You Got This. Or, do you?
As more and more small businesses close, I invite you to reflect on the decisions that got you this far.
I got an email last summer from the owner of a plant shop in Bremerton, Washington with the subject line, "Store Closing Sale." It was an invitation to buy out some of the shop's remaining inventory and fixtures. The owner mentioned they were shifting gears and taking a step down to take things more lax.
I wasn't shocked. It's not like plant shops haven't closed already in the wake of the pandemic, but this shop was more like a peer, a close relative. They opened around the same time Fernseed did and had a similar customer base. It reminded me of that feeling you get when friends in your friend group start making life decisions you're not sure you're ready for—like the first couple that announces they're getting married, or when your close friend tells you they're having a baby. "Oh, is this something some of us are doing now? What am I doing, then?"
It was something to pay attention to.
I was listening to a podcast episode recently (I think it was How I Built This) where an entrepreneur talked about getting two conflicting pieces of advice from mentors over his career. The first was to never follow your gut, because your gut can mislead you. The other was to learn to trust your gut, because your instincts aren't really instincts at all, they're pattern recognition. You're connecting the dots, spotting trends, analyzing, and shifting accordingly, which is something good entrepreneurs are always doing.
Think about it: scanning the horizon for trends is what allows us to start successful businesses in the first place. It's why so many entrepreneurs opened plant shops right before or mid-pandemic. They saw a trend and they jumped on it. Right place, right time! But then the trends shifted, and they shifted fast, and in ways almost no one, except for epidemiologists studying the statistical likelihood of a globally spreading bird flu, could have anticipated. I opened Fernseed in April of 2019, 11 months before we shut down during COVID. Was it good timing or bad timing? Does that even matter now?
Toward the end of 2022 I started noticing even more plant shops announcing closures. It became, dare I say it, a trend. It wasn't just plant shops closing, it was all kinds of small businesses, in Tacoma and elsewhere, one after the other, posting a Canva graphic or a storefront window photo with the opening caption, "It's with a heavy heart..." Like dominos. Like every night in the Hunger Games when they project those holographic images over the gladiator terrarium of all the tributes who wouldn't live to fight another day.
It's not just businesses you might expect to close, either. I'm talking about businesses that inspired me, the ones I wanted to emulate. The London Plane in Seattle. Hello, Cupcake in Tacoma. Homestead Seattle and their sister shop Plant Shop Seattle.
I'm sure you've noticed it, too. It started in the fall with small retailers posting desperate "shop here for the holidays or we might not be here in 2023" posts, and it just kept getting worse. It's one thing to watch it all from the safety of a sofa and a cushy work-from-home tech job. It's another to be right in it with everyone else, watching your sales decrease month after month.
Fernseed's 2023 sales are down 20-25% from 2022, even when our 2022 sales were down 20% from 2021. Maybe you, like me, are wondering if you're going to survive this.
To be clear, I don't think less of anyone who has decided to close up shop during These Tough Economic Times. It's truly a life-affirming decision to throw in the towel on something that isn't working. At the same time, quitting isn't an option for everyone, including me. (I have too much business debt on the books, a real rock-and-a-hard-place topic that I will certainly dive into in a future post.) So for those of us who must continue, or who don't want to close down, how do we keep going?
You know that thing of when someone tells you, "YOU GOT THIS," and you're wondering, "But do I?" What data is this Instagram acquaintance using to ascertain that I do, in fact, have this handled? Are they right?
I do think that if you're still here, still plugging away in this bloodbath, you must have done a few things right. I would wager you noticed shifting trends before anyone else did and adjusted before anyone else did. This wasn't instinct, it was pattern recognition, which is what entrepreneurs do. The fact that we keep plugging away day after day, with new sets of (often terrifying) information, indicates that we can continue to solve problems in a volatile landscape. Your Instagram acquaintance only sees the end result of those decisions (the pretty exterior), but you know what they looked like from the inside (the gruesome interior). That difference, between what it looks like from the outside and what it felt like on the inside, is what makes me wonder if someone who tells me I’ve “got this,” really knows what they’re talking about.
To that end, I thought it would be a fun and useful exercise to examine that gruesome interior in more detail. (My idea of "fun" is a little skewed these days, so play along at home only if your sensibilities match mine.)
For the next two weeks, before my next post goes out, I'm inviting you to take part in a journaling exercise.
Here is what I'm suggesting:
Think back on three crucial decisions you've made in the lifetime of your business. By "crucial," I mean that in hindsight, you recognize that if you hadn't made this decision, your business would be in a significantly different place today.
For each decision, answer the following:
What information did you have leading into the decision and where, to the best of your recollection, did you get that information?
How did you feel before making the decision? During?
How certain were you at the time that it was the right decision to make?
How did the decision impact your business going forward? What were the results?
Then answer the following:
How did the process of making these decisions, or their impact, guide how you run your business going forward?
How did it change you personally?
While I think it's most helpful to answer these questions with the intention of arriving at a data-backed answer to whether or not we do, in fact, GOT THIS, it may also be useful to include past decisions you've made in businesses you're no longer operating, such as a decision to close. You might also analyze decisions that didn't go well, things you've had to—or couldn't—recover from, either in your current business or a past business.
I invite you to share your answers with me! You can do that by replying directly to this email. (Don't worry, I won't share them with anyone else unless you're okay with that.)
In the meantime I will do this exercise myself and share the results with you in two weeks.
Happy processing!
One small thing…
I did want to share a piece of personal news that feels relevant to the continued publication of this newsletter on any sort of schedule, in case you're wondering why it took me so long to get this latest post out.
My mom died last month. She was 79, and had been living with emphysema, a progressive and fatal illness, for 15+ years. She was hospitalized several times late last year and then again in January, at which point I spent a significant amount of time flying back and forth to Indiana where she lived to spend time with her. It was a gradual and then all-at-once thing. In the wake of her death I'm trying to find the right balance of life, work, side interests and passion projects, and there's something anchoring and important to me about continuing to write here. Not that you all are pressuring me to post on a regular schedule, but I wanted to say more for myself than anything that any gaps in publication are probably the result of an unpredictable grieving process, and not an indication that I'm losing interest.