The Magic of Tiny Business by Sharon Rowe

Author:Sharon Rowe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2018-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

But Be Careful What You Ask for . . .

The phones started ringing off the hook with people saying, “I want to go green.” Orders came in practically non-stop for months and then with a repeat of the same show a year later, orders flooded in again. Our integrated, scalable, cloud-based system held up, thankfully, but we had to get a bigger office and add phone lines and staff immediately.

We went from $700,000 to $2.2 million in a year and from a two-person office to five and growing. We had back orders for up to three months. We were overwhelmed, but we patiently communicated to all our new customers, setting expectations on delivery and welcoming them into our eco-friendly world like they were dinner guests. Throughout the insanity of the pre- and post-Oprah months, we maintained regular business hours and I managed to swim daily. My personal take on this was, “We’re not running blood. There are no bag emergencies.”

In addition to increasing sales, we were now catapulted from our tiny niche into a wildly popular category of green products. Oprah gave millions of people a touchpoint, inspiring them to think about our environment as something to respect and protect. Big ideas were communicated because she pointed to our brand! And we went from being a fledging to a fast-growth business overnight.

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But businesspeople were also watching.

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They always are. They watch smaller companies grow ideas and then jump in with well-financed production and branding to meet the mainstream demand, capitalizing on ideas as quickly as they can. Not only that, there were signs we would be entering an economic downturn and a recession was looming.

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Stress is when you don’t know what you don’t know but you know you need to know more.

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It no longer mattered that we were there first, the pioneers of a new concept. We had to move fast. I had to figure out how to manage rapid growth fast. That’s when the real stress kicked in. I didn’t know what I didn’t know—but needed to know—about growing and building a bigger business. In the next sections, I’ll tell you all that I learned so that you can be better prepared than I was when your business takes off.

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