I'm 31 now. I was 22 when I started selling gloves out of the truck, 23 when the storefront opened. If I could sit down with the 22-year-old version of myself, here's what I'd say. Not the inspirational version. The practical version.
1. The customer list is the asset. Not the truck, not the storefront, not the inventory, not the brand. The list of guys who know your name and trust you to have what they need. Build that list above all else. Everything else is replaceable. The list is not.
2. The first hire is going to be hard. You're going to want to wait too long to make it because you'll think you can do it all. You can do it all for about eighteen months. After that, you start failing customers because you're tired. Hire when you start failing, not when you start drowning. Drowning is too late.
3. Don't sign a 5-year lease. You don't know what your business will be in five years. Three-year leases with options are fine. Five-year leases lock you to mistakes you can't see yet.
4. The brand reps are not your friends. They're nice people doing their jobs. Their job is to get you to carry their brand. Your job is to carry brands your customers want. These are not always the same job. Don't let a friendly rep talk you into inventory you didn't ask for.
5. Your gut about people is mostly right. The two guys who didn't pay on their accounts in eight years — both of them, you knew within five minutes of meeting them. You ignored your gut because you wanted the sale. Don't ignore the gut. The sale isn't worth it.
6. Open at 7 AM. Not 8. Not 9. The window between 7 and 9 is when foremen pick up gear on the way to the site. You'll lose half your potential foreman business if you're not open at 7. The first three months you opened at 9 because you were tired. You corrected this in month four. Correct it in month one.
7. The robbery is going to happen. I'm not going to tell you when or how, because that won't help. What I'll tell you is that the truck wasn't the asset. The customers were. When the truck is gone, the customers will still be there. Move fast, but don't panic. The 36 hours you spent feeling sorry for yourself were 36 hours you could have used to find the storefront. The storefront was always going to happen. The robbery just changed when.
8. Take the boot fitting class. Red Wing offers it. You'll think you know how to fit boots. You don't. The class will save you two years of fitting customers wrong. Take it in year one, not year two.
9. Don't open a website. The first time you think 'I should sell online,' don't. The customers don't want it. Your time is better spent on the floor.
10. Eight years is going to feel both fast and slow. The first two years will feel like five. The next six will feel like two. You won't see the time pass. Make sure the shop you build in years one and two is one you still want to be running in year eight, because the inertia of a small business is enormous and changing the model in year five is much harder than getting it right in year two.
That's most of what I'd say. The rest of it I'm probably still wrong about and won't realize until I'm 40.