“It must be great being your own boss!”
“What’s it like to set your own hours?”
“I wish I could stop working for the Man!”
These are typical first reactions when people hear you’re an entrepreneur. We certainly believed them when we decided to start Cousins Maine Lobster. While we had worked for companies, our old jobs allowed us to operate like independent contractors. We were basically on our own, just as long as we put up the numbers. Which we did. We weren’t micromanaged by some overbearing boss and we set our own hours, for the most part.
So, when we went off on our own, free of any entanglements, we thought that our semi-independence would become complete and total autonomy. We were free! And for a good day or two, it certainly felt like it. Then reality hit us. Hard.
What does reality look like? It looks something like this:
At the start of 2015, we were in the process of franchising (and opening a restaurant). We had contracted with a truck manufacturer who would supply our franchisees with a fleet of standardized trucks. We didn’t want our franchisees on the hook for acquiring a rather important piece of equipment, and we were very self-conscious of making sure our trucks looked and operated the same, whether on the roads of LA or Raleigh. Going all in with one manufacturer seemed like the best way to get everything we wanted.
Until the trucks failed to arrive on time. In the first months of 2015, we had ten franchisees ready to get to work, but half of them couldn’t open because they didn’t have trucks. Then we saw with growing panic that though the trucks looked great, they kept breaking after continued use.
We found ourselves in a bit of a quandary. We had franchisees who had given us hundreds of thousands of dollars, because they believed in us and our brand. And our response was to hand them a crappy truck that was, by the way, late? Every day these franchisees had to delay their launches, they were losing money. What could we do except try to get some answers from our vendor?
Except he had gone completely dark on us. As the problems had begun to mount, he had become increasingly hard to contact, and eventually stopped returning our calls altogether. Just like that, we found ourselves in the middle of a nightmare. That’s when panic turned to horror.
Be our own bosses? We were entirely at the mercy of some guy who had disappeared. You will never feel as helpless as when there seems no way to correct a decision you made.
Set our own hours? There was a period early in 2015 when we barely slept. We were working all the time, desperately trying to save our franchising dreams.
Working for the Man? We had failed our new franchisees on the one task that we couldn’t fail: to deliver new, usable food trucks that proudly carried the Cousins Maine Lobster brand. Never in our professional lives had we felt more under the microscope than we did during these terrible months.
That’s the reality of running your own business.
You will never be more accountable for your actions and decisions. You will never work harder or longer. And you will never have more responsibilities, which sometimes include managing the life savings of your franchisees.
So, still want to be an entrepreneur?
FEAR IS THE ENEMY
We wrote this to answer a question we get asked a lot: “What’s it like to run your own business?” Some people are just curious about the job. They want to know about a day in the life of a business owner, much as they would be curious about the daily routine of their favorite athlete or actor. But there are also those who ask because they want to know if it’s something they could do. They have an idea for a business, but they think that running a business is beyond their skills. Put another way, they want to know how we went from operating a food truck to running a business of food trucks. They seem like two totally different jobs—and they are.
Being unable to bridge this mental gap keeps many would-be entrepreneurs on the sidelines. This might seem like a simple misunderstanding, but what we’re talking about here is fear. A lot of people are simply afraid of being in charge, of running something on their own. For everyone who’s never done it, running a business is a big unknown. You might have a great idea for a new service or product; you might even go so far as to get the service or product into some kind of production. You actually see a lot of entrepreneurs at this stage on Shark Tank. They’re manufacturing a product or providing a service. They probably have some sales, either online or brick-and-mortar. But that’s when they enter the crucible of the show, because the sharks almost never bite on half a business. They want to invest in something that is fully formed, if not fully realized. By this we mean that the business is sustainable on its own, but with tremendous growth potential.
When a half business crosses that line into full business depends on a wide variety of factors that are unique to every enterprise. For us, we had a single but profitable food truck with employees, and a sustainable supply chain. Neither of us had quit our day job yet, which is usually a sticking point for the sharks, but we also had very good sales for a three-month-old business. Still, our hesitancy to go all in meant our company was in that gray area of half a business. It would have made perfect sense if all the sharks had passed because we hadn’t fully committed yet. You see it all the time.
