Build Your Scene... Build Your City... Build Your Economy

A couple thoughts on the title of this blog:  1) I grew up in a series of small towns and cities in Ohio, New Mexico, and Idaho.  In those cities and others like them, there are lots of young people who have big dreams and who really think their city sucks.  So that's where the title came from.  2) In this blog and "Lame part 2" I'm exploring a bunch of related ideas that I eventually want to distill down into an actual book.  I have no idea what the title of the book will end up being, so I figured I'd give this "rough draft" blog a really stupid name that I know I won't use for the book.

Above we have a clip of former top French freestyle skateboarder Pierre Andre' Senizergues, better known now as the founder of Sole Technology.  Of all my friends who have started companies, Pierre Andre' and Don Brown are the ones I'm most proud of.  Not only great business guys, but all around good dudes.  Sole Technology puts out Etnies and E's skateboard shoes, 32 brand snowboard boots, and clothing as well.  What I want you to take away from this clip is that Sole Tech's huge headquarters, the hundreds of people they employ now, the Lake Forest skatepark they built, and all those solar panels that now give them free electricity, all that started with a single skateboarder, in a small skate scene in France.  Thirty-some years later it's a huge global company making great products and working to reduce their carbon footprint in the process.  This is a great example of what a small local scene can turn into over the years.

This blog is not about any one city or town, it's about the hundreds of small towns and cities in the U.S. (and the world) that are being left behind as we transition into an information-based/creative economy.  These two blogs are basically a rough draft for a book idea that I'm working out in real time.

Who is this blog I'm writing for?

Young creative people- To all the artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, action sports, and tech people in their teens and 20's, this will show you why you should not only do your creative work, but why you should put in a little extra effort to build your scene as well.

Older creative people- This will remind you of the scenes you've been a part of, and hopefully inspire you to find and nurture the scenes in your area now.

Business and civic leaders- Yes... I know, I know, you don't think your city is lame, but it can probably use improvements in the areas of creativity and job creation.  I want you folks to start looking at your combined creative scenes as an industry, and a place for potential job growth.  Many creative groups will never turn into businesses, but even so, your "creative ecosystem" can help attract talented people, including entrepreneurs and start-ups, to your city or region.

What is the basic idea of this blog?

Every town or city is filled with lots of people filled with creative ideas which could enhance that area.  In the Industrial Age, these people were told to shut up and keep their ideas to themselves.  But we're not in the Industrial Age anymore.  Tapping into the latent creativity of their people is one of the best things a town or city can do now.

Politicians aren't going to turn the economy around and create the millions of high paying jobs that are needed.  We, the average people, need to start doing that ourselves.  Finding an nurturing a region's creative scenes is absolutely critical in the 21st century economic world.

Small groups of people with common interests naturally come together and form scenes.  Many scenes will always stay a casual group of hobbyists.  But some scenes turn into businesses and, in rare cases, entire new industries.  These scenes will be some of the primary job creators of the 21st century.

Anyone, of any age, anywhere, can start a scene.



I'm approaching this not as another blog, but as an interactive book that I'm self-publishing, free to anyone, in blog form to start out.  My goal is to turn it into an e-book and real, live old-fashioned paperback book by the end of 2016.

This blog is about scenes.  That word has many connotations to different people.  If you're a parent, when you go to a restaurant, you don't want your kids to make a scene.  If your girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse gets trashed at your office Christmas party, you don't want them to make a scene.  In this book, I'm referring to another type of scene.

If someone tells you their city has a good art scene or music scene, you know what they're talking about.  You have a frame of reference for what those scenes entail.  There must be some good local bands, playing original music, local clubs to play at, and probably a local newspaper or blog covering the scene.  But there are many kinds of creative scenes, from people building huge things out of Legos, to open source programmers, to You Tube comics, to creative "sports" like skateboarding, snowboarding or BMX stunts.  These scenes intertwine with each other forming scenes of scenes, which tend to attract even more creative scenes.

I've spent much of my adult life in a series of creative scenes, and I've met amazing people along the way.  In this book I'll share some of my personal stories.  But the real point of this is to educate people about what scenes can grow into.  At a time when millions of good-paying manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to other countries or replaced by robots, times are hard for millions of Americans.  Many small towns and cities have been devastated by these economic hits over the last four decades.  Using some recent figures, I estimated that at least 20.3 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed in 2016.  The number may be much higher.  Civic leaders across the country and around the globe are struggling to attract companies to create local jobs, preferably good-paying jobs.  But it's not working that well in many areas.

Meanwhile, entirely new industries have sprung up in the same 40 years, employing tens of thousands of people.  I'm not just talking about technology.  While tech in many forms has changed, and continues to change, our world, a lot of other creative scenes, and industries, are often overlooked.  They're not just overlooked by the business world at large, they're overlooked by towns and cities trying to get their citizens back to work.

