The cost of doing business

Wednesday, August 23, 2006 at 03:10am by Evan Prieskop in Start-Ups

There are types, shades if you will, of knowledge. There are facts and theories, rumors and rationales, but the most elusive—the subtlest and rarest shade of knowledge—is wisdom. I am a bit young yet to lay claim to vast stores of this valuable resource, but I have watched the rise and fall of more than a few start-ups. Thus I reserve Wednesdays’ essays for wisdom and weirdness, for the ephemera of enterprise, entrepreneurs, and existentialism.

Sometimes I get a knot in my stomach. It is neither tight nor painful, just a slow, constant, uncomfortable reminder that I am worried. I suppose that some entrepreneurs never get worried. I suppose it is possible that there are start-ups out there that are so calm and collected, so well-financed and so well-patronized that the owners float freely through their days, unconcerned with the vagaries of fate and circumstance. I have never met one, but it is a large world.

Tongue-in-cheek, I have referred to starting a business as like performing a high-wire act without a net. In fact, for many young entrepreneurs, starting their first business is like learning to perform on the high-wire without a net. Lacking the experience of our elders, we have to make things up as we go along. Throughout this website and a dozen other sources you will read and hear a great deal of encouragement. People, myself included, are eager to share their success stories with you and tell you all about how your youth is an asset, forcing you into innovation and change, how through drive and creativity you can change the world. All of this is true. But sometimes, when the rent is due and you do not know whether your new, expensive ad campaign is going to pay for itself and you just bought a case of a new product that may not excite your customers the way it excited you…sometimes when your risks are still being weighed and your rewards are still pending, all that talk of innovation seems pretty pale.

I get a knot in my stomach. My partner just smoked a lot. Even without looking in the boxes, I could always tell how many of our special orders failed to come in from the wholesaler by counting the number of cigarette breaks she took while doing inventory on a new shipment.

Everyone has his or her own way of dealing with stress and uncertainty. Some go to the movies. Others nap. Some micro-manage and others cry. I like coffee and newspaper, as long as they are in a coffee shop well away from work, but this essay is not about stress management. This essay is about stress sympathy.

I sympathize. I know what you feel. I have felt it myself. Every business owner has felt it. I lied above when I wrote that the world might be large enough to contain a stress-free business owner. No world is that large, but the world is full of business owners all the same. Take a breath, keep the facts in mind, and forge ahead. I am pulling for you.

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