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Paul Downs - Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

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Paul Downs Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business
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**A Forbes Best Business Book of the Year, 2015**
**Winner of the 2015 800-CEO-READ Business Book Award in Entrepreneurship**
When columnist Paul Downs was approached by The New York Times to write for their Youre the Boss blog, he had been running his custom furniture business for twenty-four years strong. or mostly strong. Now, in his first book, Downs paints an honest portrait of a real business, with a real boss, a real set of employees, and the real challenges they face.
Fresh out of college in 1986, Downs opened his first business, a small company that builds custom furniture. In 1987, he hired his first employee. Thats when things got complicated. As his enterprise began to grow, he had to learn about management, cash flow, taxes, and so much more. But despite any obstacles, Downs always remained keenly aware that every small business, no matter the product it makes or the service it provides, starts with people. He writes with tremendous insight about hiring employees, providing motivation to get the best out of them, and the difficult decisions hes made to let some of them go. Downs also looks outward, to his dealings with vendors and to providing each client with exemplary customer service from first sales pitch to final delivery. With honesty and conviction, he tells the true story behind building and sustaining a successful company in an ever-evolving economy, often airing his own failures and shortcomings to reveal the difficulties that arise from being a boss and a businessperson. Countless employees have told the story of their experience with managersBoss Life tells the other side of that story.

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An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York New York - photo 1
Boss Life Surviving My Own Small Business - image 2

Boss Life Surviving My Own Small Business - image 3

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

Boss Life Surviving My Own Small Business - image 4

Copyright 2015 by Paul Downs

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Blue Rider Press is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Downs, Paul.

Boss life : surviving my own small business / Paul Downs.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-698-17900-4

1. CabinetmakersUnited States. 2. Small businessUnited StatesManagement. 3. New business enterprisesUnited StatesManagement. I. Title.

HD8039.C152U63 2015 2015016068

338.7'684104092dc23

[B]

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the authors alone.

Version_1

For my mother, who never got to see how it all turned out

Contents
Preface

Ive been living the boss life since 1986. I own a small company that builds custom furniture. I started fresh out of college, with no experience. Ever since, my business has been my life, my education, and my struggle.

When I began, I had no training as a businessman and no mentors to help me. I just wanted to make stuff and have fun. I found that I was good at designing products and making sales, and the business started to grow. In 1987, I hired my first employee, and soon found myself struggling with management, cash flow, taxes, and all the other details required to keep a business running. After globalization and the Internet brought new competition and new opportunity, my company experienced unsustainable growth and, in 2008, a devastating crash. But weve enduredand even had one very profitable year. I am a survivor, but not a financial success.

In 2010, by sheer luck, I was given the chance to write about my experiences in The New York Times for their Youre the Boss blog. I became a regular contributor. Ive used that forum to describe the shabby treatment that business owners suffer at the hands of large and powerful institutions, in particular the health insurance and credit card industries. The main focus of my writing, though, has been my own company.

I decided to tell the difficult parts of my story, concentrating on my deficiencies as a businessman. I have written about fighting with my former partner, struggling with cash flow and unhappy customers, firing employees, and dealing with a rapidly changing economic landscape.

Many readers have written to tell me of their own struggles, and thanked me for publicly airing my many failures. Apparently a humble and honest look at small business life is rare. But Ive found myself struggling with the limits of the blog format. Complex and sensitive situations must be oversimplified or omitted.

This book will be an opportunity to dig deeper into my experiences. It is an accurate portrait of a real business, the boss who leads it, the people who work in it, and the challenges we face. I hope that I can promote a better understanding of the factors that drive the behavior of small business owners and, by extension, show how a significant part of our economy functions. Theres a lot of chatter about job creators from people who have never created a job. Politicians make rules, but arent required to follow them. Employees complain without understanding why bosses act the way they do. And prospective entrepreneurs gamble their future without a clear picture of the challenges they will face. All these people need to know the other side of the story. This book is for them.

Some disclaimers: the world of woodshops is almost entirely a male domain. I dont know why this is, other than tradition. I have hired women whenever I found one who was qualified, but they are a very small percentage of the total workforce. In order to simplify the language of this book, I use the male form of certain common nouns, craftsmen and salesmen in particular. Please do not take this as a denigration of women who perform those roles.

The names of some people and customers have been changed, and the quoted dialogue is my best recollection of what was said at the time. That said, all the events in the book happened. If this account offends anyone, my apologies in advance.

Introduction

If this were a standard business book, I would tell you all the smart things I did to achieve financial success, and maybe trot out a few mistakes to show some humility. Unfortunately, Im no business genius and Im not rich. My story has neither tidy conclusions nor a triumphant ending. So this book will be different.

Id like to tell you what happened to my company in 2012, as we struggled to replicate profits earned in the previous year. We started strong, but then sales took a puzzling turn for the worse. The vast majority of our clients were delighted with our work, but a couple of them werent satisfied with reasonable efforts and cost us huge amounts of money. I presided over a very good crew, except for a couple of workers who gave me serious trouble. We made some money, then lost a whole lot more, then clawed most of it back. Meanwhile, my complicated family life couldnt be ignored. This is real life. The triumph and tragedy of small business. The uncertainty and challenges of being the boss.

What do I mean by boss? Its commonly understood to mean someone whos in charge of others, but that could be a middle manager in a big corporation. Instead, Im talking about bosses who both own and run their businessessmall companies with fewer than twenty employees. More than seven million American businesses, employing nearly thirty million people, are in this category. These bosses answer to nobody and are responsible for everybody. Their own money is at risk. Every problem goes straight to them, and they have to come up with the solution, figure out how to pay for it, and then implement it. The position guarantees long hours, hard work, and overwhelming stress.

Every day, these bosses wear multiple hats: managing employees, keeping track of the money, dealing with bureaucrats, negotiating with the landlordthe list goes on and on. Larger companies, with more resources, can hire individuals or create whole departments to do these jobs, but a small company cant generate enough cash to cover that expense. So these tasks land in the bosss lap. No matter that the boss may have little or no training, and no desire to spend time on them. Done wrong, the company fails, either slowly or quickly. Done right, the boss gets to do them again. A sudden crisisa cash shortage, or an equipment breakdown, or a personnel crisisrequires even greater effort. Even if the business survives, there is never a guarantee of easy sailing ahead. The situation goes back only to the routine level of toil and stress.

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