both looked at her
askance while I denied.
	There was much looking askance this day.
	The news that she’d have to come up with some of the cash in the
beginning was a bit of a shock to her, but she said she could do it.
	And so it continued. Two hours of meeting, and in the end the
consultant encouraged her to press forward, to take a more active role, and
to come back in a couple of weeks to see what progress “we’ve” made.
	We? I’m just the bookkeeper.
	I told the artiste that I’m much too busy at the moment to continue
work on the business plan this week, which needs much work, and which I put
together in two days. “That’s okay,” the artiste said, having learned her
lesson about who’s doing what . . . “I’ll work on it. What areas did we need
to work on again?”
	“Financial projections,” I answered, “I’ve only gone out one year so
far, we need to do three years in detail, plus guess at a couple more.”
	The artiste said, “Projections? What’s that mean?”
	I sighed heavily. I explained again about income, expenses, how much
can four chairs bring in, how much do four chairs cost . . . how those
numbers will increase or decrease over the years. The artiste said no
problem, she had that all in her head. That, and the marketing. Which is a
whole nuther story. Her attempts to market, which included dragging me
along, have resulted in a story in a local business journal that I wrote and
which was published this week. She does not know about this story. I could
tell her, but why? 
	So the artiste was sent off with her assignment. Learn how to run a
business. Figure this out. Plan, plan, plan. Then again, it’s all in her
head, so what else is there to do? 
	Sigh. Great artistes. I want to tell her that if she wants me to do
all the things she thinks she wants me to do, she might as well just get all
the checks her clients give her made out to me, because that’s what it’s
going to cost her. I ain’t cheap. I may not be an artiste, but I certainly
ain’t cheap.

Monique