Blood from a Stone
There comes a time in any business’s first year that you, the owner, sit down and ask yourself: what can I do without?
Whether it is a cash flow shortfall, an unexpected expense, an emergency, or the sudden withdrawal of an important client, you will find eventually find yourself at the close of month with less money than you expected but not less bills. So the question looms: Who gets this dollar? The landlord or the phone company? The wholesaler or the state tax board?
For my first company, that day came much sooner than anyone would ever hope. For my first small business, I faced those hard questions in my very first month of operation. In the final days before opening the store, my landlord insisted upon receiving both the first and the last month’s rent on my store space before signing the lease—two thousand dollars wiped out the “cushion” my partner and I had set aside for unexpected expenses. Then we cut into our operating capital for an expensive floor restoration and the re-routing of gas and water pipes exposed by the removal of unnecessary internal walls. All of that on top of the expected decorating, furnishing, and inventory expenses.
It came to final days before opening my doors and I made a hard choice. With all our money spent and some of our bills unpaid, I let our advertising budget disappear. Except for the several hundred dollars already paid to the phone company for our yellow pages ad, our first month’s ad budget of one thousand dollars was simply absorbed. It vanished into the blur of other, more visible, more pressing bills and expenses.
Only a blitz of word-of-mouth and gorilla marketing brought in business. We saw very few customers not personally attracted by my partner, myself, or our hardcore cluster of “store loyalists” gathered in the weeks leading up to our opening.
In time we recovered from this rocky start, and, though the store did close late the next year, our closure cannot be blamed upon a lack of customers. Still, I often wonder how different the store might have been if I had found a way to get even a few hundred more dollars into advertising. I wonder if the chilling sense of desperation that hung about the store in the first few painful weeks might have been dispersed by one print ad or a college radio spot.
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