What, actually, is a retail business owner's job?

And how do we manage our time (and mental health) when planning for anything means managing the unexpected?

I will have you know this is me “pretending to pose” for a picture at work. But here’s me at work anyway.

Welcome. I’m Katherine Raz. I own a shop in Tacoma, Washington called The Fernseed and this is my newsletter about running an independent retail business in the age of Amazon, Covid, etc. If you’re a shop owner, or you sell products to small retail businesses, or you’re just curious what this whole business is about, you’re in the right place. (And if this email was forwarded to you, you can sign up to receive it yourself right here. It’s free!)

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When I started this business, I had this idea that I'd be sitting behind a cash wrap waiting for customers to come in, filling my free time rearranging merchandise. That's… not exactly how things turned out.

To start with, I'm rarely sitting behind the cash wrap—unless someone calls in, or has a pallet to break down in the back, or the floral team is busy building for an event. So I guess I do sit behind the cash register a lot. But when I do, I have a laptop in front of me because I'm trying to accomplish all the other things while also assisting customers.

From shop's launch, I had to hire people to help run the front and serve customers while I do... whatever else it is that I do around here. And that's the running joke! I know I'm super busy, but it's hard for me to define exactly how I spend my time. What is it that I'm so busy trying to accomplish, and why does it feel like there are never enough hours in the day to get everything functioning and looking the way I would like it to?

I realized recently—while trying to explain to my partner why I feel like a piece of driftwood that repeatedly gets bashed against the rocks (and thereby excuse the crying fit I was having at 4 p.m. on a Sunday)—that I basically have two full-time jobs. I'm balancing what is essentially a 40-hour/week office job with a 40-hour/week restaurant job. I'm both the manager and the worker, and for budget reasons, I don’t see that changing any time soon.

So I have to find creative ways to manage my time, not just day-to-day, but across all the goals and projects I'd like to accomplish so that I can, at some point, extract myself from the workload. (Right? If we get these things functioning, we'll make more money and I can pay someone to manage it all? Isn't that the dream?)

I thought I'd share some things that have helped me define my job role, organize my time, and manage it all. And when I say, "manage it all," I just mean capture it all somewhere, so at least I know what I'm not getting to, and what I'm prioritizing instead. Just naming and tracking what I can’t get to in a given week helps ease the mental strain of all those missed “deadlines.”

To start with, I have a job description. Maybe it seems unnecessary for the business owner to have a written job role, but writing it out—actually defining what it is that I do when I'm not bagging potting mix or re-potting plants—was like therapy. You wonder what it takes to run this business? Here's what my job is.

Maintain strategic vision for overall business direction

• Effectively communicate strategic plan and assign essential job duties to management team in order to enact that vision

• Ensure overall profitability of the business by setting revenue goals and a plan to achieve them

• Track revenue and report on whether strategic goals were achieved (monthly, quarterly, annually)

• Establish, maintain, and track goals related to the business values (diversity in hiring, commitment to sustainable sourcing, diversity and inclusion in vendor relationships) and spearhead reporting on whether we're achieving those goals

• Maintain community partnerships and relationships, such as membership in neighborhood associations and the chamber of commerce

• Spearhead giving back efforts and charitable contributions

Financial

• Oversee financial management of the business

• Maintain a system for bookkeeping and work with bookkeeping team to maintain monthly books

• Oversee monthly remission of sales tax to the state

• Maintain relationship with bookkeepers, accountants, loan sources and banks to ensure positive cash flow

• Seek sources of funding (loans, credit cards, lines of credit, grants), apply for, and maintain them

• Establish financial projections for the business on a monthly and annual basis, and generate reports that establish whether or not business is meeting revenue goals

• Oversee annual tax prep and corporate filing as well as distribution of tax forms for all employees and contractors

Operations

• File and maintain all important business licenses and inspection records for all locations

• Negotiate lease agreements and renewals

• Maintain high level maintenance contracts (shop cleaning, window cleaning, equipment rental, etc.)

• Hire and oversee all contractor relationships

• Manage decision-making process for solving high-level operational challenges, such as floral delivery, inventory transfer between multiple locations, space rental contracts, sign printing, holiday shipping times, etc.

• Research and purchase software to assist in operations and review softwares annually to assess value

• Assume all duties of GM when GM is not available (or Frankensteined)

• Hire an oversee relationships with all contractors: graphic design, website development, accounting, bookkeeping, delivery, marketing, etc.

Marketing + website

• Create and maintain the high level marketing calendar in service of strategic business goals

• Oversee the execution of marketing strategies based on strategic overview and planning calendar

• Oversee digital customer acquisition strategy

• Manage organic and paid search strategy

• Oversee the research and purchasing strategy for marketing tools and software, and stay on top of best practices for the use of each

• Maintain relationship with website design/development team and spearhead the creation and addition of all content on the Fernseed website, including addition of apps

• Analyze website in service of high-level marketing and conversion goals, ensure proper functioning of check out, troubleshoot website issues, etc.

• Track monthly marketing metrics to assess effectiveness of various planned marketing campaigns

HR

• File important paperwork with the state when onboarding new hires

• Handle unemployment claims

• With GM, participate in all hiring, firing, employee review sessions and disciplinary actions

• With GM, maintain employee handbook and training protocols

• Establish and maintain employee benefits packages (PTO, etc.)

