“No One is Coming” and 7 Other Lessons in Entrepreneurship
It was sometime in October last year. I was on month 4 of my new self-employment journey, and I was busy taking a beating: mental stress that led to physical exhaustion. Exhaustion that led to stress. We’d launched a successful Kickstarter in May, and the products had just come in as Fall arrived. My wife, Athena, and I were in the thick of prepping 1,100 Kickstarter orders while scrambling to manage the day-to-day business of Knafs and raise four kids. Late nights. Early mornings. More exhaustion. More stress. In my delirium I kept thinking, "I should hire this person. That person. They can start tomorrow!" All of the people who came to mind have solid jobs, benefits, and families. I can't pay them enough to come work in my cold garage at our little startup.
And it struck me: no one is coming. Whoa. Extreme Ownership slapped me in the face. That moment was a turning point for me. When you realize the situation is dire and you have no option but to self-rescue, a jolt of clarity and adrenaline hits your system. It was a catalyst to refocus and solve my problems in bite-size bits. The past 11 months have been a wild self-employment journey for Athena and me. We’re not experts, but we’ve learned a couple lessons that are worth recording for future reference. You may find them useful as well. Let’s dive in:
1- Hiring is Scary. Burnout is Scarier.
When I cook, I have a habit of squeezing every last bit of juice from lemons and limes. I smash them, then I squeeze them, then I enjoy the personal satisfaction of chewing the inside to get the pulp for myself. Typing it now sounds odd. And oddly bad for my teeth. Don’t judge me. But I want all that juice!
Every last drop.
I have this same habit with my time and energy. I squeeze out every last drop, then chase the pulp with my teeth. While helpful in many life scenarios, this is a potential defect with self-employment, and it’s a slippery slope. We had a moment a few months ago where every dollar in our business accounts meant nothing to us. We were ready to spend every last penny to buy back the sanity our business had stolen. So, we started hiring. In Athena’s words, “Hiring changed my life.” True story. It’s terrifying to hire people, knowing that their livelihood and my business skills are now dancing the tango. But the alternative was burnout in our family, marriage, and business. Looking back, we should have hired 3 months sooner when the hypothetical juice flow transformed into an enamel-eating chew-fest. I’ve got to get better at forecasting needs, simplifying, or taking the hiring risk before the burnout sets in. It’s a constant struggle.
2- Everything Scales Simultaneously
In June of last year, we added a large distributor to our group of wholesale accounts. It was a great opportunity to work with friends and grow with a bigger company that I respect and admire. However, their orders broke our system. We didn’t have the capacity to keep up, and we were underserving our longtime customers while hemorrhaging our data. It felt like the beginnings of a forest fire that would soon burn out of control. I wanted a cozy campfire burning hot and even. So, I dropped them 3 months after onboarding. It was an awkward phone call, but it was the right thing for my business. I learned that scaling happens simultaneously. More orders = more accounting = more shipping = more marketing to sell through = more orders.
I thought when we took the business full-time I would be able to help alleviate some of Athena’s load in Accounting and Operations by pitching in. Turns out, I’m a mediocre accountant, and she loved shipping too much to leave it alone. I pushed the marketing button instead. And her job increased in operations. That increase caused more work for me in purchasing, which caused more accounting. I realized that adding more fuel to the fire is great, but to keep the same level of light and heat output, you must be ready to gather and chop the firewood. Which means you must sharpen your axe and plant your trees. Every push in business creates and alternating pull somewhere else within the business. Recognizing that everything must simultaneously scale together has been helpful to avoid a forest fire.
3 - We Chose This.
When we first started our pocket knife business, Athena and I would often turn to each other and ask, “Are we having fun?” As we progressed, it became, “Are we still having fun?” Somewhere in the last 11 months we stopped asking if we’re having fun, and we instead say to each other, “We chose this.” It sounds defeatist. Maybe it is. But knowing this was a choice we made together after a ton of contemplation, consideration, and prayer is comforting. We self-selected this gig. No one recruited us or gets to drop a Friday afternoon big deadline bomb on our desk. Every job has its challenges and hard days. But we chose this, and that’s highly motivating.
Athena and me at Blade Show Salt Lake — our second trade show.
4 - Money is Weird.
I used to play a game in my head with my salary at work. 10% goes here. 15% goes there. 40% goes there, etc. I don’t play that game anymore because money is very different for us now, and not because we’re Scooge McDucking-it into our private pool of gold coins. We see it as a fluctuating, unpredictable tool. We put profits back into our business and save for a rainy day. However, there are some perks. For instance, we paid for Christmas using credit card rewards points. Try planning that into a budget. (As a side note: we’ve recently discovered the joys of ACH and we likely won’t have as many credit card points in the future; we’re learning.) We plan trips with a business objective on the side.
Me and Sanford Owen at Carmel Cutlery. It’s a mere stone’s throw from the beach. And Sanford’s guidance about pocket knife suppliers has been invaluable the last 6 months.
