Confession of a Serial Entrepreneur – Small Changes Big Ripples

At the end of the last post I said I was 23 and started a maternity store, I think I was actually 24 when it opened. At the time I was on a contract with Canadore College doing liaison officer activities. One day I bumped into a friend downtown who said he was going to Europe for six weeks. I asked Doug if he wanted company as my contract was coming to an end and I might have the time. He said yes. I had always dreamed of back-packing through Europe. Up to now I had been to the US a few times – to visit family in South Bend, Indiana and of course Disneyworld twice but other than that I had not been outside of Ontario or Quebec.

Now my older sister was pregnant with her first child at this time and commented that she could not find any maternity clothes in North Bay and had to leave town to shop. Being the industrious graduate that I was, I started doing some research, i.e. how many births there were in North Bay and area each year and was the market big enough to sustain a small store. There were around 1,600 births per year. I did the math and that seemed large enough given that I had a captive market. My research also told me that there was only one chain in Canada called Thyme Maternity so maybe there was space to have a competitor. I was vacillating between starting a business and going to Europe. Then one day I headed to my bank downtown and beside the bank serendipitously is a small store that just became vacant. It was the perfect size for my store. So, I made the decision to open a maternity store. I wish I had gone to Europe with Doug – serendipity is not a sign it is just happenstance. I have always been good at delaying gratification, always putting in the work today for some future payoff. As I get older it gets harder to justify this behaviour but I am still doing it – five years of work and no payoff yet for One Red Maple. My wife thinks I am nuts. 

Remember I am 24 male, and I have no idea about most things, let alone how to start a maternity store, but I signed a one-year lease and now I needed to figure it out. I found a store in Toronto that sold used racks, shelving, mannequins, etc. So, I loaded up the car and came back and renovated the store and added one change room. I think the store was probably 300 square feet. I found a lady that worked in the maternity business that recently moved to town and hired her as Manager. Then we went to Toronto – the King Edward hotel on King St. W. This hotel for some strange reason was synonymous with fashion shows and fashion retailers. It was where many independent retail stores went to buy clothes for their stores. It was a grand old hotel that was showing its age. Many floors had retailers that would come for a week and use the rooms to sell their wares. There were models walking around in all sorts of outfits and it was an exciting and fun place. With the help of our manager, we managed to hunt down the few maternity clothiers and purchased our first inventory. This is a larger task than expected for such a small store exacerbated by the fact that our market was small so we could only pick a few of the same outfits – (apparently no female wants to meet another female wearing the same outfit).

We were on a tight budget, so we travelled to Toronto in the early morning and returned at night. We never stayed at the King Edward as we could not afford it. I look back and sometimes this lack of cash makes you do crazy things like drive home at night in a snowstorm with no winter tires. I remember the only way I could tell where I was on the road was to look out the passenger window to see where the snowbanks were. The snow was falling so fast at times I thought was on the Starship Enterprise travelling at the speed of light (anyone that has driven through a snowstorm at night will know what I mean). My car was a used four door Mercury Zephyr, I can’t remember the year of it but it was the ugliest car ever made, it looked like a rectangle on wheels. Mine came in a tan, brown colour – the ugliest colour you could ever paint a car. It had two options, heat and an FM radio. I needed a car for work and did not have much money, so you get what you need. It was rear wheel drive, and the tires were about 6” wide. God, I hated that car.

As I am driving this abomination from Toronto to North Bay, my manager was white knuckled in the back seat. When you are an entrepreneur, you have to make choices and when cash is scarce you do things that are risky to save a few bucks. I have driven through way too many snowstorms, and now I never put my staff in that position.

The store was called Baby Boom Maternity. The bottom of each B was enlarged so the B looked pregnant. A graphic designer from Canadore designed it for me and it looked great. It was a mix of pink and blue; she really nailed the look and feel of it.

Now being a 24-year-old white male had some advantages back in those days but not if you owned a maternity store. No pregnant woman wanted to talk to me about clothing, nursing bras, pregnancy or even the weather for that matter so I could not work in the store. This is a problem since one way to save wages (money) was to work in the store. Gina also worked full time and was studying for her Chartered Accountant designation, so she had no time either. After this business I swore I would never own a business again that I could not work with the customer.

We did reasonably well at the beginning but once the initial onslaught had died down, we were barely breaking even each month. We tried lots of things, sales, special events, etc., but it looked like the current situation was going to continue. We were not particularly happy with our manager, but we kept her because of convenience. Many times, in my entrepreneurial life I have kept an employee that I was not overjoyed with because in the short term it is a headache to get rid of them or you don’t have time to deal with the work it would create if you replaced them, so to avoid that headache you keep them around. Sooner or later, you need to deal with this, and you should always – yes always deal with it right away as it causes your business harm. It takes a while to learn that you need not suffer fools. I no longer suffer from this ailment. I think large organizations and governments suffer heavily from this infliction.

One thing my research did not tell me was that if you sell higher quality maternity clothes that last then women share them and pass them around. That same garment makes it way through numerous pregnancies. This one fact was probably the most detrimental to our business. Some marketing research guy I was to miss that. So, we came to a decision point we had to change something or shut down, and I will tell you what we did in the next post.

As I was recollecting this story it occurred to me how interconnected lives can be and decisions have consequences. As I mentioned Doug and I were friends, we hung out in the same friend group the last year of high school, but we never individually hung out. After university he lived in a different city, and we rarely saw one another and grew apart. When I had my heart attack, I sent out an email to all family and friends giving them a status update. I did this for two reasons, the first is that I did not want to answer the same questions repeatedly and the second reason was to give other people my age information that may be useful as everyone I spoke to wanted to know the symptoms. Perhaps they were self-diagnosing. Now Doug was not on that email list that I sent out as I did not have his contact information. One month later he died from a heart attack while playing hockey. One of the lines in the email I sent was “When I look back the key thing for me was, I just felt gassed after exercise, especially hockey. If you find yourself sucking in air on the bench after your shift pay attention to it.” I wondered for a while that if I took that trip with Doug maybe we would have been closer and I would have had his email address and maybe he would have read my message and maybe it would have changed his outcome. I found out this summer from a mutual friend that the information would not have helped because he was having no symptoms, I still wonder as I had good reasons to explain away all the symptoms I was experiencing.

Small change big ripples.
A song that works with this post is from Britian’s, David Gray’s, A Moment Changes Everything. If you never listened to David Gray have a listen as well to my favourtie song by him called Babylon (live version is the best).