All the World’s A Critic

At the Island. Pull up a chair. Stay a while.

On building something from scratch, learning in public, and the curious expectation that beginnings should look like endings. 

“Mr. Owl, how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?  

Let’s find out–One… Two…”

Madame Founder, how many open tabs does it take to create a virtual business model?

Today the answer is 46.  

I've dealt with restaurant equipment that chose opening week to malfunction, vendors who interpreted delivery schedules as suggestions, and the peculiar mathematics of staffing a dining room when three people have called in sick.

Yet somehow, forty-six browser tabs have managed to humble me.

I have been late to Zoom meetings because I couldn't find the correct tab. My best friend and COO finds it terribly amusing, sympathetically, of course.  The back office to the website is open, the VOIP app is open, my calendar is open, email, at least two personal projects, the instruction packet written for my VA… You get the picture.

There are days when I sit down at my desk with its twin curved monitors and Calm Cafe Jazz Radio softly playing through my little speaker, with a perfectly reasonable list of things to accomplish. Then, I look up and discover that twelve hours have passed. The tea is cold, lunch has become a theoretical concept, and the original list has somehow acquired seventeen relatives.

On particularly productive days, I even manage to cross something off before the dogs start hinting that it’s their dinner time.

After five restaurant openings, I thought I had a reasonably comprehensive understanding of what it takes to get a business off the ground.

And I did.

What I hadn't fully appreciated was how different the experience would be when the business model itself was still being developed.

MealScript, my first non-brick-and-mortar enterprise, has introduced me to an entirely different concept: opening the doors while you're still deciding where some of the walls belong.

And apparently, the guests have arrived.

Think about it like inviting a few new friends over for a nice dinner: you’ve planned the perfect food, beverages, and music.  You get home the night before the big event, put on your favorite (ratty) sweatpants, threadbare T-shirt, and do-rag because you are even deep-cleaning your place and preparing food before these people come into your space. You’ve got your “getting this done” music on blast… 

The doorbell rings. 

Mildly looking like a chimney sweep straight out of Mary Poppins, you run to the door, throw it open expecting your Amazon guy– 

Instead… Your new friends, hostess gift in hand, are standing there, and their look of excitement melts into total confusion.  

Technically, you could turn them away. 

Socially, that option seems to have disappeared, and all you have to feed them are your test batches of appetizers that you aren’t entirely satisfied with.

The scheduling blunder is all you.  You’re horrified, right?  

That’s kind of what my personal socials look like.  I have run test kitchens for new restaurants that felt less chaotic.  

Building a business has a peculiar way of rearranging one's priorities. A project gets set aside for a week, then a month, and before you know it, you've practically forgotten where you put it. I consoled myself with the thought that the internet contains approximately seventeen billion other things to look at. My personal socials are full of test videos and posts that scream “I am a newbie”– Poor sound quality.  Poor scripting.  Bad camera angles and lighting. Surely my early attempts at cinematography would disappear quietly into the digital wilderness. 

Then the doorbell rings…  They see the do-rag, hear the opening lines of Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” and smell the fragrance of overbaked cheese straws.

Even with a perfect recovery line and a well-executed evening thereafter, the guests have already judged.

And to be fair, that's what audiences do. We form impressions. We decide what we like and what we don’t, and whether something deserves another thirty seconds of our attention.

The curious part is how readily a first impression can become a final conclusion.

I am not entirely innocent of this myself. I've watched a video, formed an opinion, and moved on without really giving much thought to the hours—or possibly the forty-six browser tabs—that went into producing it.

The difference is that I now have a rather personal relationship with the person on the other side of the MealScript camera.

I have received suggestions that made me reconsider decisions I thought were settled. Sometimes a suggestion has sparked an idea that became something far better than what I'd originally imagined. What started as “okay” became so much more. 

I've also received suggestions that were perfectly reasonable for a business I have absolutely no intention of building. Learning to recognize the difference has become part of the job. 

One advantage of observing a business from the outside is that you can identify a problem, offer a solution, and return to your regularly scheduled life. The person building the business (or the story) has the slightly less glamorous responsibility of determining whether the solution will actually work.

Meanwhile, MealScript has been developing opinions of her own. 

She has standards.  

A philosophy.  

Strong preferences and an understanding of what she is and what she’s not.  She has even required me to leave behind an idea or two that I was rather fond of.  

I've discovered that creating something is a little like writing a story. You may know where you intend to begin, but the characters occasionally have other ideas.

MealScript, it turns out, has quite a few.

And somewhere along the way, I discovered that the woman building MealScript was changing nearly as much as the business itself. 

But I've been wondering about something…

Did anybody ever ask Mr. Owl whether he actually liked the Tootsie Pop?

(The world may never know…)

-Kimberly Fehler

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