Howard A. Tullman
Tribeca FlashpointSuccess: “We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life when all we really need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”
The president and CEO of Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy and a pioneer in digital and social media, electronic arts and immersive education shares his insights on what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur.
The Art of Business
I think of my businesses as art projects: they’re done with a certain style, a certain voice, and there’s a consistent way you approach the process – every single time. You do it with a vengeance – no prisoners, no retreat and no surrender.
“Artistic” doesn’t mean soft or passive to me. This is an aggressive process – you’re ruthlessly trying to get down to the most basic answer to the fundamental questions, the leanest solutions possible – how do I save my customers time or money or make them more productive. Nothing else really matters.
You’re always trying to make your products and services (and your internal systems as well) faster, easier, and simpler. It’s an ongoing and constant work of creation, evaluation and iteration. Always raising the bar. You never actually get there – you just get a little closer and a little better every day. I call it “successive approximation.”
And there’s another important analogy to the artistic process. A new business really is like a blank canvas or an empty piece of paper. It’s critically important for the entrepreneur to have a very clear vision of where he or she is headed. When I think of something, I think of it as shockingly fully realized – down to an amazingly precise level of detail. I can answer questions with a frightening amount of specificity and certainty. Not that this will be how things ultimately turn out – but it’s the confidence that’s the crucial element.
We always say: “Sometimes wrong, but never in doubt.” Or, as they say in Hollywood: “The screenplay isn’t the movie that ultimately gets made, but it’s what gets the movie made.” You’ve got to have a plan and you’ve got to get the process started. Everything else will fall in place along the way.
And finally, although many artists think of their work as asocial and solitary, the great thing about innovation and building a team to build a business is the amazing and exciting way that the collaborative process becomes contagious and additive and you get to sit there together and just watch the magic happen as your dreams and ideas become concrete realities and just get better and better as time goes on.
Rule Number One: I Always Ask for the Best Seat in the House
Being an entrepreneur is definitely something that grows out of both your own nature and the way you were raised (nurture). I think that a great deal of my drive and ambition comes from a work ethic and an energy and enthusiasm that my parents gave all of us. It’s invaluable when you know that your parents have absolute, unconditional love for you and they instill in you a ridiculously unwarranted confidence and a belief in your handsomeness. My parents did that for all six of us kids.
We were taught that there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be the first and the best in whatever you do and – more importantly – that if you don’t ask, you don’t get. Or, as Michael Jordan used to say, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.”
I started as a trial lawyer and traveled around the whole country doing cases. I really was a gunslinger for hire and I was in a new crowd and a new town every month for years. It makes you very flexible and very confident that you will always somehow figure things out.
It’s very entrepreneurial to be standing up in front of the jury. You have to think on your feet, manage a constantly changing flow of information, and literally adapt your story to a lot of uncertainty. And, you have to sell yourself and your answers to a group of strangers over and over again. It’s a very stimulating and exciting environment. And, after you’ve done this for a long time, pitching your new business or raising money on a road show seems like a piece of cake.
Rule Number Two: There’s Always a Right Way to Do Things
But eventually I retired because I hated having to do a half-assed job of things. Neither the winners nor the losers in any litigation were ever happy campers. The winners thought they paid their lawyers too much and the losers thought their lawyers let them down. And, ultimately, it became so expensive to do a quality preparation and research job (and the kind of job that you wanted to do in order to feel good about yourself) that no one wanted to pay the price. So I figured that, at least if I worked for myself, I could work as long and hard as I wanted and do things the right way and no one (except my family, of course) would be in a position to complain.
In addition, I was just a bad employee. I always had new ideas and suggestions about better ways to do things. After a while, people do actually get tired of constantly hearing how things can be improved. You end up concluding that, if you want to do things your way, you better be your own boss.
Rule Number Three: There’s Always More Work – You’ve Only Got One Family
When I was a young lawyer, I was recruited by all the big firms in New York. One guy taught me a life lesson. There are three traditional parts to life: work, family and recreation. He said, “My life has only two parts, my work and my family.” He didn’t play golf; disappear with the guys to go fishing; or play poker 2 nights a week. He said that he loved his work so much that it was his recreation as well. That’s the trade-off he made.
It’s always seemed like a good deal to me as well. I wasn’t an absentee dad. I might work 90–100 hours a week, but I was always there for my family. I figured I owed my family the rest of my time. My preference was always to fly the red eye home instead of sleeping over. I was never ever the person for the clients to have dinner with. I’d be in my hotel room working or heading home.
Rule Number Four: They Call It ‘Work’ for a Reason – Make Sure You’re Working for the Right Reason
I would never say, “I’m having fun.” I might say I’m unbelievably proud or excited or satisfied. But if anybody tells you that being an entrepreneur is about money, comfort or luxury, it’s not. It’s about enthusiasm.
The choice to be an entrepreneur―being your own boss―is not easy. It’s hard on your family. And you shouldn’t be slaving away for somebody else. Life’s too short for that. Make sure that, if you decide to head down this long, winding and tiring road, that ultimately you’re doing it for yourself because it’s important to you. Not because your kids need to go to a fancy college or you need a new car. Too many hours of your waking day are spent working not to be excited about it.
Rule Number Five: Enthusiasm is a Force Multiplier
Parents of students at Flashpoint often come in with tears in their eyes and ask me, “What did you do to my kid? He was a slacker who didn’t really care about anything and now he’s excited about school. And he pays attention.” And I usually say that we didn’t really do all that much – we designed the environment; we assembled a bunch of creative kids and surrounded them with their peers (maybe for the first time) in a very cool place; and we lit the fuse.
But they’re the ones who make it happen every day – working in teams, collaborating on large and small projects, working with industry professionals – and all with a single goal in mind – to get the best training and preparation in order to get the best possible job when they get out of here. The excitement and enthusiasm at Tribeca Flashpoint isn’t limited to us – it’s totally contagious and it’s a lifestyle. You’ve got to put yourself into it and, if you do, it’s pays you back a thousandfold.
We built our new college in 100 days and it was a brutal and challenging process and every day was a constant battle against time and compromises. The contractors would come each morning and say they could have this thing done on time, but it would be “bumpy”; or they could fix this problem, but it would cost twice as much as we planned. And we said, every single time, “We believe you can do it right and on time, and we’ll be here 24 hours to help you. But we expect you to be just as professional as we are.” Let me tell you that when you can get a drywall guy to believe his work is special, you’re pretty good at this.
And it’s catching. It took a few weeks for some of the guys to believe what we were saying, but when they determined that we were serious they began sharing in the philosophy of building a sacred space where we planned to change a whole lot of lives. When the project was completed on time, we personally thanked every one of them.
Your attitude eventually finds its way into the people you’re working with; the people you’re working for; and even the people who are just watching things happen. There’s only one way to lead and that’s by example. We do what we have to do. We do it as well as we can do it. We do it when it has to be done. And we do it that way every single time. After a while, it becomes second nature.