TL;DR. Because you already are one, whether you admit it or not. You're the founder, the product developer, the marketing department and the person answering emails at eleven at night. Your scripts are the inventory, your voice is the brand, your outreach is the sales pipeline. A writer who doesn't mind that business doesn't avoid having one. She just runs it unattended, and that is how people get blindsided.

What made me start thinking this way?

I got blindsided on one of my screenplays. I'm not going to lay out the details, but the short version is that I didn't see it coming and I should have.

What I took from it is that I'd been running a business for years without admitting I was running one. Not badly, exactly. Just without looking at it.

What exactly is the business, if I only write?

Four jobs, and you hold all of them.

You're the founder, which means every decision about direction is yours and nobody is coming to make it for you. You're the product developer, and the product is the script. You're the marketing department, which is your voice, your presence, and how anyone finds out you exist. And you're customer service, because you're the one answering the email at eleven at night.

Your finished scripts are inventory. Your query letters and meetings are a sales pipeline. Your reputation is brand equity. None of that becomes untrue because you'd rather be writing.

What does playing it safe actually cost?

I've worked inside a number of companies, a few of them in this industry, and I've watched the other version of this. A business finds something that works and then holds onto it the way you hold a flashlight in a dark basement. Same offerings, same approach, same pitch, year after year, while everything around them moves.

I understand why. The tried and true feels safe. Trying something new costs money and time, and worst of all it can make you look foolish if it flops.

But writers' needs change, and the industry changes, sometimes violently, as we've all watched these last few years. The economy is doing its own version right now, lights flickering, nobody sure what's around the corner. The companies that won't go down and look at what's actually there are the ones that get left behind, and the joke is that the basement was never haunted. It was just dark, and nobody went down.

The same is true of a company of one.

What actually happens when you ignore it?

Nothing, for a long time. That's the problem.

A business that stops evolving doesn't fail loudly. It settles, the way an old house settles, and you tell yourself the noises are normal right up until the day they aren't. The script goes out and you don't track where. The agreement gets signed and nobody read it twice. You learn nothing new for four quarters running and it doesn't hurt until it does.

Nobody gets blindsided by a villain. They get blindsided by a company nobody was running.

So what did you do about it?

I went and learned the other end of it. I hired a company to teach me to produce, and I'm doing the assignments. Budgets, schedules, who says yes and why, what a package actually is.

I'm a producer now, and the honest reason is that I got caught not knowing something I should have known. That's a worse reason than wanting it, and it's the true one.

Doesn't this take time away from the writing?

Some. Less than you'd think, and far less than the time you lose cleaning up after something you didn't see coming.

The writing is still the art. Protect it. But the hours around the writing belong to the business, and those hours are being spent whether or not you decide how.

The founder's checklist

Do you know what your inventory is? Count the finished scripts, not the ideas.

Do you know who the buyer is for each one, by name?

When something goes out, do you know what happens to it next, or does it just disappear?

Who reads your agreements before you sign them?

What do you know this quarter that you didn't know last quarter?

Where does your next opportunity come from, and did you build that or did it find you?

If your business stopped evolving a year ago, would you be able to tell?

The writing is the art. The rest of it is still yours, whether you're minding it or not.