Yet there are thousands of entrepreneurs who never get beyond the half-a-business phase, and not because some venture capitalist doesn’t invest in them. A lot are afraid to give the kind of absolute dedication that is required to turn half a business into a full business. If you’ve ever run half a business, then you know what we’re talking about: you can spend years just getting by, in a perpetual state of limbo, doing just enough business to keep going, but not going anywhere. Why not take the leap? Why not go all in, as we did? Because of fear. For most, it proves insurmountable.
People think that this fear of going all in stems from financial insecurity, family obligations, or health-care concerns—the usual reasons people stick it out with jobs that are less than their ideal. And these considerations certainly come into play. But we also think there’s something else going on, something that is actually stronger than the fear of being without something you need. It’s the fear of being someone you can’t imagine. And it gets back to that question we get asked: What’s it like to run your own business?
Those with half a business or just an idea for one ask this question all the time because they think the answer will somehow help pull back the curtain on the great unknown. And once they see the little man working the levers of the great and powerful Oz, then they’ll see it’s no big deal. But, of course, this almost never happens, because knowing how someone else did it doesn’t necessarily mean you can do it. There are a lot of books out there, written by some of the greatest business minds in history, that tell you exactly what it’s like being a business owner. But knowledge doesn’t lead to action. Reading everything there is to read about entrepreneurship won’t bridge the great chasm people have in their heads that separates them from business owners.
“They can do this, but I probably can’t.”
People only think this way because they can’t visualize themselves as business owners. And until you see yourself as a business owner you will never overcome that mental hurdle. Granted, this is easier said than done, but we’re also not just making this up. Visualizing yourself as a business owner is just a slight twist on the old business guru’s advice to visualize success. And that kind of advice is everywhere these days. Just a quick Google search turns up these articles as the top hits, all from respected business journals:
“The Extraordinary Power of Visualizing Success” (Entrepreneur Magazine).27
“Why Visualizing Success Isn’t as Far-Fetched as it Sounds” (Fast Company).28
“Visualize Your Way to Success (Really!)” (Inc. magazine).29
You need to make the jump from knowledge to action. You need to see yourself doing all the things you read about in the books, that you have read in this book, and that you hear from other business owners you ask. Start doing it immediately.
And stop telling yourself that the reason you’re still in half a business phase is because of financial, health, or family concerns. We’re not trying to minimize those concerns at all, but they’re not really holding you back. You will never have enough money in half a business phase to feel good about quitting; you either have a way to pay for your health-care expenses or you don’t; and your family will either support you or it won’t. What we’re saying is that those ducks will never be a nice, perfect row for you.
No, what’s holding you back is the fear of actually achieving your dream of becoming a business owner. It’s a role you haven’t been able to comprehend, because it seems so outlandish, so foreign. The potential of success is scary. So, stop thinking of it as a potential and start thinking of it as reality. Not until you turn knowledge into action, and actually start seeing yourself as a business owner, will you ever muster the courage to walk across the bridge and join us here on the other side.
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE …
What you’re going to find on our side is that it’s actually not all that different. Or, let’s put it this way: it’s not that different at first. It’s the same effect of seeing someone every day for a year versus seeing someone only once a year. In the former, you hardly notice the changes in the person; whether they’re skinnier or fatter; balder; happier or sadder. But in the latter, the changes can be dramatic. “Wow, you’ve lost weight!” (Or the opposite.)
During the first few months of becoming a full-time business owner you won’t feel all that different from your previous months as either a half-a-business owner or just someone with an idea. You don’t suddenly gain access to the Business Owners’ Club. But gradually, as your business grows and matures, change begins to happen, dramatic change. And when you look back one or two years later, you will be astonished at the person you’ve become. Usually, the transformation is for the better, but not always.
You should anticipate this and plan accordingly. What we mean is that even though you won’t notice the changes in yourself, they’re happening under the surface. You hope that your best qualities as a business owner come out during this early phase, and they usually do. But your bad qualities come out, too. And whether they’re good or bad qualities, the pressures of a running a start-up business will put them in the forefront. That’s when relationships begin to strain and friends start to turn on each other.
