BUSINESS ADVENTURE turned SUCCESS STORY The
BY JEFF LICCIARDELLO It all started with ink spilled on a page. Chris Mitchell, founder of Pladd Dot Music and Georgia Southern alumni, said, “I was planning a gig one night at three a.m. and I fell asleep [designing] a flier and my pen put a black dot on the page. It was for our first gig in States-
Advice from an alum Mitchell had a spark of inspiration. He transformed his hobby and passion into success and is now sharing his tips on how to turn your great idea into a career.
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boro on November 17, 1993. I had to improvise.” “I told the bass player, ‘You know it’d be really cool if we could afford color because then we could make [the black dot] a plaid dot. So it started as black ink on a page by accident, it wound up with fourteen thousand
square feet, twenty employees, manufacturing guitars and amplifiers. It’s insane.” Mitchell has been a business owner since he was fifteen with the start of his band. “The moment you start a band, you’re in a business. You negotiate contracts and prices. You make plans to buy things and work to build up a show,” Mitchell said. Mitchell started Pladd Dot before he graduated from GSU in 1999. It is now a vast business with divisions in music, distribution, publishing, recording and pro-audio. In 2010, Mitchell launched Pladd Dot Toys, a nonprofit charity that sells collectible toys and donates proceeds to the Bulloch County Sheriff’s Department’s local toy drive for children in
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YOU DON’T NEED A BUSINESS DEGREE TO START A BUSINESS -- JUST SOME PASSION
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IT’S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY, MONEY, MONEY
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DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE WORD “NO”
I’ve been able to take all of my hobbies and interests and turn it into my life — that’s fun. That’s why I can work until three in the morning if I have to.
My goal has never been the money. My goal has been the creation – it has to be. If your end goal is money, there are a lot of obstacles that are going to prevent you from that success.
You have to be willing to take no and also take no more than once. It’s a big challenge, but one time they’ll say yes.
need. “We sell a lot of toys online and in store. All the proceeds go to benefit charity – not most of the proceeds, 100 percent,” Mitchell said. During Mitchell’s time as a student at GSU, he was the music coordinator for Union Productions, now known as University Programming Board. He was responsible for booking acts to come perform and maintaining the budget. This spring, Pladd Dot is building a guitar for GSU. “The color is going to be True Blue. We are going to match the football jerseys and have customizations for the entire university,” Mitchell said, “I love GSU. [It] really helped me define who I was and it gave me the perfect working environment for doing what I do.”
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YOU HAVE TO BE THE ONE WHO CARES
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HARD WORK & TIME ARE NECESSARY
No one cares about your career half as much as you do, so you are going to have to do all of the work. You’re going to have to put in the hours – you’re going to have to do all of the labor. When you think you don’t have any more energy to go on, you’re only halfway there.
I was never afraid of hard work, and it takes a lot of hard work. I’ve seen a lot of businesses fail simply because they do not understand how many hard hours you actually have to put in. You have to be committed to working on your business from the time you get up in the morning, until three hours past your bedtime or longer.