The Lost Year

I don’t think I can move forward until I admit that 2010 was a total wash.

Typically, when people ask me “how the coffee thing is doing”, I do what most people do when things haven’t been going well:  I smile and nod and say, “great, never better”.  Then some of them will stare into middle distance and make a vague statement about how they wish they could own their own business.

It won’t surprise you to hear that owning your own business is not exactly the path to an easy life.  It’s a lot of work for what are sometimes intangible results, and the risk that comes with leaving your previously well-paying job is always hanging over your shoulder, champing at the bit to say “I told you so”.

Don’t take that as pessimism, or a fatalistic pronouncement of doom.  That’s simply the fact of striking out on your own, the lay of the land as it is.  There is also, of course, often a wealth of positive reinforcement for the self-directed.  It may not be true of everyone, but I find actual comfort in being able to say, “If I fail, I have no one to blame but myself”.  Owning your own small business gives you a real sense of agency, and can reward competence directly in a way a cushy corporate job sometimes can’t (or won’t).

Unfortunately, my first year didn’t really result in any of that.  I’m not really looking to get into why, just to admit that on balance, 2010 was a professional failure for me.

I have an easier time discussing it because the business is strong now, stronger than its ever been, and most of its pain points have been managed or removed.  It would certainly be more politic to not mention that it ever had issues, but for whatever reason I have this thing about living in a glass house.  I would have an easier time admitting what didn’t work and starting from a clean slate than trying to pretend everything was great while frantically trying to repair things behind the scenes in the hopes that reality will eventually catch up to the story I’ve been selling at dinner parties.

It’s not about outlining a sob story, either.  In the interest of not seeming coy, I will sum it up briefly: the partnership I let myself be talked into joining, because it was something I wanted, turned out to be with someone whose personal dishonesty was only matched by a towering incompetence, and who saw the business solely as a handy cash box to assist him in his noble endeavor of trying to drink himself to death.  He has since been ejected, legally and physically, but not before he managed to do a great deal of damage that I spent the middle of 2010 slowly learning about and the end of 2010 trying to repair.  The end.

There’s something to be said for the fact that most small businesses don’t survive that kind of damage and yet we’re poised to be more profitable in 2011 than we’ve ever been.  That’s one thing I am sort of proud of regarding 2010–being able to bounce back from near bankruptcy to stability and profitability.  There are very real challenges ahead in the short term, but I can say that after having the kind of year I just had–a year of basically spinning my wheels and not understanding why things were no better off than the day before, of bearing all of the kind of stress I left my previous job to get away from and not managing it effectively–I am more determined than ever to make this successful, and so far it seems to be working.

I guess all this is really a way of talking around feeling like I’d lost my edge.  (Or not.  Maybe I don’t have an edge.  Maybe I’m just a big ol’ soup spoon.  I dunno.)  In terms of what I’ve been wanting to accomplish with my life, I can pretty much write off 2010 as a loss, largely because I wasted too much time wringing my hands together and trying to pretend nothing was wrong, instead of seeking the root causes and addressing them honestly and effectively.

So my New Year’s resolution is Honesty, Competency, and Results.  I’m resolving to be honest with myself about what’s good and bad, what’s working and not working; to be competent in fixing what needs fixing and shedding what can’t be fixed; and to focus on quantifiable results that show how we’re in a better place today than we were yesterday.  At the risk of sounding unnecessarily maudlin, I don’t really have a lot of years left to “lose” the way I lost 2010.