Being an entrepreneur is one of the most challenging things a person can do. It’s especially challenging though when, between you and your wife, you have made the dubious decision to run five distinct organizations. I have my marketing agency and a small software company. She runs two retail stores in Colorado Springs — a furniture store (we call it “the big store”) and a little parrot and bird supply shop, which also houses the rescue birds for our fifth organization, a local non-profit parrot rescue that she founded and which we both serve as board members for.
The ownership of the businesses are split 50/50 between us which means that we’re both involved heavily in what the other person is doing and, of course we help each other out. I support the ventures that are primarily her domain with marketing and advice, and she supports mine with accounting and the same.
But there’s a saying that “shit rolls downhill,” and being a business owner means enduring your share and sometimes more. My wife and I though have the very unenviable lot of standing at the bottom of five hills simultaneously.
Take the last 24 hours, for example. Since yesterday morning, we have dealt with the following:
- The awning guy had to come by the big store to inspect the carnage after freakish 80-100mph gusts of wind blew our awning clear off the building and into the vacant lot behind our property. Fortunately no one was hurt. But awnings are expensive and ours will likely be $10,000+ to replace. We call him “the” awning guy, by the way, because there’s only one company in all of Colorado Springs — the second largest city in the state — licensed to build/install commercial awnings. There will be no competitive bidding on this project. The light fixtures underneath the former awning will also need to be replaced. The insurance adjuster also came, but the glass guy won’t be there until today to take measurements to replace the glass in one of our doors that was broken by the same crazy wind storm. Plywood is not a good look for the entranceway of a fine furniture establishment.
- Two of my clients reported incredibly odd, mind-bending bugs on their site which logic and reason seemed to defy. We needed to make these issues a priority, and our team probably spent 4-5 hours easily working on this stuff. Another had their third serious website outage in two weeks. I ended up having to call their hosting company twice and check in several times via email throughout the day until the issue was resolved. The hosting people assured us that they have identified the issue and are replacing faulty hardware to ensure that this doesn’t happen again, but if the issue returns, it appears we will have to find the client a new hosting company.
- One of my longtime — and longtime favorite — clients has a habit of emailing me what I call “Pandora’s box” questions, generally about search engine optimization (SEO) or online advertising. It’s a Pandora’s box because, while I love them, they are usually asking whether they can/should do something and generally, those questions fly in the face of what I (and often Google, our benign overlord of the Interwebs) consider best practices. But in these cases, when I say “No, don’t do that,” a lengthy email conversation tends to blossom uncontrollably for days in which they ask the same question over and over again, each time providing different justification for why what they want to do is actually OK — and hoping, I suppose, that ultimately I’ll change my recommendation. “But I think it will be just fine if maybe we do it THIS way….,” they’ll write, and then I have to respond with a more robust version of, “No, still just no.” I genuinely love these guys, but these emails have a tendency to test my patience. There are two fresh Pandora’s Boxes waiting for me in my email right now.
- A disgruntled former rescue volunteer decided to flame the rescue and the bird shop on our public Facebook page yesterday. I’m honestly not sure how it all started with this person, but she harassed us to the point that several times this year we had to have discussions among our board as to whether or not we needed a restraining order. It’s been a quiet couple of months, but whatever issue she has, she is obviously unwilling to let it go. We had to ban her from our page and we’ll keep our fingers crossed that she loses interest in bullying a small non-profit animal rescue.
For me, all this is happening in the background (and sometimes in the foreground) as we work through one of the busiest two month periods in the decade-plus since I started this company. In the early years, “Christmas Vacation” essentially started for me Thanksgiving Day. Stuff would be DEAD, the phone wouldn’t ring, my email would be quiet, and then it would be gangbusters by the end of the first week in January. Since 2009 though, the last quarter of the year has been very difficult to plan for. Some years it’s dead, some years we are completely slammed. This year, we are insanely busy and I absolutely LOVE being busy. But knowing that you have a full day before the chaos starts happening makes the chaos a lot harder to stomach psychologically.
The words, “I don’t have time for this” are rarely in my vocabulary.
Mark Cuban said something on an episode of Shark Tank once, and I’m paraphrasing, that “an entrepreneur is someone who would rather make $50K to work 80 hours a week in their own business than make $100K to work 40 hours for someone else.” The money part isn’t an issue for me right now (though as a business owner, you never really know) but otherwise that definitely describes me.
Even with my position at the bottom of all these hills, I would still much rather do this than most anything else.