Something I've noticed about the small business blogs I like to read -- the owners are all stress puppies.
Constant sturm and drang with suppliers, with landlords, with customers, with employees. Rarely is the course smooth in love and war -- and small business. (A great sage of failure once said, "Only dead fish go with the flow...')
(Note: I'm not talking about puff blogs, who talk only about how great they are, and then announce a few months later that they're closing to "spend more time with the family...")
No, the interesting blogs are about real working stores, and about how day to day business works.
So either:
A.) Stress puppies start small businesses.
B.) Small businesses turn people into stress puppies.
C.) Small businesses owned by stress puppies start blogs....
The answer, of course, is all of the above.
But mostly B.
I don't think you can run a real business without running into constant problems that have to be solved. It's what you do every day. So it's what you blog about.
Hopefully, we also keep a sense of humor about it.
**********
Speaking of future stresses -- Linda said that Micheal Powell was on NPR talking about Kindle. His take was that it was too expensive, that books would always have a place, and so on....
Which seems to me to miss the point.
It isn't that Kindle will take away 100% of the book business. But how about 30% or 20% or even 10%? What with Barnes and Nobles and Borders and Amazon and Costgo, independent bookstores are obviously under a lot of stress...
So 10% could be significant. 20% even more so.
Put another way; say you keep 80% of your wages, but have to give up 20%?
My store is almost designed to live on the fringes of these things...I only carry fiction, for instance, already forgoing all non-fiction because I don't have room. And so on...
But most new bookstores can't be affording to lose elements of their business.
Constant sturm and drang with suppliers, with landlords, with customers, with employees. Rarely is the course smooth in love and war -- and small business. (A great sage of failure once said, "Only dead fish go with the flow...')
(Note: I'm not talking about puff blogs, who talk only about how great they are, and then announce a few months later that they're closing to "spend more time with the family...")
No, the interesting blogs are about real working stores, and about how day to day business works.
So either:
A.) Stress puppies start small businesses.
B.) Small businesses turn people into stress puppies.
C.) Small businesses owned by stress puppies start blogs....
The answer, of course, is all of the above.
But mostly B.
I don't think you can run a real business without running into constant problems that have to be solved. It's what you do every day. So it's what you blog about.
Hopefully, we also keep a sense of humor about it.
**********
Speaking of future stresses -- Linda said that Micheal Powell was on NPR talking about Kindle. His take was that it was too expensive, that books would always have a place, and so on....
Which seems to me to miss the point.
It isn't that Kindle will take away 100% of the book business. But how about 30% or 20% or even 10%? What with Barnes and Nobles and Borders and Amazon and Costgo, independent bookstores are obviously under a lot of stress...
So 10% could be significant. 20% even more so.
Put another way; say you keep 80% of your wages, but have to give up 20%?
My store is almost designed to live on the fringes of these things...I only carry fiction, for instance, already forgoing all non-fiction because I don't have room. And so on...
But most new bookstores can't be affording to lose elements of their business.