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A peculiarity of the small business owner's mind is that seasons come to be defined purely in terms of cash flow. Summer is not about landscapes lit by golden sunlight or great oaks casting restful shade, no. Summer is about foot traffic.
Guess what, folks? Summer's over.
Throughout July and August, the store averaged over a thousand sales per month but yesterday we did exactly four sales, maybe thirty combined for the two days before. Thus I tunneled into an ever deeper depression. I hadn't expected summer to end quite so abruptly. I hadn't planned for it.
We're performing the high wire act without much of a safety net so planning is essential. Planning in this context essentially means making up projections and graphs by interpreting coffee grounds at the bottom of a Starbucks cup. It doesn't have any more substance than, say, a psychic reading from Mrs. Laurie, Monterey's own gypsy fortune-telling franchise now telling past, present and future from four (count 'em!) sparkling new locations in the greater Peninsula area including one very close to me on Cannery Row. High overhead but no inventory and very low labor costs (assuming that Mrs. Laurie can ectoplasmically project herself simultaneously into all four locations.) Maybe I should have gone into the psychic reader biz.
Because when in a panic last night I exhumed several business plans from the most ancient partition of my hard drive, I found that the numbers I'd made up for the Cannery Row Company overlords (when I was trying to persuade them to rent me their overpriced storefront) were right on target.
Unfortunately my projections only covered one year. August 2003 to August 2004. The business plan needs to be updated. But there's so much minutiae to attend to, daily maintenance and upkeep, two-thirds of a web site yet to do that business planning can't be a priority even though it's all that stands between me and the great dizzying abyss of uncertainty.
Not much other news. Surrounded by people, I'm lonely; feel the need for some deep soulful communion though with whom or with what I can't say. I wish I still believed in God. But I don't. Ah, saudade…
Guess what, folks? Summer's over.
Throughout July and August, the store averaged over a thousand sales per month but yesterday we did exactly four sales, maybe thirty combined for the two days before. Thus I tunneled into an ever deeper depression. I hadn't expected summer to end quite so abruptly. I hadn't planned for it.
We're performing the high wire act without much of a safety net so planning is essential. Planning in this context essentially means making up projections and graphs by interpreting coffee grounds at the bottom of a Starbucks cup. It doesn't have any more substance than, say, a psychic reading from Mrs. Laurie, Monterey's own gypsy fortune-telling franchise now telling past, present and future from four (count 'em!) sparkling new locations in the greater Peninsula area including one very close to me on Cannery Row. High overhead but no inventory and very low labor costs (assuming that Mrs. Laurie can ectoplasmically project herself simultaneously into all four locations.) Maybe I should have gone into the psychic reader biz.
Because when in a panic last night I exhumed several business plans from the most ancient partition of my hard drive, I found that the numbers I'd made up for the Cannery Row Company overlords (when I was trying to persuade them to rent me their overpriced storefront) were right on target.
Unfortunately my projections only covered one year. August 2003 to August 2004. The business plan needs to be updated. But there's so much minutiae to attend to, daily maintenance and upkeep, two-thirds of a web site yet to do that business planning can't be a priority even though it's all that stands between me and the great dizzying abyss of uncertainty.
Not much other news. Surrounded by people, I'm lonely; feel the need for some deep soulful communion though with whom or with what I can't say. I wish I still believed in God. But I don't. Ah, saudade…
