I'm not going to give the kind of details that don't serve the story. The truck got cleaned out one night. I'd parked it in what I thought was a fine spot. It was not a fine spot. Whoever did it took everything: inventory, a couple of tools, and the truck-bed cover I'd installed the month before. Insurance covered some of it. Not all.
What I remember about that morning is the math. I was supposed to be at a job site in Bayonne at 6:45 AM. I had 78 customers on a list — guys I'd been showing up for week after week — and I had nothing to sell them. The next two days I drove around in a borrowed van trying to figure out what the path forward was. Restock and get back to the truck routine? Or take it as a sign that the truck era was done?
I remember sitting at a diner on Forest Ave with my brother, who'd been telling me to get a storefront for a year, and we drew the numbers on a napkin. Lease, insurance, inventory float, point-of-sale, a sign. It came out to a number that was double what I had in cash. We sat there for forty minutes. Then he said something I'll remember forever — he said 'you already have the customers, the lease just gives them an address.'
He was right. The customer list was the whole asset. The truck had been a delivery mechanism. A storefront was a different delivery mechanism. The customers were the same.
"The robbery took the truck. It didn't take the asset."
I signed a lease three weeks later. Not on Bay Street, where the rent is double, but on Port Richmond Ave, which is closer to where my customers actually were. Port Richmond is a working neighborhood. Bay Street is a destination neighborhood. My customers were not going to drive to a destination to buy gloves. They needed to pass it on the way to a job.
First three months in the storefront were brutal. Foot traffic was nothing — Port Richmond doesn't have walk-in shoppers the way other neighborhoods do — and I was used to going to the customers. Now I was waiting for them. I almost gave up twice. The thing that kept me there was that the foremen who'd known me from the truck started pulling in at 6:45 AM to pick up gloves on the way to the site. The truck routine became the storefront routine. Same customers. Different mechanism.
If you're reading this and your business just had a thing happen that feels like the end — robbery, fire, divorce, lawsuit — I'm not going to tell you it'll work out. Sometimes it doesn't. What I will tell you is that the asset you spent years building is probably not the thing you think it is. The truck wasn't the asset. The customer list was. The robbery took the truck. It didn't take the asset. Knowing the difference is what kept me from quitting.
I drive past the spot the truck was parked sometimes. It's a different parking lot now. I don't think about it much. The shop is the thing now.