May is Personal History Month, a time for capturing your story in print or video to preserve for future generations. Storytelling has existed for as long as there has been language. It shapes our culture. It inspires and persuades.
Good storytelling is a coveted skill for success in business.
This blog article is going to violate my general rule of “don’t talk about yourself; talk about the reader.” It’s my story, but if you’re in small business, it could be your story, too.
THE GENESIS
By the winter of 2006, it was evident my father’s condition had declined to the level of care that my step-mother, a retired RN, was no longer able to provide in their home. She had worked valiantly, day and night, but Alzheimer’s is relentless. She deserved a break from around-the-clock caregiving, and he needed a skilled nursing facility.
After spending all of December in the hospital, word came suddenly just before the New Year that my father would be discharged, but he could not return home. The pressure was on to select a long-term care facility and arrange to transfer him there that day.
While my step-mother worked with social workers and insurance companies to make the clinical and financial decisions, my wife Lisa and I hustled to handle the physical logistics of preparing his new accommodations with clothes, telephone and cable service, and a few small pieces of furniture.
Buoyed by the success of handling Dad’s transition that day, we knew our resourcefulness and quick response held the promise of a budding business. If we could do this once for our family, who’s to say other families wouldn’t pay us for similar services?
We were inspired to create a personal assistance company – not just for families with elderly loved-ones in transition, but for any family who was feeling time-starved and overwhelmed. We would serve our customers by handling the minutiae of the day so they could have more time for higher priorities. So in 2007, Buy Some Time Concierge, LLC started doing business as BST Concierge.
That first year was an eye-opener. The market wasn’t there for personal assistants; at least, not in our community. While personal concierge and lifestyle management companies were exploding in larger cities, East Tennesseans already enjoy a work-life balance that permits them to be do-it-yourselfers. Knoxville is, after all, home to Scripps’ DIY Network!
We discovered very few people in our market understood or desired help with errands, reservations or shopping. The only chore they’d rather outsource was housecleaning.
CHANGE OR DIE
There is a website, http://autopsy.io, dedicated to lessons learned from failed startups. The prevailing reason most businesses (pre-revenue and post-revenue) fail is a lack of need in the marketplace. The founders may have very clever ideas, but their concepts are disregarded as unneeded solutions to problems that don’t exist.
A secondary issue contributing to businesses closing is failure to pivot. “Change or die!” has been the mantra in commerce for 40-plus years.
If a dirty house was our customer’s problem, we would become a cleaning company. We didn’t set out to be housekeepers, but it seemed to be a necessary change of direction to stay afloat.
We learned, after a year or two, that we had simply created a bigger job for ourselves than our previous employers ever demanded from us. We were trading hours for dollars, and after overhead, we had fewer dollars at the end of the day than the beginning.
While the quality of our service was top-notch, our business acumen wasn’t. We were burning money, paying the bills and not taking a paycheck for ourselves. This was a business model that had no future.
We began to seek help and to work on fixing what was broken.
IN WITH THE NEW
One afternoon, Lisa and I sat in our office because every vehicle we owned was pressed into service with multiple cleaning crews. We were running at maximum capacity and still losing money.
“What else do we have to sell?” we asked each other.
We recognized that we had two good brains, a network of business contacts, and working computers with internet access. We could help other small business owners who were struggling with marketing or administrative tasks. These were the areas where our skillsets and experience were strongest.
Lisa’s first virtual assistant client was a service company who needed inbound sales and administrative support in 1999. Tim worked for 28 years in broadcasting, journalism and marketing before joining Lisa full-time in 2009.
The decision to pivot to a B2B provider was a natural fit.
It was also a business model that was not bound with geographical or staffing limits. We could work virtually with any client in any time zone. If the work load ever grew beyond our bandwidth or outside our core capabilities, we knew plenty of talented people who could be our fulfillment partners.
We learned to network and collaborate. We sought programs, seminars and authors to deepen our understanding of business and entrepreneurship.
We also made the hard decision in 2014 to cut loose the personal service business.
There’s a Harvard Business School study that indicates a new business owner is 38% more likely to succeed if they’ve started and failed on a previous attempt.
I can attest to that statistic. While our new business entity, Be Media Savvy, is generating less revenue in gross sales than our former company, we are enjoying a 300% increase in net earnings.
That’s three times the size of our former personal household income. That’s freedom to enjoy a night out, a beach vacation, a helping hand to our kids and grandkids…all without the stress that accompanies money worries.
At the end of the day, that’s all a small business owner wants: a break from the stress and a good night’s sleep free from worry.
If you’re in business, that’s my wish for you, too.
This story continues next week on Think About it Thursdays on the Savvy Blog.
