Easy Finance

I have been following with great interest the trials and tribulations of Paul Downs and his woodworking business as he navigates troubled waters (I’ll get back to business groups in my next post). I’ve also been following the comments that Paul’s posts have been getting.

Because I have been blogging here for almost a year, as well as following the other bloggers, the comments sound familiar. Many are supportive and appreciative of those who share their stories. Some offer advice, some offer analysis. And then there are others. Here are two of my favorites from Paul’s most recent post: “At best you’re on the deck of the Titanic.” And “If you replace all the business activities with poker games, this reads exactly like an account of a gambling addiction.”

Really? These comments get to the heart of why I, and others, write for this blog. Entrepreneurship is misunderstood by many people. Comparing Paul’s journey to a gambling addiction or a ship going down is at best ignorant, and I say that in the nicest possible way. I mean ignorant

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The day after laying off half of my workers, I sat with the others in my office. They knew we were in trouble, but The Partner’s policy of silence had kept me from revealing just how bad it was. They were angry about being kept in the dark, and many were ready to quit. So I made a promise that from that day forward I would answer any question, any time, as completely and honestly as possible. I laid out for them what the near-term future would look like: we had work, but not much. More might be coming, but maybe not.

I told them how much money we had, how much money we could expect, and how I planned to spend it. I put on a brave show, but inside I was terrified. (You can read my previous posts here.) This was at the height of the financial crisis, late October 2008, and it seemed likely that the market for custom conference tables would disappear completely. But to my great surprise, we kept getting jobs. First a very large order from the Air Force. Then an order from a pharmaceutical company, another from a college in Texas, another from a credit union in Maine. T

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Two disadvantages of selling residential furniture are that the average sale is small and you have to work really, really hard to get it. The Partner and I both realized that it would be hard to build the business (you can see my previous posts here) selling only dining furniture. Residential clients want to sit in the chair, to feel the finish and to thump the table top before they buy. Which means we could only sell to clients who came to the shop, and that’s a relatively small group.

The Internet solved our problem, but in an unexpected way. In 1999, I had made a large conference table for a Philadelphia client. We put a picture of it on our Web site. People started to call about the table in 2003. They told me that they found my site using something called Google. In 2002, zero percent of my sales were driven by Web searches. By 2004, it was 90 percent, and we passed $1 million in annual revenue for the first time. We canceled our print ads and used the money to buy Web searches aimed at dining furniture and conference tables. M

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Last year when I decided to see if I could run around the track while my son played a flag football game, no one was more surprised than me when I made it all the way around 3 times without stopping. I was so stunned that I Tweeted the news. I was even more stunned when I got up the next morning and the first thing I wanted to do was run. That was weird. I kept up my running for several months, then got lazy between October and February.

I picked it back up again in early March and have not stopped since. It’s hard to describe why I like to run. I touched upon the connection between fitness and business in a general sense in this post, but I think I only scratched the surface. I think there’s more to it, specifically where running is concerned. I’ll think about that, and if I can put it into words, you know I’ll share it here.

The photo is of one of my Asics GT-2150 running shoes. I chose this model because a gait analysis showed that I tend to pronate when I run, and I have a bit of a pronounced arch.

You can learn more about the importance of well fitting running shoes in my radio show interview with marathon runner Laura McClain. In the

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