Ben reflects on Small business saturday
What Small Business Saturday Means to Me
Sandwiched between the big-box retail sales date, Black Friday, and the online sales tradition, Cyber Monday, is a day very special for people like me: Small Business Saturday. Each year, we get a few questions about what it’s like to run a small business.
My initial response is always something to the effect as follows:
You have to be a glutton for punishment to run your own small business in today’s ever-changing business environment. You’re a bit like our favorite boxer, Rocky. How hard you can hit isn’t as important as how long you can withstand the hits.
You have to be someone who likes to prepare but lives on the thrill of an ever-changing environment.
You have to be okay with people thinking you’re crazy. They’ll say this until you make it.
A lot of us don’t make it for a variety of reasons. The easiest mistake to make is to focus too much on organization and the bells and whistles and not on what every business needs to survive: sales. Every business needs income coming in faster than its going out. Sure, you can finance and you may have been born in different circumstances than I was born into. I’ve seen lots of folks who have fun with an Instagram page or enjoy pumping out Canva designs well before they have anything that so desperately matters: cash flow. Sales. Interest from consumers. Clients.
If I caught your attention, feel free to continue reading.
Here are my 10 top lessons learned.
More cash doesn’t solve all of your problems. As you grow, your problems get bigger. I remember having a weekly payroll for a small team of workers working a small number of hours. As we grew in operations, we grew in payroll and the expenses that came with it. Don’t read this as any indication that I don’t appreciate our team or that I don't believe they are worth every dollar. I sometimes reminisce about when the business was just my family and me, with no payroll expenses. Marketing? We did it. Cleaning? We did it. Cashiering? We did it. We’ve grown to the level that we couldn’t operate well if we did all of the work.
There is no work/life balance in a successful small business. Successful small business owners will find themselves taking calls in the off hours, responding to emails, scheduling social media posts, creating social media content, staying late to catch up on issues, etc.
You should invest in antacids. I’ve spent many nights worried about what to do next. There have been points in my career when I’ve worked a second job just to help me have an appropriate cash flow for my “main” business. There have been
You need a team of believers surrounding you. Believers will help give you the confidence to run your business successfully. An essential item to note… believers are not enablers. Enablers pump you up in hopes that they’ll get a piece of the pie, and sometimes they go with the flow to avoid hard conversations with you. Our original banker didn’t think a flea market/antique mall could ever produce the sales volumes that we do. He questioned me at every possible chance, which made me question myself. By chance, that banker left, and we were partnered with a different banker. Wow! What a world of difference it made to have someone believe in us and make us feel validated.
There is a season for everything. What worked for you at one time will not work for you all the time. For example, before we used the full space of The Ark building, we could run with a crew of one person. It was so slow that I could go hours up front without anyone coming in. If someone needed into a locked showcase on the sales floor, we only had 1-2 of them and I could still help the customer while watching the front. Now that we have renovated the full size of the building and have numerous locked showcases, there is no way we could safely work with only one employee at a time. Because we are also the a shipping drop-off for our community, I can’t remember a time that there wasn’t at least 2-3 customers in the building at any one given time. Marshall Goldsmith’s What Got You Here Won’t Get You There speaks to this concept. What worked to get you to sell your first 100,000 is a wildly different skillset than for when you sell your first 500k or 1m.
Focus more on results and less on process. This may sound counterintuitive. Certainly, you do need some structure and process-related procedures and norms. However, I don’t waste time telling my employees what they should or shouldn’t wear, but I AM focused on what output they have. Did they meet their sales goals? Did we complete all the projects?
As much as humanly possible, run a flat organization, and forever run it as a startup. Steve Jobs forever described Apple as “the world’s largest startup”. Don’t get too big for your britches; start working on organization charts, titles, reporting structures, etc. I’ve had jobs where I made these mistakes, and that was a painful but powerful lesson to learn. At our level, all of our 10-15 employees report to me, but they have different leaders who can help coach them before some problems get to me. We have a process for who takes over when I’m away from the store. Different folks have different focuses. Everyone knows what their key performance indicators are.
No one will care about your business more than you do. This shouldn’t be surprising or controversial. Who cares the most about a baby? The ones who created it, who nurtured it, and who made sacrifices for it. A small business emulates many of those same qualities. Find those who want to grind with you on evenings fueled with caffeine, coming up with ways to grow the business. For me, my best thinking is done in the “off” moments.
He who can prioritize is he who can win. My team presents me, daily, with questions, ideas, and suggestions. Nine times out of ten, it’s an idea I want us to chase down or to try. However, deciding on the priority relative to all the other opportunities and challenges we face is what makes a good owner/operator.
Finally, know how to apply your situation into best practices. I love reading business development books, productivity books, listening to Ted talks, etc. In short, professional development is very important to me and therefore to my team. However, if we changed how we did business to stay in vogue with every business book, podcast, video, etc., then we wouldn’t have any time to, well, get any work done! I think each business thinker or personality has a few good thoughts and then needs to create constant contact so they’ve got to come up with something, right?