However you choose to plan for the changes that will happen, you must understand that running your own business can be a traumatic experience. And we don’t use the word traumatic lightly. It means that you will undergo extreme mental (and even physical) distress that will leave its mark long after the crisis has passed. There’s almost no way to plan for this except to know that it will happen. Neither of us have children yet, but we imagine it’s a bit like knowing that one day your child will get into serious trouble. You can’t predict what kind, only that it will test your faculties as a parent. And at that moment, everything depends on whether you can handle the crisis properly. Again, it’s the old idea of visualizing yourself in that moment: how will you respond? Will you be the leader that running a business has made you? Will you control your emotions and strive to see the path forward?
But simply handling the crisis well won’t always diminish the trauma it has inflicted on you. You will live with the scars. Returning to the child analogy, if your child got into trouble because of a lie they told, then it would be very hard for you to trust that child again. Everything they say will be suspect. You might have helped the child get out of danger, but that loss of trust is the scar that remains. In this way, you are changed for better and worse. Better, because perhaps your distrust will save your child from another crisis down the road; worse, because the world has become just a little darker.
Which is why it helps to remember the best things about yourself. Not only that, but also those activities or moments that bring out those qualities. You will begin to cherish those things much more than you did in your earlier life. They will be like little life rafts in the great ocean of business ownership. We identified our own rafts early on and still cling to them to this day, perhaps more tightly than we did when we were younger and dumber. One of those you’ve already read about, the recuperative powers of family. We each still find love and joy in our families and retreat to our little fortress on the Maine coast as much as possible.
Another is more banal but no less restorative. To this day, in Jim’s office, we have our old NHL ’94 video game. The cartridge is always in the console (we play no other games), and the controllers—the ones that have known our hands since they were small and clumsy—are ready to be picked up. You might remember that it was while playing this game in Sabin’s apartment in LA in 2011 that we started the conversation that eventually became Cousins Maine Lobster. There’s a reason for that. Our business is nothing if not a reflection of the things we love most in the world: family, our values, and simpler times. Playing against each other immediately returns us to those very things, if only for the duration of the game.
Perhaps we’ve just had a huge argument with each other. Time to play. Perhaps we just heard that a long-term, valued employee was caught stealing. Time to play. Perhaps we are told that the price of lobster is closing in at an all-time high. Definitely time to play.
By playing, we are able to block out these distractions and return to our center. We’re able to rediscover the reasons we started down this road in the first place, which is sometimes the only thing that will keep you from quitting. And, lastly, it’s just a way two friends can relax during the workday. We even make it interesting by playing a best-of-seven series with some money stakes. And if the loser gets swept, he needs to pony up $500. As far as we can remember, this has only happened once—but the loser doesn’t want to admit it in print. Not only does this make the contests more fun, it all but forces the business distractions from our heads. There’s money at stake! During these moments, we aren’t business owners; we’re just two cousins having some fun. It’s good to be just that every once in a while.
So, yes, we fight, we argue, we have good days, we have terrible days. Sometimes one of us is having a great day, while the other one’s day is in the toilet. That’s just how it goes. But those little things add up and if you don’t have a way of bringing yourself back to your center, then they will become huge things down the road. Because the fact of business ownership is that you will change. The goal is to do all you can to make it so that the more things change, the more you stay the same.
A PARTNERSHIP … OR A MARRIAGE?
One thing we get asked all the time is, “What’s it like working with your family?” Our response is usually immediate: “Great! Wonderful! Wouldn’t have it any other way!” And these are accurate reflections of our true feelings. We wouldn’t be here without each other. Put another way, we would never have decided to go into this business if we hadn’t decided to do it together. Family first was our motivation from day one and will remain our motivation for the rest of our lives.
That said, if you’re someone who’s on the verge of starting a business and you have the potential to go into it with a family member, there’s a very practical question: should you? Is it better to run a family business, or should you instead run one by yourself, or with non-family partners?
