I couldn't have kept this business going without orange juice, envelopes, and napkins. Entrepreneurs know the feeling. You wake up in the middle of the night and grope desperately for pencil and paper to jot down a vital idea before you lose it. Usually, a tall glass of O.J.-on-the-rocks (those free AOL disks make great coasters), a faithful dog, and some scraps of paper -- envelopes or napkins -- get you through these entrepreneurial night sweats. Sometimes, stronger medicine is in order, especially if your checking account balance is minus $125 and you have a payroll to meet the next day.

Over the past several weeks, I've been blitzing through O.J. and scrap paper (O.J.'s not on sale every week, you know). I'm transforming my business from a brick-and-mortar staffing agency to an Internet-based service for writers, editors, and clients who need them. The old staffing-company model, where you collect commissions based on the annual salary of someone you place, is arcane. More to the point, it's under siege from the online staffing agencies.

Nightly, it seems, another Internet-based resume warehouse springs up, with hundreds of thousands of listings and ever more sophisticated ways of culling them. They're becoming formidable adversaries. And I don't want to be crushed in the onslaught. Hotjobs.com, Monster Board, Headhunter.net, Net Temps, and tons of other sites compete more and more with recruiters. They're a much less expensive way of filling staff positions. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that five years down the road, staffing companies will find themselves in the same predicament as travel agencies: cut out, their commissions crushed, as customers go directly to the Web.

So here I go again. I'm actually launching a whole new business — just when I thought I had this one in orbit. And the foundation for what is now a full-blown project for a new business plan resides on two napkins from the airport lounge, where I had gone to wait for my mother-in-law. It was truly a brainstorm, not a fleeting moment of madness, and has stood the test of time: A week after I jotted down my notes, the notion still made sense. I don't have the details in place, but I have what journalists call the "nut graph" -- the paragraph that makes the reader say, "Hoohah! So that's what this is all about."

How does a company change its way of doing business in midstream? Carefully and recklessly. You plan carefully. Then, when you know you have a winner, you ride it like crazy. First, you get everything down on paper. I'm addicted to doodling and always have a large drawing pad in front of me. Ideas, fire-breathing dragons, and funny faces go in the sketch pad. This particular project so far has taken up five full pages.

The major problem with changing the way we do business is getting the staff to back it. I've pitched some of the idea to my operations manager and my recruiter. Not the whole thing. I'll wait until I know this plan will work.

The next couple of weeks look pretty busy. I need to create the model, formalize it for presentation to a venture capitalist, and then ask my staff to buy into it. I must be nuts. Pass the O.J. and that napkin, wouldja?

George Giokas is the president and CEO of StaffWriters Plus, a specialty agency that places writers in temporary and permanent positions with corporate and other employers. It also provides editorial consulting work. His database includes 2,500 writers and editors specializing in more than 60 categories. His Web site is located at www.staffwriters.com, and you can E-mail him at george@staffwriters.com.