Let's look at a few statistics to give you an idea of how different industries compare:

-The U.S. auto industry had a great year in 2015, selling 17.5 million cars and light trucks.  Sales are estimated at "about $570 billion." -WSJ.com, 1/5/2016

-Motorcycling, in all its facets in the U.S., was estimated to be a $42 billion annual business.  If you ad in the "ripple effects" of all the traveling, manufacturing, service, and tourism , plus wages for all of those, that number jumps to $102 billion... annually. -L.A. Times, 2/6/2013

-Total all time sales for all Harry Potter books, movies, DVD's comes to $24.8 billion.  Books sales make up $7.2 billion of that, and movies account for another $7.7 billion. - staticbrain.com

-Total U.S. video game sales in 2015 were $23.5 billion, up 5% from 2014. - fortune.com, 2/16/2016

-The U.S. gun industry has total U.S. sales of $13.5 billion a year, with a profit of $1.5 billion. -CNBC.com, 10/2/2015

-Amusement parks, including water parks and similar attractions, were "expected" to have total sales of $13.4 billion in 2013, a 2.8% increase from 2012. - Bloomberg

 -Total U.S. movie box office sales were over $11 billion in 2015.  Star Wars: The Force Awakens grossed $936 million in box office sales itself.- boxofficemojo.com  Yes, if you're keeping track at home, that means video games made more than double what movies did last year.

-The NFL brought in $7.24 billion in the 2014-15 season.  That's $226.4 million per team. -sbnation.com, 7/20/2015

-Bicycle sales in the U.S. totaled $6.2 billion in 2015, and there are 4,089 bike shops across the country and 99% of bikes are made in Taiwan or China. -statista.com

-The surf and skateboard industries topped $6 billion in annual sales in 2012. -San Diego Tribune, 6/10/2013.

-The NBA brought in combined league revenue of $4.8 billion in the 2013-14 season. -statista.com
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-The John Madden Football video game series brought in a total of over $4 billion as of 2013. -money.cnn.com, 9/5/2013

-Theater ticket sales on Broadway in NYC totaled $1.3 billion in 2015. -statista.com

-The Top Ten NASCAR teams brought in a combined revenue of $1 billion in 2015, and each team is worth an average of $148 million. -Forbes.com, 2/17/2016

-From 1999 to 2009, the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video games series earned $1 billion, making it one of the top video games of all time.  It's still selling today.  -Forbes.com, 9/30/2015

-Cirque du Soleil, the revolutionary French Canadian circus, had estimated annual revenue of $810 million in 2010.  They employ over 4,000 people from 40 countries and have a 338,000 square foot headquarters in Montreal. -wikipedia.org

-Personal drone sales in the world was estimated to be $552 million globally in 2014.  There are predictions it will grow to $1 billion annually by 2022. -grandviewresearch.com

-The U.S. snowboarding industry brought in over $406 million in sales in 2015. -statisticbrain.com

-As I write this (8/27/2016) the Pokemon Go game, released less than 8 weeks ago, has become an international phenomenon, and is earning an estimated $1,906, 840 a day right now. -thinkgaming.com

To paraphrase former president Richard Nixon, "a billion here, a billion there... it starts to add up after a while."

Yes, I realize these numbers are from several different years and time periods, and there's a lot of apples and oranges.  In the action sports world, for example, there are a lot of privately owned companies, and good stats are hard to come by.  So what's my point?

My point is that the entire Harry Potter industry came from the ideas of one woman who was "on the dole" when she first started writing it down. Video games are still thought of as "kids stuff" by most civic and local business leaders, many of which don't realize the industry is now twice as big as movies.  The surf, skate, snowboard, and BMX worlds are still seen as a bunch of losers in many parts of the country, including where I live now. The income Broadway theaters make totally surprised me when I looked it up.  Tony Hawk was a skinny skater kid whose biggest dream in the early 1980's was to get a photo in the skate magazines and maybe have a backyard ramp.  Cirque du Soleil started in 1984 when a bunch of street performers thought, "Hey... you think we could start a new kind of circus?"

All of these industries emerged from scenes of people, highly creative people.  My point is that you never know what a small group of creative people who form a scene will lead to.  Do you think Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak's parents wanted to hear about their crazy little machine when it was time to take the garbage out?  Probably not.  But they did pretty well for themselves later on.

If you're a local or regional civic or business leader reading this, ask yourself, is playing golf with guys from a large corporation the best way to bring new jobs and growth to your area?  Or should you take a closer look at the creative scenes you already have in your area, and see if helping them might be worthy of a bit of your time and effort.

If you're a creative person of any kind reading this, go ahead and tweet about how I'm only focused on money and business and not the true spirit of creative expression.  Then think about the other creative people in your area and how to create a scene, rather than just random people doing their work here and there.  The rest of this blog is for you.

There are at least 20 million Americans who can't find a good paying job right now.  Personally, I'm creating my own job.  Check out my blog about that process, Create Your Own Dang Job.