Our answer is going to be nuanced, so bear with us. Before we officially started Cousins Maine Lobster, we decided to take a personality test. We were family and we were friends, but that says very little about whether we would make good business partners. You might love your sister, but would you want to work with her every day? If your answer is an immediate no, well, that’s probably the only test you need. But if you think the answer is yes, then you should make sure you’re certain. That’s why we took those personality tests. We wanted to know if our personalities would be compatible in a business relationship. Our tests suggested that they would be, and so we forged ahead.
And what we’ve since discovered is that we make an excellent team. We each bring to the table complementary characteristics that shore up whatever weaknesses we might have individually. So, for example, Sabin would say that Jim is the hardest worker he’s ever met, while Jim would say that Sabin’s tenacity in the face of adversity or setbacks is second to none. We still have our disagreements, but these are surface arguments. They aren’t, to use the marital law term, irreconcilable differences. Each of us is stronger with the other than we would be on our own.
Our shared blood also makes our business bond stronger. Again, look at it like a marriage: if two people decided to enter into a relationship, but forgo marriage and all the legal entanglements that come with it, then the bonds that hold you together are tenuous. In other words, it would be quite easy to walk out on each other. But you can’t just walk out of a marriage, not without triggering a whole host of legal and financial procedures. That might seem like a hassle to some, but it actually is a boon. Why? Because those potential entanglements make us work just a little bit harder to keep the relationship strong, to overcome disagreements, and to remember why we work better together than apart. Besides, if we ever break up, we’ll still have to see each other over Christmas and that would just be awkward.
We hasten to add that our experience doesn’t mean we believe going into a family business is right for everyone. We only took this step after we felt that our family bond would strengthen, not detract from, our business bond. It might be different in your case. In fact, if you learn that you and your family member(s) wouldn’t make very good business partners, then don’t go into business with them. We each have a lot of friends and family we love dearly and with whom we spend a lot of time. But we probably wouldn’t work well with most of them.
It’s the same for you.
You might think going into business with your spouse, or family member, or best friend would be easy, fun even. But the characteristics that make for a good marriage or friendship don’t always make for a happy business relationship. In the same vein, your perfect business partner might be someone you don’t have much of a friendship with at all. Now, this is unlikely, since people aren’t in the habit of starting a business with someone they don’t like, but it certainly happens. You don’t need to be friends to have a good working, creative, and collaborative relationship with someone. Our point is that you can’t assume how well you’ll work with someone based on your normal relationship with them.
THE FIRST HIRE, THE FIRST FIRE
Managing human beings isn’t the easiest thing to do. We sometimes envy those who run one-man businesses that never require dealing with the complexities of another person, much less a large group of people. But this is part of business ownership—it’s a major part of business ownership. You are nothing without your employees. That’s the easy part to understand. The more difficult part to understand is that you can’t be dragged down by bad employees. You always want to give them a break, a second chance, a shot at redemption. You’ll quickly learn that doesn’t work. Yet, unless you’re an egotistical monster who has no ability to sympathize with others, firing employees for professional or personal reasons will be one of the toughest things you will do as a business owner.
The good news (or perhaps bad news) is that it gets easier. We’ll explain.
Early in our business, before we ever had the thought of franchising, we concluded that we had to fire one of the first people we ever hired. We need not get into the reason why the relationship stopped working, but it had begun to take a toll on each of us. We had never fired anyone before, and we certainly didn’t want to fire someone who had helped launch our company. Perhaps, we told ourselves, his faults could be overcome by his dedication to the company, his willingness to take a chance on us before we proved successful.
But those kinds of justifications almost always prolong the problem. We knew what we had to do; we just weren’t quite ready—or experienced enough—to do it yet.
For a variety of reasons, the task of firing fell to Sabin. He worried himself sick about it, so much so, in fact, that Barbara had to intervene. She didn’t minimize the pain we felt over firing this person, but she gently pushed us to understand why it had to be done. In other words, she made us face facts: this is part of running a business. Keeping bad people on your payroll doesn’t help your company, no matter how much you may like them personally. So, when the fateful moment came, Sabin was able to go through with it and move on. What we did had been done in the best interests of the business—and that’s how a business owner must think.
