Corporate Cocaine
The earliest days of opening your own start-up business are intoxicating. I have to imagine that the feeling compares positively with the finest of illicit amphetamines. It is easy, while in this energized state, to overestimate your own capabilities, your own endurance. Just because you have been working 16 hours a day for the last four months to get your money raised, your business plan accepted, your site perfected, and your stock just right, doesn’t mean you can keep that pace up forever.
Thou art mortal, Hero.
One day, just weeks before the opening of my first storefront, my partner and I were sitting down with a loan agent who asked, innocently, what we expected to be hour hours of operation. I answered, “Noon to midnight, Tuesday through Sunday.”
My partner looked at me funny, but was far too canny to argue in front of a loan agent. As soon as the agent left, however, she approached me. “I thought we had decided on seven days a week?”
We had discussed both options, in the early days. Apparently, each of us was convinced that those discussions had ended in a different conclusion.
I maintained that having a day off would, in the long run, preserve our fragile sanity. Furthermore, I argued, we could always open for the extra day a week down the road, if we felt the market warranted the move, but if we started out at seven days a week, we would never be forgiven by our customers if we had to back off.
She insisted that we needed to maximize our exposure. The weekends are one customer base, the week another. Cutting the weekend crowd by half was suicide, and cutting a weekday would prevent us from becoming a good “after school every day” stop for the kids.
She won out that day, largely because I felt just as confident and steady as she did, so I did not really argue all that long or all that hard.
That next February, with our heating out, our stock depleted, our bank account low and my partner on an unscheduled, month-long furlough in another state (due to family emergency) I direly regretted back off my position.
Opening a business is fantastic. It is exhilarating and empowering in all the right ways, but do not let it go to your head. Plan for normalcy. Plan a reasonable, maintainable schedule. Then, if you want to be a super-hero do it on overtime.
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