Not All Help is Good Help
The corporate workforce is full of jokes about the pain and consternation of Mondays. Those of us who start our own businesses generally would not know a weekend if it stole our wallets, but out of respect for the else-employed I have chosen to dedicate Mondays to the hardest part of starting up your own business. Monday’s are dedicated to the mistakes and missteps I and others I know have made in the working-without-a-net world of entrepreneurship. Here is to hard knocks, prices paid, and lessons learned on the hoof.
After finding and leasing my first business’s location, we set about remodeling the space to suit our needs. Some friends and excited prospective customers contributed greatly to the remodeling effort (I will write more about this phase of remodeling while doing a ’success story’ column’.)
It finally came time to select and install furniture. Our tables and chairs we custom built, right there in the building, using spec’s provided by a friend of the store and built by a cheery labor force requesting only cheeseburgers and future discounts for their aid.
By the time we started looking for shelving, the aid coming our way from a snowballing community of potential customers was enormous.
The same supporter who designed and supervised the very successful chairs and tables job gave us some sturdy shelf designs utilizing 2×4s and plywood. Another, newer customer offered a cheaper, unsupported, interlocking plywood design plus access to a woodshop needed to build it. My partner and I liked the sturdiness of the 2×4-based design, but our budget was getting tight and we could probably bang out the twelve needed units of the second design in a day and for half the price.
The result less than optimal. The plywood was warped. The shelves, though finished and standing, leaned into one another like drunken sailors. Worse still, we were out of time. Opening day was upon us, and building the other shelves would have taken time and money we no longer had. Much finagling and creative decoration was needed to disguise the disheveled fixtures as ‘rustic’.
Remember, not all help is good help. Cheaper is not always better. And ugly is ugly, whether you call it ‘distressed’ or not.
Leave a Comment