There’s no mincing words here: to be a business owner is to understand that the business comes before everything else. We know this sounds harsh. Isn’t family more important? Isn’t your health or the health of your employees more important? Those things are extremely important and you must take responsibility for them. You must care for your family and care for yourself. You must allow your employees to take care of these matters when they arise. But none of that changes the fact that the business is the first responsibility of a business owner.
We can also look at it in a more positive light. For example, say an employee of ours had to take extended leave to care for a sick relative. As a productive, hardworking employee, this person is extremely valuable to our business. We’re not going to let her go simply because she needs some time off. Doing so would be worse for our business than waiting for her to return after the emergency has passed. Getting rid of your best employees because they have personal concerns isn’t an effective way to run a business. It’s the same if the employee is sick. We want that employee back and will do everything in our power to have that employee back, even if it means they need an extended period to recuperate.
One of the first things you learn as an entrepreneur is the difficulty of finding good people. It’s so difficult, in fact, that we’d rather hang on to mediocre employees than go out and find new ones. Hiring is a frustrating, time-consuming process. We don’t want to fire anyone, and it’s not because we’re just a couple of swell guys. It’s because we don’t want to deal with the hassle of replacing them. At least we know what we’re getting with our mediocre employee compared to someone new and entirely unknown. For we’ve learned that you never know how someone will perform based on what they’ve done. The only metric that matters is what they’ve done for you.
However, sometimes you can’t avoid it. Sometimes you must fire an employee because they have ceased to be a positive force for the company. As an entrepreneur, you will be disappointed by some of your people. When this happens, there are two ways of handling it: you can give the employee another chance, or you can fire them. In our early days, we chose the first option often—and it bit us hard. This goes back to the trauma we mentioned earlier. Trying to be Mr. Nice Guy doesn’t work; it just doesn’t. We have the scars to prove it. It takes a lot for an employee to disappoint us, but when it happens, we cut the cord swiftly.
The reason for this is fairly simple: the vast majority of firing cases involve personal, as opposed to performance, reasons. What we mean is that the employee wasn’t the kind of person we wanted at Cousins Maine Lobster. We don’t know this right away, obviously. It’s more a pattern of behavior that builds to a breaking point. And as we’ve become more experienced with this sort of thing, our breaking point has fallen dramatically. We simply don’t put up with disrespect or a personality that is a distraction.
There is a case to be made that an underperforming employee should be allowed to improve. The caveat is that this usually means the employee simply isn’t the right fit for the job. So, unless you’re willing to transfer the employee into another position, letting them go is usually the best option. But we don’t tolerate bad habits, bad behavior, or a bad attitude. Again, we don’t want to be this strict, but we have scars from giving that type of employee too many chances.
Particularly in the food-service industry, our capacity for tolerating bad performance is razor thin. It’s just the way this business works. A case in point is a manager we had hired to help open the restaurant. This wasn’t Aaron, Sabin’s cousin, whom we had asked to come up from San Diego to help us with the restaurant. Rather, this was someone whom we hired to help with the details inside the restaurant, from stocking the kitchen to hiring servers and receptionists. Yet as we got closer to our opening, we noticed with growing distress that this manager had failed in most of these basic responsibilities. Unfortunately, it wasn’t simply a case of the manager being a bad fit; it was negligence. We had no choice but to fire him immediately—and right before our opening. But when you’re in the food industry, you rarely have the luxury of time. Things happen quickly and we couldn’t afford to give the manager another chance.
Sometimes, it’s just a matter of fish or cut bait. Even though you might lose someone in an important position, you will be better off. Yes, sometimes this means that everyone else needs to do more work and take more responsibility, but as a team, you get better. These moments also solidify your core by forcing everyone to lean on each other. That’s how the best teams are forged, though adversity. In the end, despite the difficulties, you and your company will be better off than if you had kept the bad employee.
