From Idea to Entity
For a long time, tBPG has existed the way most real things start; as a philosophy, a naming convention, a folder structure, a set of principles that had been tested until they held. That's not nothing. But it's also not a legal person, and at some point a body of work that intends to outlast a mood needs to become one.
That point is now.
Meeting the Accountant
The first concrete step was sitting down with an accountant — not to talk about branding or vision, but about the boring, load-bearing questions: what structure actually fits an operation that spans creative work, research, and commercial product and services, and what the tax and reporting implications look like once “a bunch of related projects” becomes “an entity with obligations.”
I'm not going to get into the specific structure here (partly because some of it is still being finalised, and partly because the structure isn't really the interesting part yet unless you, like me, geek out on that sort of thing). What matters at this stage is that the shape has a direction, and that direction has been sanity-checked by someone whose job it is to notice when a nice idea and a workable structure aren't the same thing.
What's Left
The next step is a solicitor meeting next week, which is where this stops being a conversation and starts being paperwork. That meeting is intended to instigate the final steps toward actually creating the entity: the part where a philosophy that's been operating on trust and goodwill gets a formal skeleton underneath it.
I won't pretend this part is exciting to write about. It's accountants and solicitors and structure, not the five movements or the principles or the work itself. But it's the part that makes the rest of it durable — the difference between something I run and something that exists independent of whether I'm having a good week.
More on the structure itself and how it's all going to operate once it's actually locked in. But it may take a while after the next meeting to actually write about it.
Silence is golden... unless you're talking about toddlers, and then it's usually time to panic ...!
Along with all my other projects, one thing I really enjoy is watching movies and TV shows. Not maybe the popular ones, and certainly some of the more odd ones. Of particular delight is "making" my oldest child watch older movies. The most recent selection was the 1980 Flash Gordon movie (with a very young Brian Blessed and Timothy Dalton). One of the highlights from this particular movie was quoting parts of the movie, and K1 asking if I really liked it that much (K1 expected it to be far more camp than it is) - and their response when I said no, the songs from the soundtrack by Queen used soundbites from the movie and they were what I was quoting.