Boss Life
Authors: Paul Downs
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2015 by Paul Downs
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Downs, Paul.
Boss life : surviving my own small business / Paul Downs.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-698-17900-4
1. CabinetmakersâUnited States. 2. Small businessâUnited StatesâManagement. 3. New business enterprisesâUnited StatesâManagement. I. Title.
HD8039.C152U63 2015 2015016068
338.7'684104092âdc23
[B]
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author's alone.
Version_1
For my mother
,
who never got to see how it all turned out
I've been living the boss life since 1986. I own a small company that builds custom furniture. I started fresh out of college, with no experience. Ever since, my business has been my life, my education, and my struggle.
When I began, I had no training as a businessman and no mentors to help me. I just wanted to make stuff and have fun. I found that I was good at designing products and making sales, and the business started to grow. In 1987, I hired my first employee, and soon found myself struggling with management, cash flow, taxes, and all the other details required to keep a business running. After globalization and the Internet brought new competition and new opportunity, my company experienced unsustainable growth and, in 2008, a devastating crash. But we've enduredâand even had one very profitable year. I am a survivor, but not a financial success.
In 2010, by sheer luck, I was given the chance to write about my experiences in
The New York Times
for their “You're the Boss” blog. I became a regular contributor. I've used that forum to describe the shabby treatment that business owners suffer at the hands of large and powerful institutions, in particular the health insurance and credit card industries. The main focus of my writing, though, has been my own company.
I decided to tell the difficult parts of my story, concentrating on my deficiencies as a businessman. I have written about fighting with my former partner, struggling with cash flow and unhappy customers, firing employees, and dealing with a rapidly changing economic landscape.
Many readers have written to tell me of their own struggles, and thanked me for publicly airing my many failures. Apparently a humble and honest look at small business life is rare. But I've found myself struggling with the limits of the blog format. Complex and sensitive situations must be oversimplified or omitted.
This book will be an opportunity to dig deeper into my experiences. It is an accurate portrait of a real business, the boss who leads it, the people who work in it, and the challenges we face. I hope that I can promote a better understanding of the factors that drive the behavior of small business owners and, by extension, show how a significant part of our economy functions. There's a lot of chatter about “job creators” from people who have never created a job. Politicians make rules, but aren't required to follow them. Employees complain without understanding why bosses act the way they do. And prospective entrepreneurs gamble their future without a clear picture of the challenges they will face. All these people need to know the other side of the story. This book is for them.
Some disclaimers: the world of woodshops is almost entirely a male domain. I don't know why this is, other than tradition. I have hired women whenever I found one who was qualified, but they are a very small percentage of the total workforce. In order to simplify the language of this book, I use the male form of certain common nouns, “craftsmen” and “salesmen” in particular. Please do not take this as a denigration of women who perform those roles.
The names of some people and customers have been changed, and the quoted dialogue is my best recollection of what was said at the time. That said, all the events in the book happened. If this account offends anyone, my apologies in advance.
If this were a standard business book, I would tell you all the smart things I did to achieve financial success, and maybe trot out a few mistakes to show some humility. Unfortunately, I'm no business genius and I'm not rich. My story has neither tidy conclusions nor a triumphant ending. So this book will be different.
I'd like to tell you what happened to my company in 2012, as we struggled to replicate profits earned in the previous year. We started strong, but then sales took a puzzling turn for the worse. The vast majority of our clients were delighted with our work, but a couple of them weren't satisfied with reasonable efforts and cost us huge amounts of money. I presided over a very good crew, except for a couple of workers who gave me serious trouble. We made some money, then lost a whole lot more, then clawed most of it back. Meanwhile, my complicated family life couldn't be ignored. This is real life. The triumph and tragedy of small business. The uncertainty and challenges of being the boss.
What do I mean by “boss”? It's commonly understood to mean someone who's in charge of others, but that could be a middle manager in a big corporation. Instead, I'm talking about bosses who both own and run their businessesâsmall companies with fewer than twenty employees. More than seven million American businesses, employing nearly thirty million people, are in this category. These bosses answer to nobody and are responsible for everybody. Their own money is at risk. Every problem goes straight to them, and they have to come up with the solution, figure out how to pay for it, and then implement it. The position guarantees long hours, hard work, and overwhelming stress.
Every day, these bosses wear multiple hats: managing employees, keeping track of the money, dealing with bureaucrats, negotiating with the landlordâthe list goes on and on. Larger companies, with more resources, can hire individuals or create whole departments to do these jobs, but a small company can't generate enough cash to cover that expense. So these tasks land in the boss's lap. No matter that the boss may have little or no training, and no desire to spend time on them. Done wrong, the company fails, either slowly or quickly. Done right, the boss gets to do them again. A sudden crisisâa cash shortage, or an equipment breakdown, or a personnel crisisârequires even greater effort. Even if the business survives, there is never a guarantee of easy sailing ahead. The situation goes back only to the routine level of toil and stress.
That's not to say that being the boss is relentlessly terrible. Inventing the processes that enable successful operations is like solving an intricate puzzle. It's highly satisfying to see your business running well, delivering the product or service that inspired its creation. There is no thrill like receiving payment from a satisfied client. Most workers try hard to do a good job, and most people are good to work with. Consistently meeting a payroll is a real accomplishment. A business can provide for the security and growth of both boss and employees. It might be able to expand and enter markets all over the world. It might even make a healthy profit. The boss can take delight in each small victory and, over the course of a career, be proud of all that has been accomplished, whether it added up to fabulous wealth or not.
Every business has a dual nature: the real-life version with its countless imperfections, and the ideal theoretical business the boss imagined when he started, where everything works as it should and money is made. Good money. Steady money. Maybe even outrageous money.
Money is the unavoidable scorecard. Any business can be great at making a product, great with its employees, great with the customers, but if it doesn't make profits, it isn't considered a success.
While recounting the events of 2012, I'll concentrate on four subjects:
Sales
focuses on how my very small company interacts with a wide variety of clients, from enormous institutions to individuals.
Operations
is about how my company makes its products, how I manage the people I employ, and my attempts to move our workshop from a nineteenth-century model to the twenty-first-century version. This transition is an incredibly complex problem and the solutions we find (or fail to find) have implications for the whole economy. The third theme,
Money
, describes how cash flow, or lack thereof, affects my decision making. And finally, I'll describe how I exercise my
Powers as boss
, balancing those demands with my duties as a father and husband. The details of this story are particular to my company and my life. The lessons, I hope, are useful to everyone.
The shop floor from the southeast corner.