We know this is a lot of gloomy stuff. It certainly isn’t what makes running a business such a fulfilling job. We hate to fire anyone, and not only because it means someone is now unemployed. It means we had failed to find the right person for the job. That means we’re back at the drawing board, searching for a diamond. It’s a simple fact of business that you rarely find that diamond—but when you do, boy, that is what makes this a fulfilling job.
From the family members who have worked with us since day one to our employees at the corporate office to our franchisees spread around the country, we are in daily awe of the team we’ve built. It didn’t come about without a lot of painful lessons in the art of managing people, but you learn, and, as a business owner, you can’t afford to forget. The joy is in finding that employee whose passion for the business and the brand rivals your own. They love not just the work, but the people they work with.
You don’t find this type of team overnight. Like most everything else about running a business, it takes a long period of trial and error before you know the type of person you want. But you’ll get there. Now, when we interview an applicant, we can tell fairly quickly whether that person will be a good fit. We usually already know whether the person can do the job; that’s what a resume is for. This is also why we fire so few people for performance-related reasons. The bigger, harder issue to figure out is whether that person fits with the type of culture you’ve built. We’re going to talk about culture more in a later chapter, but we can say now that culture is something that takes time. When you’re just starting out, you don’t know what type of person would work well in your company. Or, put another way, you think you know—but you soon discover that you’re wrong.
You need to stick with it. At the beginning, if you’re like us, you’re going to want to be everyone’s best friend. But as you grow into your role as a business owner, your focus shifts away from personal relationships. You don’t need more friends. You need strong employees, because that’s what the business needs. The ultimate change that happens to every successful business owner is when they can distinguish between the needs of the business and their personal needs. One belongs in the office; the other stays outside.
MATURING INTO A PROFESSIONAL
We also soon learned that the edge we had acquired in dealing with employees extended to other parts of the business as well. Whether it was the lounge restaurant experiment or the truck vendor, we’ve made plenty of mistakes in our time. It doesn’t matter if those people let us down in some way. We made the decisions and we had to take ownership of our mistakes if we hoped to move forward. It’s the same reason why we faulted our franchisee for his manager’s mistake of showing up late—and thus, losing an amazing opportunity. The franchisee believed it was his employee’s mistake. But that’s not business-owner thinking. It was his mistake for not taking the opportunity seriously enough to be there in person. And it was our mistake in bringing that franchisee on board.
Because at the end of the day, our employees’ mistakes and the mistakes or failings of those with whom we do business fall on our shoulders. An employee moves on to the next job; a business partner finds another. We’re left with the aftermath of the mistake, wondering how we don’t make the same one in the future. And as our company has grown, we’ve had to accept that the consequences of our mistakes have grown, too. Making a bad choice with a lounge owner when we were in business less than six months is forgivable, but mostly because we didn’t lose that much. But the mistake with the truck vendor? We’re still paying for that one years later.
Unsurprisingly, this influences your character. Those scars make you harder, less trusting. The fact that we’ve been burned by otherwise decent people hawking bad ideas stings terribly. Why didn’t we see it was a bad opportunity? Because we were young and we were more trusting. Our vetting process was not as evolved as it is today. That’s not a fault; the fault is if you don’t learn from it. The fault is if you cling to the idea that everyone with a smile and firm handshake has your best interests at heart. It’s not a pleasant experience knowing that there are people out there who want to take advantage of your good nature. But that’s part of being a business owner. You see a dark side of humanity. Or, at least, you better.
On the outside, we like to think that we’re the same guys we were when it was just the two of us on a truck slinging lobster rolls. We still wear the same clothes, we still talk the same, we still have the same friends, we’re still a couple of mama’s boys who love our families, and we still love what we do. Yet internally, and especially when we’re in our business-owner mode, we’ve had to evolve into something harder than the two aw-shucks kids we were on Shark Tank.
One side of this edge is simple caution. We’re far more skeptical when approached with new opportunities, particularly from people we don’t know. We also don’t pursue new ideas as haphazardly as we did in our early days. Admittedly, that was part of the fun in those days. We just did (almost) every crazy idea that popped in our heads. This reckless abandon got us into some thorny predicaments, but we also believe it was a big reason we became so successful so quickly.
