To close out the 2009 season of Entrepreneurs in Action, the video series I produce at Crain’s Chicago Business, I wanted to get a group of entrepreneurs together to talk about running a business in Chicago. And so it happened that we amassed four Chicago entrepreneurs at Half Acre Beer Co, my cavernous neighborhood brewery .
We sat the group in tall chairs, poured them some suds and talked entrepreneurship. The result, I think: a smart, honest, spirited discussion among four guys battling to build their businesses in the face of recession, bureaucracy and the normal, impossible odds facing every entrepreneur. Please check it out. If you’re an entrepreneur, want to be or are just interested in small business, I’m pretty sure you’ll find it worth your 20 minutes.
Special thanks to Ed Scanlan of Total Attorneys, Eric Fosse of Homemade Pizza and Darren Guccione of Callpod for participating. And a big shout-out to Gabriel Magliaro of Half Acre, who not only played along but let us take over his brewhouse for an afternoon. Also, my crew was fantastic: Steve Serio, Jeff Hartvigsen, Erik Unger and Lisa Jacobson nailed the shoot. And as always, Dustin Park, our editor, the Yo-Yo Ma of Final Cut.
[Note: I've had a lot of good feedback on this. But I've also heard several complaints that go: Here's five white guys talking about doing business in a diverse city with an increasingly less-white-guy-centric business community. It's a completely fair criticism. One of my goals in 2010 is to bring more diversity to our EiA subjects. Count on it. This year I profiled two women: Zoe Damacela and Lindsay Gaskins of Marbles. Neither of them fit the bill for this roundtable--Zoe's too young and green and Lindsay doesn't own her business. But if we assemble another roundtable in 2010, look for a little less vanilla.]




Two months and two posts ago, I introduced 17-year-old entrepreneur and fashion phenom Zoe Damacela. Since then Zoe has won $5,000 in a 

The
One final memory of that story. On the spread inside the magazine was a wonderful illustration of a house that had crashed down to earth, crushing a girl in ruby slippers. Seeing that, I wrote the headline ‘Goodbye Yellow-Brick Road.’ Forbes‘ editor, Bill Baldwin, overrode that in favor of the more literal ‘What if Housing Crashed?’ Mine was better.
Still, what I’m about to do is gratuitous. This is a full-on boast.
Fifty years ago today, Raymond Chandler died. We’ve yet to get over it. By we, I mean those of us who love detective novels, film noir and other forms of that distinctly American genre: the hard-boiled arts. Chandler took what had been a trade — writing pulp fiction for