Spiraling

This week I’m writing from an ethereal, swirling pit of frustration, false pressure, and overwhelming excitement. We still haven’t landed on a name and it’s eating me alive. I don’t understand how we can have the entire English language at our disposal and still struggle to come up with a name that’s unique, meaningful, and not already taken by another company.

I feel like a shark. Not in the ridiculous “cut-throat businessman” way, but in the way that I have to keep moving to breathe. I think that’s some of what’s making me so frustrated about the name thing. Without a name we can’t really move forward with any of the other big steps (form LLC, set up email, etc) and I hate feeling stalled. It makes me crazy. It feels so silly to be stuck on what feels like such a surface-level aspect of the business. Maybe (probably) that’s understating the importance of the name a bit. Who knows. I guess naming the company is just as much wading blindly into the ocean with your hands tied behind your back as the rest of this adventure.

If I’m being honest, the struggle with the name precipitated my first real bout of doubt this week too. I was laying in bed, mind swimming with terrible names, and I felt my thinking start to spiral. If we can’t come up with a unique name, do we even have a unique idea for the company? What if we end up being just another small-time production company begging for wedding gigs? What if we somehow start making movies and realize that our “rogue entrepreneur” strategy left us inexperienced and misguided? What if we’re missing that thing that makes our work even a little bit interesting? Is this whole thing just another elaborate distraction from the fear and pain I’ve been running from the entirety of my conscious life?

Hey!

Slow down.

Reading all that back, I realize how harsh and compassionless my inner monologue has been this week. It’s actually really helpful to see it externalized on the page. It’s obvious that I’m being pretty hard on myself. It’s also clear that, despite providing a menial amount of motivation, this reflective interrogation is ultimately very ineffective. Really, it just makes me angry and exhausted and clouds my thinking. I need to rein in my mind and start breathing again.

While the naming process has been frustrating, creating our business plan has been a little more gratifying. I came across a very informative article on the Studio Binder website in my research a few weeks ago. If you’re curious, you can find it here. The article was about the steps involved in creating a production company and at the end of the article they included a template for a business plan specific to a production company. The template was fairly rudimentary but proved very helpful in guiding the process.

Writing the business plan in general has helped us make our ideas more specific and to clarify our goals as they relate to our timeline. The more specific our goals and ideas are, the easier it is to clarify our next steps and prioritize them. This helps with morale too. Keeps us moving forward.

My goal was to have a name by the end of this week and that did not happen. But, that happens. Having a first draft of the business plan is awesome and we’re going to keep chipping away at the name thing. Maybe I’ll share a bit more about writing the business plan in my next post.

Take it easy on yourself this week.

Wishing you compassion,

Will

P.S. The name Will Barnes is an alias. As mentioned in my first post, I can’t leave my current job until I have another comparable stream of income and I’d like to prevent my boss from firing me first. Please don’t seek out my real identity. I will reveal myself when the time is right.

You can reach me via email at [email protected] or on Twitter, Instagram, and Threads @BosslessBlog.