But the other side is what we hinted at above. We’re more mature today. This isn’t just a matter of being distrustful; it’s knowing that a mistake can lead to severe consequences. We’re very much aware that we’re responsible for dozens of employees and franchisees. A long time has passed since it was just the two of us counting money on the floor of Sabin’s apartment. The more successful you become, the more responsibilities you acquire. And those responsibilities include people who have bills, and rents, and families. They have dreams, too. They have given us their time and talents. The coldhearted businessperson’s response is to say that we’ve given them a job and salary. Fair trade, right?
Nah. By giving us their time and talents, our employees and franchisees have also given us their ambitions, hopes, and dreams. We don’t just repay that with a regular salary; we do our best to reward their time with smart business decisions that justify their decision to join us—and stay loyal. So, we don’t take chances that aren’t carefully considered. We don’t play games with shady actors who have a sweet deal to offer us. We’ve learned from experience that those golden apples are best left untasted. The potential consequences are just too severe.
And part of this maturity shows itself in our newfound ability to keep our mouths shut. We used to blab endlessly. We talked about what we were doing and what we wanted to do with everyone who cared to listen. We just liked to talk about our business, because it was exciting to us. But loose lips can get you in trouble. We’ve since learned it’s best to keep things a bit closer to the vest. Unfortunately, this includes what we say with family and friends. The fact is that success brings competitors and copycats. The competitors we can handle; that’s part of being in business. It’s the copycats who drive us nuts, because they don’t create anything new. And being creative, being original—these are the essence of business success. We didn’t appreciate that in our early days; we do now.
Our relatively swift success means we’ve had to learn and adapt much faster than is normal for business owners. At the same time, we’ve never grown comfortable in what we were doing. We haven’t had much time to grow complacent or arrogant. And this has allowed us to keep our humility, which is one of those qualities we hope to never lose. Our ability to laugh at ourselves, to ask questions, to remember where we came from—these are the very things that have made us successful business owners.
We like to think that we’ve had to mature, because we need to protect the best thing we have.
LESSON
KNOW WHAT BRINGS YOU BACK TO YOUR CENTER
We wish we could tell you that the experience with our truck vendor turned out all right in the end. The ending certainly could’ve been worse, but it wasn’t good. We eventually worked things out with the franchisees, who now use their own truck vendors. Besides the money, our determination to use one vendor to supply all our franchisees with standardized trucks became a casualty of the ordeal.
For example, our Raleigh franchisee, Greg Keller, was one of those who lost tens of thousands of dollars on a truck that ended up breaking all the time. He was rightly upset with us. We talked on the phone and Sabin assured him that we would make it right. So, we sent him one of our LA trucks to get the franchise up and running. He used that truck for the next six to seven months, until another one could be built for him. It was the right thing to do, but it also meant that we lost money—that truck wasn’t on the road in LA during the busy summer months.
Throughout the entire mess, there were many opportunities for us to completely lose our heads. And while we certainly lost our tempers, we didn’t have the luxury of losing control. We had a business to run. Our customers don’t care that we’ve been screwed over by some crook. Our employees probably cared that we’d lost a bunch of money, but they still need their paychecks. And our franchisees certainly cared that they were still waiting on trucks that might never arrive, but they expected us to live up to our end of the contract.
Those were long days, to be sure. And perhaps it was during those days that we became true business owners. We were tested like never before. We were also forced to confront the consequences of our mistakes. It was harder than training for Division I hockey and harder than not having a dad around growing up. But because of these trials from our youth, we found we could handle this.
We know we emerged from the crisis stronger, more educated, and better prepared. Our faults had been rubbed in our faces, but we also had rediscovered our virtues. We saw more clearly what made us a great team and what made Cousins Maine Lobster a great company. And we learned to cling to those virtues a little bit tighter than before.
As should you. Being a business owner means confronting tough truths about yourself and the people with whom you work. But it also means appreciating the things that made you successful in the first place. For us, it’s our families, our friendship, and our home. Those are the things that bring us back to our centers. And the higher we climb, the closer to our centers we want to be.