The truth about owning a small business

We recently spent some time chatting with a friend of ours who is a restaurant owner/chef.  We hadn’t seen each other for awhile and didn’t realize how much we needed to talk.  It’s a lonely, isolating world being a small-business owner, and it’s a major relief to sit down with someone who understands this and blow off some steam.

Here’s the down-and-dirty reality.  It may look like a dream to the outside world, but in reality, owning your own small business is very, very hard work.  For example, as Anthony Bourdain, with characteristic bluntness and humor, discusses in “The Nasty Bits”, for people who dream of opening a restaurant, the reality is – most often than not – that they will fail.  If it was as easy as swanning about the dining room in nice clothes giving out free drinks to friends and raking in loads of money, everyone would want to do it.  The young celebrity-chef wanna-be who is faced with boxes of onions to peel and dishes to wash and the reality of the heat and sweat and stress of a professional kitchen will not last.  He describes successful chefs who at times return to the “menial” jobs of prepping garlic or washing pots because they appreciate the meditative nature of such jobs, and have understood that it is these seemingly small, mundane tasks that actually make up the bulk of your days in a kitchen.  If you can’t perform these tasks mindfully, if you cannot find pleasure there, then you should not be in a kitchen.

Running an inn is no different, really.  As I was re-reading this book for the second or third time, this part about peeling garlic made me think about cleaning toilets and doing laundry.  It’s not uncommon for us to do ten loads of laundry a day and finish folding in front of the TV at nine at night, and to spend eight to twelve hours on our feet each – and I mean each – and every day.  And it’s typical to work seven days a week, with a day off every couple of months.  It may look like a dream from the outside, but being a small business owner – even in Hawaii or in a beautiful restaurant – is hard work. 

We’ve been asked with surprising regularity if this is “all” we do, and what our “real” jobs are.  To be asked this, after spending hours scrubbing and cleaning and mending and peeling and cutting and baking and washing and folding and ironing and sweeping and hauling and managing books and marketing and being on the phone and computer and running up to Costco and Home Depot and Lowes and baking and cleaning and washing some more and tossing and turning all night wondering how we’re going to pay our bills … I am speechless.  But, I try to take it as a compliment, that we make things look easy because we are professionals.

As our conversation drew to a close with our friend and we’d aired all our common complaints and stresses and fears, we returned without hesitation to the fact that we love what we do, wouldn’t trade it for anything.  Sure, it’s extraordinarily – if not obviously – hard work (you can forget weekends, evenings, holidays, any sense of security, and probably a pay check for many months or even years when you first start out).  However…we choose this work so that we could be with our kids, and raise them in a beautiful place we love.  We’ve risked much to do this, but we still believe it was totally and completely worth it.  We love it here, and we love the work.  Our friend is fabulous at his job, and his customers can feel this.  We genuinely love taking care of our guests and sharing the island with them, and we think that they can feel this, too.  We are constantly working to do better by our guests, to improve everything we do – from our website to our welcome book to our breakfast offerings to our marketing.  We have met the most fantastic people here, and it is our absolute pleasure taking care of them.  Yes, it’s hard work, but we wouldn’t be doing anything else.  Again, I think it’s like being in a kitchen.  It may be hot, you’ll definitely get burned and cut, people will send back food and abuse your waiters, your feet will ache, you’ll stress endlessly about paying the bills, but at the end of the day – or long night – when things have settled and you see how happy you’ve made your guests with your creation, with your vision, with your dream, you know you are in exactly the right place and wouldn’t trade it for the world.