I ain't long gone, been having mid-terms and large projects for school that I had to get completed. Right now it is slowing down back to just the learning process.
I know the majority of all of you have ran a small business with just a couple of employees and know what it is like to loose the one key person that does all the hard work of the background. The books, ordering, answering emails, accounts payable, accounts receivables, general ledgers, payroll, taxes, tax forms for the government and states, unemployment payments, legal stuff....shall I go on? It is difficult doing it all on your own when you start out, but when you are relatively small, and not much business yet, it is easy, then you grow, hire a person to take on half of the responsibility. Then they are gone. I can just imagine all the extra work that she is doing right now that Brandon was doing. And trying to get things out.
It is extremely difficult to run a small business, no question. But even apart from all of the responsibility and the long hours and the hard work, running a successful small business requires a certain personality type, and not everyone has it. I surely don't have it; believe me, I've the scars to prove it.
Running a small business requires that you can differentiate between the items that absolutely require your personal touch and attention, and the items that you can delegate. It requires that you can select, hire, train, but most importantly
trust other people to take care of selected duties that you can't handle on your own.
Failing all of that, and/or in case of business-related emergency, running a successful small business requires that you can allow yourself to miss family events or to neglect personal matters. Dropping your business obligations because you want to tour colleges with your daughter (or whatever), and then telling your customers, "Sorry, but I do have a LIFE to attend to," as if we should all be ashamed for expecting professional-quality service (or, hell, even
half-professional-quality) in return for our money -- well let's just say that that approach does not inspire confidence.
I'm sure we can all
empathize with Mrs. T, but empathy only goes so far. The world would
grind to a halt if empathy were sufficient to keep businesses afloat and in good standing. Instead, what we have is market darwinism: if you don't have what it takes to run a business -- if you are both incapable of hiring trustworthy subordinates
and unwilling to make personal sacrifices to devote ungodly amounts of your own time to the business -- then your business will die.
I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but life sucks; buy a helmet. That callous turn of phrase is perhaps the most important lesson anyone can ever learn, but for all of its deceptive simplicity, it's an extremely difficult lesson truly to absorb. When I said before that I've known people who treat their businesses as props in their own personal soap opera, I wasn't kidding. It happens a lot, and it's not entirely unforgivable: running a business
is hard; it's stressful; it sucks. But the long-term rewards are potentially limitless. Give and take, risk and reward.
Or, to put all of that rambling another way, more succinctly: Do you really think that Mrs. T herself would meekly accept a month-long delay between payment and any encouraging sign that a promised service will be delivered? How often do you encounter delays of this magnitude in your daily life, given all of the products and services you consume, both directly and indirectly? How often do you see a business delay so long with basically zero explanation or communication? I'd be willing to bet it ain't often, and I'd be willing to bet this is the only present case in which you're willing to make your professed allowances -- because at the end of the day, we all only have so much empathy and personal interest to go around.
