I have always felt clarity comes with writing things down. It is my hope that by sharing my thoughts, experiences, influences, fears, failures, successes, and lessons learned in a blog, it will help not only help me gain clarity and insight, but perhaps it may help anyone else that may find themselves in a leadership role, whether it be in business, not-for-profit, education, or as the CEO of the home.
Here is a little be about my background. Currently, I am the President & CEO of a small business that is growing throughout the USA and Internationally. I have an MBA from a top ranked program. I also have my undergraduate degree in business from a top ranked program. At this point, I will not use my real name as I prefer to not have a need to be inhibited in my writing. I want to share my true feelings and experiences and perhaps it may mean that I must write about private, somewhat confidential things. So hiding my true identity may be essential. I guess we'll see in the future, but today that is my feeling.
I must say that I love business. I think my early childhood experiences greatly influenced my passion for business and my desire to be a business man, a CEO and an entrepreneur. I think the story is worth telling so here it goes. I was born of goodly parents that became entrepreneurs out of need. Back in the 80's, my mother was a crane operator employed in the steel industry and my father was a welder. My parents were not formally educated although they were still very smart people. My mother was born in Mexico and my father in the USA. They married young. Both had been raised in single parent homes by their mothers. Both had lost their fathers as infants to death. Anyhow, in my recollection, my parents came home from work around the same day with bad news. They were both being laid off. I remember people attributing some of these tough times to something called Reaganomics. My dad's plant had decided to move their forklift manufacturing operation that was only 5 minutes from home to Mexico. I can't remember what happened to my mothers job, but I assume the demand for steel went down. To think back that my mother was a crane operator is kinda nuts. She was a beautiful green-eyed dark haired beauty with three young children. She started to work there when I went to kindergarten around 1978. It was a job where her language skills were not as important. She would merely need to climb a tall ladder seemingly 100 ft or more above the ground and move steel beams from one place to another. I remember that in her job, there was a lot of waiting up high in her cab while she did things because she would come home from work having accomplished things like knitting a 14 x 8 ft dining room table cover that was detailed and beautiful while she was at work. I also remember that at one point she read a book to help her learn English. She told us about it... it was scary! It was called Flowers in the Attic. I remember the main story line being about a mother who locked her kids up in the attic. It was a scary book and I hoped my mother wouldn't go psycho on us. Anyhow, thanks to Reaganomics and high-interest rates, my parents were laid off. I don't know why they just didn't go and get other jobs. Perhaps unemployment was high and eventually they choose instead to be entrepreneurs....or perhaps they had no choice. In the USA, the American dream is to own your own business. It is a rite of passage often thought to financial security and wealth or at least security. That reality is true for a small minority, I would guess. But in many other countries, starting your own business is mostly done by those who can't get a job or hold down a job. I guess at some point you just need to take matters into your own hand. Whether right or wrong, good or bad, not being able to get a job can in many ways be a blessing in disguise. It is what we do with our adversity and our God given talents that will make our lives rich and purposeful. Certainly, starting a business out of such extreme need isn't ideal. It may seem much more ideal to have a bunch of capital in the bank to help you pay for all the expenses until there is profitability. This isn't really how many businesses start and perhaps why so many fail. But I was once told, what you don't have in money, you can make up by being smart. I think there is a lot of truth to that and have found that sometimes its almost better to not quite be so comfortable in funding. You need to learn to be ingenious in running an operation, a new business, so as to find how to be profitable.
Getting back to my story, I remember one night, I believe I was in 7th grade, when my parents had fully decided they wanted to open a business. We gathered around my parents King size bed. They had been able to raise us in a middle-class suburban neighborhood... in a newer home. It really was a great place. They decided to involve us children in the decision making process. I'm not sure why. I think it was smart of them to do it because it would eventually require a lot of sacrifice by our whole family. Getting early buy in from your team is essential for building a solid backbone and committed workforce. I don't really think my parents were that strategic, I just think they really wanted our ideas. My parents basically invited us to give some business ideas of what we thought would be cool to own. I don't remember any of the ideas, except for the one that stuck. I think it was my brothers idea, but I could be wrong. My siblings were older and in High School. Around that time, video stores were new, ad it was so cool that we could go to a store and rent a movie. We could watch it when we wanted. We were no longer beholden to the TV Guide and had to center our schedules around when something would be on TV. We could simply plop in a movie and watch it whenever we wanted. What a concept!
