Getting Ready for The Leap

With the end of the year coming up, like the rest of you, we are thinking about the future, the road ahead of us.
I read this piece yesterday.
Don’t Start a Company, Kid:

The first few years of a company’s existence are a terrible awkward adolescence. You will work like a dog. You will spend a large percentage of your energy on stuff that will eventually be thrown away. You will live on the edge of poverty.

That’s us! Anyway…
We are at that point with Writ Large Press/DT•LAB where our wheels are starting to spin in place a little bit. It’s not that we are running out of ideas or losing interest or just plain failing.
It’s more like—it’s more like we have hit a ditch on our speedway and we need a bigger car or something to get across it. Good God, that is a terrible analogy! Hopefully you get the point.
What I’m saying is we definitely need to push ourselves to the next stage because we feel a bit stagnant.
Actually, what I’m saying is we are ready to make The Leap.
Last night Peter and I spoke at length about doing a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign. It’s not the first time and I’m sure it won’t be the last. And I know that our future LAB partner, The Pop-Hop, opened after a successful Kickstarter campaign. Many projects have. I don’t know if I’m right about this, but I just don’t think it’s for us.
IDENTITY
Once we ask for money, whether through crowdfunding or VCs or private investors, I know we can’t go back. We will be who we sold ourselves to be when we asked for people to invest in us. This is not a bad thing at all, but it’s something we have to be ready for.
Most likely thing we have discussed, especially since our exit from The Bookstore That Shall Not Be Named, is opening our bookstore. There are storefronts around and people willing to help find something, even giant lofts that have invited us to set up DT•LAB inside.
And having retail space(s) is a huge part of our future plans, but it’s not who we are going to be. You know what I’m saying? I don’t think we’re meant to be just a bookstore.
There is a big picture. Gigantic picture. And we’re going to need money. Probably a good chunk of it. And there will be bookstores involved, but not in the way people might think.
INVESTMENT
No Kickstarter/Indiegogo. That’s what we concluded last night after a whiskeys.
However, we will definitely be looking for investors from the beginning of the new year.
We will have a business plan drawn by the end of the year, laying out our plans, our projects, for the next 10 years. I am excited to put down on paper how everything we’ve been dabbling in, playing around with, working on, excelling in, how all those things come together into one cohesive vision.
The idea of finally declaring who we are and what we want is scary.
The piece I linked to at the opening of this post ends with this paragraph:

The best part of creating a company is defining a culture. If you can find a company that has a culture you like and will pay you Enough to solve problems, go work for that company. Don’t start your own.

Too late.

What are you looking for?