When a Small Business Becomes an Affair of the Heart COMMENTARY: From The Newsroom by Michael Hart At the heart of this issue of the Business Journal, meant to focus on the Valley’s small businesses, is a dozen or so accounts of how now-successful companies handled that infamous, exhilarating, painful first year of operation. Even those of you who have gone through that experience but somehow managed to avoid having one of our reporters ask you to talk about it can identify. There are tales of long, long days; panic-ridden attempts to raise money that entrepreneurs hadn’t planned to need; and hours spent staring at a phone that won’t ring. But there are also accounts of tips on where the money was, chance encounters that led to real customers that while they seemed like gifts from heaven at the time came only after weeks and months of hard, thankless work. Of course, every story you read here about the “Year of Living Dangerously” was told by somebody who persevered and succeeded. In working on this issue, I have learned you can ask different arms of the U.S. Small Business Administration the same question how many new small businesses succeed and get different answers. Suffice it to say well over half don’t make it past their first five years; my gut tells me more than half don’t make it past the first year, but that’s just me. Truth be told, most small businesses end more or less unhappily for those involved. Of course, those are typically not the stories we tell in a publication like this. Big or small, we write about the companies that do well and the ones that flame out dramatically. In a sort of parallel universe, however, right next to the one the Business Journal tells you about and far removed from the ear of a reporter, is the one in which many people have lived for generations. Often the businesses did fail, but more frequently the people feel like they survived and flourished. Like many people, I grew up in the middle of the storm that small family-owned businesses most closely resemble. Many evenings, how much we took in that day was a more important topic than how school went for me. The next piece of used equipment we really, really needed was more vital than any of the adolescent dramas I felt I was going through. Our family’s business was like everybody else’s: as idiosyncratic as they come and exactly the same as all the rest. From the late ’50s through the mid-’70s my parents owned a small traveling carnival. They (and I, when school didn’t interfere) wandered through the Midwest and Upper Rocky Mountains every year from early spring to late fall, setting up every week at a different county fair the Ferris wheel, Flying Himalaya, cotton candy machines and the oh-so-lucrative “games of chance.” Every few weeks we would hook up with a number of similar shows to play bigger spots, state fairs, where the “nut” was bigger but the money was better. Looking this week at all the lists of “what small businesses need to do to be successful” and “why small businesses fail,” I can see my parents did absolutely everything right and everything wrong. Over a couple of decades, they tried everything at least once, and made every single mistake a few times. They had meticulously detailed business plans and made split-second decisions that almost instantly were revealed to be irrevocably wrong. There were years when they were “adequately capitalized,” with enough cash to feel like a rainout in a small town in Minnesota was a chance to take a break; and there were times when you could find half a dozen semis parked on the shoulder of some highway because somebody miscalculated how much gas it would take to get to the next town and how many days it would be before the next kid paid his 50 cents for a walk through the funhouse. There were weeks in places like Fargo, N.D. or Rawlings, Wyo. when my mother couldn’t find enough local kids to staff the concession stands. And there were weeks in other places where my mother and father spoke to each other harshly usually in the rain about how they were going to manage to pay the ride boys off on Sunday night. In the end, it’s hard for me to say whether they succeeded or failed. The very, very narrow niche of the entertainment industry called the traveling carnival pretty much disappeared by the mid-’70s. The Arab oil embargo made it too expensive to get over the road, and all the amusement-starved residents of the rural Midwest suddenly had enough cable TV, Pong and links to the outside world to make sinking a basketball for a stuffed bear not seem like that much fun. My parents didn’t sell out as much as sell off. One ride, one cotton candy wagon at a time, they liquidated until finally, one spring, it didn’t seem worth it to go out on the road again. Were they successful? They ended up comfortable, but not rich. I had an excellent (and, now I realize, expensive) education that has served me well in a post-carnival world. I think now about some of those nights stranded with a dead truck battery on some road between Heber, Utah and Rifle, Colo., nights that we all eventually survived, and feel like nothing about being a newspaper editor can ever be hard. For many years after she had officially retired and up almost to the day she died, my mother would see a ragtag carnival set up on some shopping center parking lot, stop to talk and feel like she was missing something she once had: a business that was her own. Michael Hart is editor of the San Fernando Valley Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].
