I looked through the plan. They had made assumption after assumption about the services offered, sources of revenue, their ability to enter alliances with traditional brick-and-mortar businesses and organizations to form the crucial referral networks, the potential fees and charges. Lenny must have been uncomfortable with those leaps of faith, but the plan also laid out a timetable that identified both the crucial steps and what they hoped and expected to learn at each stage. They were candid and detailed about what they didn't and couldn't know at this point, and they identified how they would refine and reshape the plan as they continued to educate themselves about the market. The plan was a reliable compass, as it should be, not a road map.
They had indeed already made some progress in putting together a team, identifying a strong candidate with a technical background and some startup experience to bring the site up and beginning conversations with a small group of counselors and doctors who were amenable to serving on an advisory board. Someone with accounting experience had expressed interest in joining them part-time in the beginning, expanding to full-time if the thing took off. The team wasn't locked up, but they had apparently found some good candidates who would join as soon as more financing was secured.
They had created simple, pro forma financial statements based on the segments of the existing market they expected to migrate to their service and form the core communities in their network. Then, for each community, they had identified the various potential sources of revenue and the estimated total revenue. It added up to a number that would probably be large enough to get Frank's attention.
“What do you think?” Lenny asked.
Less tidy and tightly wrapped than the Funerals.com presentation, this plan was a bit raw. All in all, though, not a bad job for ten days' work. Most important, the plan communicated a stronger vision, an idea with a wider horizon focused on meeting a critical need. For all its loose ends, it had real potential.
I told them to be completely candid with Frank. Engage him in the power of the idea behind Circle-of-Life.com and enlist him, to the extent he was amenable, in helping them find the answers that would make it a success.
“What if it fails?” I asked. It was a more defensible idea with stronger commercial underpinnings, but it was still a crapshoot.
“We've talked about failure,” Lenny said, “and I agree with what Allison said before. I'd always be sorry if I didn't try this. We're realistic about the chances, but we believe we can make this work and grow.” He shrugged. “If we do our best and it fails, we'll still be glad we did it. It's worth doing.”
“And if it's a great success,” Allison added, “this is just the beginning. We'd like to build communities around the entire spectrum of significant life events, like births and graduations and weddings, all the events people want to share with friends and families.”
“That's the circle of life in the name,” Lenny said. “When we thought about what weaves together all those events, we realized it was the family. People will still be able to build sites for individual events, like a birth or a wedding or a death, but we also want to provide the opportunity for life events to be organized around families. That's the context in which most of those events are celebrated anyway.”
“And once you make it easy for family members spread around the world to link up,” Allison continued, “you open up a whole new realm. Imagine this—families could connect to form broad and deep genealogies. In a few years our children will be able to go on the Web and surf their way back through generations or jump across a family tree, from the tip of one branch to the tip of another. Rich with pictures and words. Imagine the sense of community that makes possible, even in a world where extended families rarely stay together.”
The web of life. The forces of technology pull us apart, and yet that same technology provides the means of staying together.
Lenny smiled. “Most of the advantages of living in a small town with all your relatives,” he said, “without living in a small town with all your relatives.”
“None of this,” he added, “requires new technology. All the pieces exist. What will make Circle-of-Life.com different and attractive is the valuable information we'll provide, the common ground for communication, the simplicity and accessibility of the site, and, ultimately, the communities that will form there.”
Lenny looked at his watch and realized they needed to leave for their meeting with Frank.
As they packed their cases, Lenny said, “You must have lots of questions.”
“It's a rich idea,” I said. “I'll look at the plan in more detail and e-mail you my thoughts.”
“Do you think it will work?” he wondered.
“I don't know,” I said honestly. “I think somewhere, somehow, something like it will work. As you said, the technology for creating on-line communities exists today. Somebody just has to figure out how to put it together with the right content and information in a compelling way that people will value and someone will pay for.”
Allison stood and shook my hand with a satisfied grin.
“Nervous about your meeting?” I asked them.
“Sure,” Lenny said. “This is important to us. Frank is doing us a big favor. We can't blow it.”
Good, I thought. Welcome to the Whole Life Plan.
“Do you think Frank will like it?” Allison asked.
“I'm not sure,” I said. I worried they were seeing Frank a little too early. They had so many ideas that still needed winnowing, refinement, and integration. Focus and organization would be key, as it is in all startups. They would need help strategizing and prioritizing. The good news was they had a wealth of enthusiasm and vision to work with now.
“We're going to make this happen, one way or another,” Lenny said. Then he lowered his tone a notch. “Allison and I have talked about it, and we'd really like to have you join us in some fashion. Give it some thought, will you?”
I smiled, flattered as always when someone invites me along for the ride.
I walked with them to their rental. They got in, and Lenny rolled down his window. I leaned over so I could see them both.
“Let me know,” I said, “what Frank says. If he's not interested, I might know somebody who is.”
Epilogue
THE
ROAD
WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE, the journey is the reward. There is nothing else. Reaching the end is, well, the end. If the egg must fall three feet without a crack, simply extend the trip to four.
Nearly twenty-five years ago, stranded on a deserted road in Scotland, this certainty struck me.
It was a damp and dreary day. Cold April rain spit from the steel gray sky. The wind whipped down the hills and ripped right through my winter coat. The landscape was forbidding—craggy, rock strewn, good for a few sheep but not much else.
A friend and I had been on the road for a week or so, hitchhiking from London. A ride with a long-haul trucker had gotten us to Glasgow, but as we headed east to Aberdeen and then north to Inverness and Loch Ness, friendly drivers, or any cars at all, were harder to come by. Near Aberdeen, we finally landed a ride from a bonny lass, a bit of a talker. She had just broken up with her boyfriend, she admitted, and she seemed intent to practice her flirting. We obliged her and practiced too.
She wasn't going far, so she invited us back to her farm for a bite to eat and a drink. It was clear she meant alcohol, and with my rotten luck—a vegetarian looking for something green to eat in the British Isles—a steaming bowl of haggis.
Hmm. A friendly girl? A little food and a lot of drink? A warm, dry cottage on a cold, wet afternoon? How could I say no?
But my plan simply would not permit it. This place was nowhere, certainly nowhere on my itinerary, and I needed to set my eyes on Loch Ness and hightail it back to London, so I could cross the channel to Paris. I had planned this trip for months, studying the maps and circling the names and places I had to see. I was intent on packing all of Europe's monuments and museums into four or five months, a low-budget, seventies version of the Grand Tour. I had spent years deferring to the exploits of my preppy friends who had already made their tours; I was determined to catch up.