There’s a tax game to play, and we play it wholeheartedly. Our standard of living hasn’t changed at all. We’re still incredibly frugal, except I did buy top-of-the-line headlights for our cars after a slick AutoZone employee sold me hard. I installed them myself. That’s lifestyle creep at its finest, amigos! The reality is, money is a weird tool whether you’re self-employed or not. But it is always a tool. Learning to use the tool wisely is a life-long pursuit.
5 - I Know Nothing.
Triple net. NNN. Worker’s Comp. Insurance. Brokers. HS codes. Additional insured. Swift codes. CAD. CAM. G-code. Quality control. Lean. Buildouts. Vanilla shell. Modified net. CAM. ACH. E-flute. GA4. And the list goes on and on. The reality of entrepreneurship is it stretches in ways I never could have imagined. I’ve been forced to learn quickly. I’ve become a master at Googling it for initial understanding, then asking questions of people who know and relying on others’ expertise. Never before have my own inadequacies and knowledge gaps felt like that dream where you go out in public in your underwear— except it’s real-life. I wouldn’t even call it Imposter Syndrome or “Fake it ‘Til You Make It.” No. It’s swan diving into the deep end wearing a swim diaper and floaties with the understanding that you’ll probably be fine, but you may need a new swim diaper after you sort through the terror of the experience. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know anything. Education is a lifelong, often painful, process . I’ve put this into a little chart that shows how this works for me:
I’m convinced that learning is hard for most people. It’s stressful. It takes energy and time. It takes dedicated study. I think of learning as pushing my brain two degrees beyond “What I Know” into the realm of “What I Want to Know.” Those two degrees, multiplied over time, have been the key to being willing to make the jump into self-employment. First I learned video. Then I learned marketing. Then I learned brand management. Product management. Business management. Now self-employment. That’s a gross over-simplification, but pushing my education into the unknown has served me very well so far. I highly recommend it.
6 - Listen to the Cheerleaders.
I've been amazed, humbled, and grateful for all the people who are cheering me on. I see it in social media comments and as people shake my hand at trade shows. The phone calls and texts from friends and family are invaluable. They can see the hustle and the struggle as the plant breaks through the soil. They're sending sunshine and rooting for my success. I was at a Trade Show a couple weeks ago, and a 19-year-old came up to me and told me he’d been following my professional journey since he was 9-years-old. Whoa. That one messed with my brain. Aside from feeling old, I realized my work has been impacting people in ways I couldn’t have imagined when I started selling pocket knives online back in 2011. These people are sending good vibes and support. The cheerleaders make all the difference.
7 - No Days Off
You know those dumb gym t-shirts that say "no days off"? They're actually about entrepreneurship. Even on the days when I’m disconnected, I’m thinking about my business. It commands a corner of my brain all. the. time. I wonder to myself about farmers. I suspect they’re constantly thinking about the weather and the sun and the temperature and the diesel in the tractor and the animals and the feed and the fence. And. And. And. You can’t shut off that stuff! It’s your world.
This is a field near my house. Not my field, but I often think about it as I drive past. What are they planting this year? How’s the water situation? How’s the soil? Is the tractor running well? So much to think about in this field.
The dirt is in your nose and the calluses are on your hands. I don’t own a tractor (yet), but I think of my little ecommerce business in pocket knives as my field. I think about economic conditions and geopolitical movements and site traffic and imports and timing and hiring and budgets. And. And. And. I’m working on better controlling my mind and when it thinks about the business. But so far, I’m finding even when I’m not physically working, there are no days off.
8 - No One is Coming
I’ll end this where we started: no one is coming. I just finished the book Endurance. It’s the story about Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated Antarctic exploration in 1915. Their boat got stuck in the ice, and the only chance for survival was self-rescue. There was no helicopter exit option and no one to hear their cries for help. They had to figure it out themselves in conditions that should have swallowed them whole. Their only options were to self-rescue or die. I realize that my little pocket knife business doesn’t have such dire consequences as an Antarctic disaster, but the mentality of Shackleton and his crew is inspiring. Self rescue or your business dies. This knowledge is absolutely empowering, and I’ve seen it work wonders for my mental health as an entrepreneur. I was telling myself that we just had to hit a certain revenue place and I'd hire my friends with MBAs to fix all my problems. Surely there was a white knight that was going to come rescue us from our self-inflicted entrepreneurial messes. This isn’t to say I don’t have friends, mentors, employees, and contractors helping out. They’re amazing and invaluable. But when it’s midnight or 5 a.m. and nothing is working correctly, it’s my problem. It’s our mess. Our issues to fix. Once I took ownership of my business in my head, the world seemed much brighter. Sure, we were still swan diving with floaties, but when you’re the only people on a deserted island with no chance of rescue, you’re going to start smashing rocks together and climbing trees to figure it out— no one is coming. And that is a beautiful, terrifying thing.
If you’re interested in following along with the Knafs journey, sign up for our email list on the bottom of the page. We usually send space kitties and goofy memes, but you’ll probably enjoy it.