What it really takes to start and grow a business
A friend of mine owned a restaurant. By the usual measures of business success, she wasn’t wildly successful. What she did was create a job for herself and jobs for a dozen or so other people. She showed up day after day, year after year. One evening, in a conversation about nothing in particular, I noticed that she’d said the same thing three or four times. “I love feeding people.”
I’ve thought about that conversation often. I hadn’t asked her why she started the restaurant or what kept her going. We were just talking, and that simple sentence kept finding its way into the conversation. I think if I had asked her why she did what she did, she might have given me a more complicated answer. I’m glad I got to hear the simple one.
There are wonderful resources available to people who want to start or grow a business. You can learn how to price your work, read a financial statement, build a website, or hire your first employee. You can sit down with someone who knows how to ask good questions and can help you see possibilities you hadn’t considered. CEI’s Women’s Business Center has been instrumental in my own growth as a business owner, and I hope anyone reading this page will take advantage of the help that’s available.
The advice you get in an hour with a good mentor might change how you run your business. Then you have to go back to your shop, your studio, or your kitchen table and decide what to do with it. You have to make the phone call, change the price, or sit down with the numbers you’ve been putting off looking at. And you have to keep doing that through the stretches when sales are slow or when something you worked hard on gets very little response. That’s when I think it helps to know what you came here to do in the first place.
I don’t believe making money can be the primary motivation that sustains a business over time. I say that as a former commercial banker and as someone who’s been in business since 2000. I take the money seriously. I want to know what it costs to make what I sell, whether I’m paying myself fairly, and whether I’ll have enough to get through the quiet months. Those questions matter because I want to be able to keep doing work I care about. On a day when the numbers are disappointing, I need a reason to sit back down and figure out what I can change.
One way to find that reason is to try the Five Whys. Start with whatever answer comes to mind when you ask yourself why you want to start or continue a business. Maybe it’s “I want to work for myself.” Ask why that matters. Perhaps you want more say over how you spend your days. Ask what you’d do with that freedom and why it matters to you. You might discover that you want to spend more of your time making things with your hands, carry forward a skill you learned from someone you loved, or create a place where people in your town can gather. The number of questions matters less than giving yourself time to hear an answer you might otherwise pass right over.
For me, some of the answer is in the pleasure I still take in working with glass. After all these years, I’m curious about what will happen when I put two colors together. I love that something I noticed on Vinalhaven can find its way into a piece of jewelry and then become part of somebody else’s life. And I value having a say in how I spend my days. I want to make room for those things when I decide how much time to spend in my storefront, what to make next, or which opportunities to take on. A decision that looks good on paper can feel different when I picture the week I’d actually be living.
Of course, loving your work still leaves you with plenty to learn. If you make things by hand, you have to count the hours you spend making them and the hours you spend photographing, packing, and selling them. If you run a seasonal business, you have to think about what your busiest months need to earn for you to get through the quieter ones. Sometimes the answer is to raise a price, change your hours, or let go of something you’ve always offered. It helps to know what you’re trying to make room for when you make those decisions. You can love feeding people and change the menu.
I think about that when people talk about growing a business. More sales, a bigger space, and more employees are familiar measures of growth. For a business of one, growth might mean earning more from the hours you already work or getting to a point where you can pay yourself regularly. It might mean having enough repeat customers to plan ahead, or being able to take a day off without spending it thinking about the business. And remember small is worthy! The next step depends on what you want your work and your life to look like.
Which brings me back to my friend. When I think about her restaurant, I think about the dozen or so people who had work because she opened it and the people who came in and were fed. I think about what it took for her to keep the doors open year after year, and how readily the words came to her that evening. She loved feeding people. I wonder how many of us, asked to describe what success looks like, would remember to count a thing like that.
If you’re starting a business, or standing in the middle of one and trying to figure out what comes next, I hope you’ll find someone to help you with the practical questions. I also hope you’ll listen to yourself the next time you’re talking about your work and there’s nothing in particular you’re trying to explain. What do you find yourself coming back to? What might you say three or four times without even realizing you’d said it once?
That might be your why.