My parents thought was that they could locate their business in an Hispanic neighborhood and focus on a niche, Spanish Videos. Of course, as children, we thought the idea was great but didn't just want Spanish videos, we didn't like them. We wanted to make sure our parents agreed to rent hit English movies as well. It seemed like a good idea so my parents went into figuring out how to do this.
Long story short - eventually they found a building that they decided to purchase. It was on a main road in a lower-income area. My parents decided that they would sell our house and move to this building. We would live upstairs and run the business downstairs. Honestly, I don't know why I was in such good spirits about this. Looking back, we moved from a real nice neighborhood into the ghetto. We also moved from a home that my parents had built that I still have fond memories of today, to an apartment-like situation with basically 2 bedrooms and one bath into about 900 square feet of a pretty ugly place. I was used to my home being the place where everyone gathered, to a place where I and my parents were too embarrassed to let anyone over. I remember wondering at that age why my mother wanted to sleep in her nice house until the very last day she owned it. I remember her sleeping on the floor the very last night since we had moved out the furniture. She was sad to sell it. I was excited about our new adventure. I looked at it like we were going on a camping trip. To this day, I think my mother regrets selling the house. I realize today that they actually didn't make money on the house so it must not have been used to fund the new business. What I think my dad insisted on was that my parents needed to reduce their fixed costs while they took on this new risk. So his hope was just to eliminate a big payment. Really though, it wasn't that big... I think it was like $750. Today, as I counsel every new entrepreneur, one of the main ideas I try to instill upon them is to keep their fixed costs as low as possible. So my dad decided to sell the house and my mother resisted some. I think that was a trend in their life. My father was much more conservative in spending and my mother had a greater risk tolerance...especially as she grew in confidence. I guess its okay to have differences in opinion and risk tolerances. Sometimes you need to take chances but they need to be tempered. One of the defining characteristics of many Entrepreneurs is to have an over-abundance of optimism. I think its a blessing that can turn into a curse. You need it especially when things get tough. But on the other hand, too many O's in the blood can become toxic.
So eventually we sold the house and moved to the gang-infested ghetto to start our new video store. This building was a good location. It had great windows and was right on the main road that had thousands of cars passing every day. Back in the day, it was a nice neighborhood, but crooked politicians had stripped the city of its former glory and left it to rot. There was still many good people in the area and it had become a place of immigrants and minorities. Even these people needed to enjoy a good flic. So we still thought it was a good move. Especially since the business was also in the midst of many homes. My parents found a little bit of money to buy some inventory. They probably maxed out their credit cards. I don't think any of us realized how expensive VHS tapes were. Even today in 2013, many of us go to Wal-mart and by DVD's for $25 or even $5. Back then my parents could only afford to buy a few movies to start their business. Each one cost them about $89.00... some more or less, but that was the average price. We had to rent each movie for 30 days straight before it even contributed to our profit. Picking the right movies were essential.
My parents realized that they needed to sell more than videos if they were going to make it. I remember they day they opened their store, they only had about 80 movies in spanish vhs and beta tapes and some english. In order to fill up their square footage, they also sold spanish music, mostly cassette tapes, candy, and then something random... clothing! In my eight grade year prior to starting our business, I remember my parents taking a road trip to Mexico to go see what they could buy and sell. They eventually ended up in Morelia, Michoacan. They found a place to buy cool clothes for cheap. Honestly, the clothes were pretty cool. The brand was called Titicos. I suddenly had an expanded wardrobe. I was still attending junior high in my previous neighborhood. My friends loved the clothes I wore. My parents also bought mexican blankets and other stuff they thought their new clientele would appreciate from the homeland.
When we came back, we setup the store. We did our best to make the store seem full of stuff even though in reality we only had 80 videos to rent. We were so excited. We were about to open our first business. And my parents needed to, before their unemployment ran out. We named our store, Fantasy Favorites. It was my brothers idea and we all loved it. Later we realized it was probably not the best name for a video store. Men used to walk in and ask for the adult section, which we did not have. This was a family run business and we were a church going family. We, innocently, thought fantasies were basically another way to describe fiction. But I realize how "un-innocents" would tie in the word fantasy to something much more sinister. Anyhow, little did we know what craziness to expect the first opening days of our business.