Inventory + merchandising

• Establish new vendor relationships and maintain relationships with all vendors

• Make strategic decisions about what inventory to carry — map to strategic aesthetic for shop design

• Oversee shop design and redesign efforts

• Establish and oversee merchandising protocols and efforts across both shops

• With inventory manager and inventory leads, maintain an overview assessment of what products perform well, what products should be kept in inventory, or discontinued

• With inventory manager, GM, and shift leads, ensure best sellers are adequately displayed and always in stock

So that's a lot, right? To be honest, I'm not sure that's even all of it, and some of it is probably over emphasized while I'm missing other, more important parts. But I'm sure I scribbled that all down while eating a messy bagel over my laptop, so it's a work in progress, as is everything.

Part of my job is, of course, to maintain and execute the overall business strategy. We can't, for example, just decide one day that we're going to offer wedding and event florals and then the next day it magically happens. There are so many steps to launching and operationalizing literally everything, and meanwhile there are floors to sweep and lightbulbs to change and shift schedules to adjust because people want a different day off. And oh by the way our terra cotta supplier enacted a 20% surcharge on all products to cover the rising cost of container shipping so we need to reprice every terra cotta pot and saucer in the system and on the floor at both shops or we're actually losing money, and no one caught that because it's not baked into the wholesale pricing, it's just a line item at the bottom of the invoice, and we've been eating that cost for months. Did I plan for this? No. Does it have to happen, like, now? Yeah.

My weeks are an endless series of making plans and God laughs. For months. For years! There is a legitimate psychological toll when week after week you make a list of things that feel critical to the success and growth of your business and week after week you watch those best-laid plans get washed away like sand castles when the tide comes in.

We can all read all the time management and self-actualization self-help material that's out there and it's helpful to a point and then it's not. Because almost all of it has one assumption in common: that it's written for an audience of people who don't have to suddenly figure out how to build and deliver a $4,000 wedding floral order for tomorrow when a car just crashed into the front of their business.

Where's that book?

When I have to drop what I'm doing over and over again to focus on the thing that suddenly became more important because who thought that was going to happen, I need a system to remind me what it is I'm even doing when I sit back down at my desk (or my laptop at the cash wrap, as it were).

Here are a few things that currently work for me. Sort of. They're not perfect. But here they are:

1. I recently starting using Google Calendar to block out time in my schedule weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly, for the things I have to do regularly, like create reports, schedule marketing emails, etc. Blocking out the literal, physical time on my schedule means I don't schedule a 10:30am call with our web developers on a Thursday because it looks like I have nothing better going on when I actually have all this other stuff to do. It also means that, when I have to forgo what was on the calendar, I can move the working block to another space on my calendar in the future. This works better for me than a list, because a list doesn't tell me how much time anything takes. Working blocks tell me when I can't possibly cram all that work into a single afternoon. They tell me when I realistically have time to get to work I had to reschedule.

2. I adhere to the David Allen system of "capturing" everything. If I'm sitting at a stoplight and I suddenly remember we forgot to pay an invoice that only I can pay because we have to do it as an ACH bank transfer, I write it down immediately. Where do I write it down? TeuxDeux.

3. TeuxDeux, the app that maintains my entire life. It's a daily task list for all the little one-off things, but also a giant bucket where I capture every impulse, every thought, every forgotten task and weird idea. It holds my entire life together, and I can't recommend it highly enough for its simplicity and functionality. I've tried to use other apps here and there, but TeuxDeux is like a maintenance drug for me at this point. I can't go off it or my life starts falling apart in weird ways I can't describe but that aren't pretty.

4. TeuxDeux isn’t great at multi-step project management though. So for that I use Notion. If an idea pops into my head—then immediately into TeuxDeux—and sticks long enough to become something we actually want to execute in the shop, I add it to the Fernseed Roadmap we maintain in Notion. The roadmap is basically the conveyor belt of all the bigger projects we want to tackle, and in what hopeful order. Recently our new manager helped me put everything into the roadmap into a month-by-month plan, which is manageable because (her idea) we only plan to tackle one operational thing and one product launch thing each month. That's doable. That's all the time we have. It’s August and we still have some leftover July work happening.

   

   The weekly planner tool we just started using at the shop to assign tasks.

5. That new manager and I now use a weekly shop task calendar with recurring organizational/operational tasks that acts a bit like a daily checklist. We re-set it each week, and we make sure that everything important, including one-off tasks that we write in, gets assigned a day. Each day our team meets at the board and divvies out the tasks, deciding who will do what. If tasks don't happen on a particular day, they get physically moved to the next day.

Finally, and I'm not kidding:

• I meditate.

• I read stoic philosophy, which emphasizes the idea that "the obstacle is the way." (In fact I wrote about this without realizing it earlier this year.)

• I practice a program that encourages daily morning reflection on flexibility, on staying out of our heads about what we—little ego-driven maniacs that we are—hope to accomplish each day and instead stay curious about what the universe has in store for us instead. (Because the universe will certainly have other plans, so get ready.)

I guess it's a system of life hacks supported by project management apps and daily adherence to a spiritual program?

And, you know, that written job description. Highly recommend writing yourself a job description if you haven’t done it yet.