In the late 1990s, pagers were a big business, and we were a major player in our market. A large corporation that was also in the pager business in our area offered me over half a million dollars to buy my pager business, outright. I turned it down. I was 28 years old and didn’t hesitate. I knew what I was doing.
At our peak we had nearly 2,000 subscribers, and every one of them was worth between five and fifteen dollars a month in pure profit. It was like printing money. So I did the math in my head and figured I would clear that half million on my own in a few years and I thought I was smart for saying no.
This was right around the year 2000. Cell phones were catching on in a very big way. Inside of a one-year span, we went from nearly 2,000 subscribers to under 100. It was financially devastating. My business had become totally reliant on that “dependable” monthly income.
That is one of the biggest mistakes of my business life, but it is not the only one, and the others came at a variety of costs.
I never learned quickly enough to hire fast and fire fast. It always seemed easier to put up with a bad employee than to do that person’s work myself. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I was fortunate: over the years most of the people who worked for me were genuinely good people. But there were a few bad apples I tolerated for way too long, and the bill came due in morale, in reputation, and in sleepless nights. Every single time my gut told me I had the wrong person on the payroll, my gut was right. Every time. I should have acted quickly and decisively, and I didn’t, because I told myself keeping them was less work than replacing them.
I also wasted a lot of money on advertising and marketing, because I was certain I knew what the public wanted and where they were looking. I had my metrics sitting right in front of me, but I didn’t listen to them. I chased marketing that wasn’t working because I wanted to be right about it, and being right mattered more to me than the numbers did. It is the same failure as the hiring one, wearing different clothes: the information was available, and I needed to pay attention to it and cut the cord quickly. But I knew better.
What all of that adds up to is the one lesson I wish I had learned twenty years earlier, and it applies to life at least as much as it does to business. Humility.
I had some success early, and I let that convince me I had all the answers. Not most of them. All of them. That lack of humility cost me dearly over the years, and every one of the mistakes above traces back to it. I was not wrong because I lacked information. I was wrong because I was too arrogant to see the forest for the trees.
Which is the trap I am standing next to again. Running a shop for 29 years could easily convince me I already know what a shop owner needs, and that would be the same mistake in a new package. The people buying 1sixty8 Manifold have their own insights about their own shops, which I have never worked in, so I am listening to the people using it, and I plan to keep listening. My experience gets to inform this. It does not get to be the only voice in the room.
If you run a shop and want to see what 1sixty8 Manifold does, or you think I have something wrong, send me a note. Both kinds are welcome, and I answer them myself.