Save your business — or not?

Career (re)building in the postpandemic era, a three-part series.

I know I look like a career counselor and columnist, but I’m actually a business owner / operator. I’ve started, owned or operated more than a dozen businesses since my junior year in college, many of them simultaneously. From book publishing to house cleaning to bathroom tiling to conference center operations to, yes, career counseling, I have nearly 40 years of continuous experience as an entrepreneur.

And I’ve never seen anything like this before.

Without question, this is the most confusing, distressing, unsettling and just plain difficult business climate I have experienced or known about. And yet, because business is inherently a matter of yin and yang, it’s also the most intriguing and potentially auspicious climate I’ve seen.

As the thinking goes, whenever there is an upheaval in the economy, there are winners and losers. Some businesses will survive this period, some won’t, and some will blossom in unexpected ways.

If you’re a business owner, here’s the thing you need to understand: Which businesses are which won’t be a matter of chance. Although luck may play a part, I’ve learned there’s very little that can stop a business owner who intends to survive. The question is: What will survival look like?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. There are questions to ask while deciding the fate of your business. Such as:

Do you want to save your business? It’s OK to say no. I believe that businesses have a natural cycle, just like other living things – and most especially when they draw their breath from the owner. But this is one of those courageous questions we’re always hearing about. If you don’t want to run this company anymore, you need to face that and do what needs to be done, even if it involves something drastic such as bankruptcy.

Delaying things will not serve you well, as keeping a business on life support is exhausting – particularly if you’re the one doing the chest compressions. And frankly, now is a good time for a no-explanation-needed business closure, which might make this easier to do.

What are you willing to do to keep your business? When I started my current company in 1985, it was roughly my sixth business – and I had just turned 23. I vowed to stay open for five years, just to prove that it could be done. To keep that promise, I had to change the services drastically, move multiple times for cheaper rent, sign a loan at 32 percent interest, deliver newspapers for two years, unload UPS trucks at night, take in roommates, and much, much more.

Would I go to the same lengths now? That’s hard to say. Now I have more years of experience to guide a “work smarter, not harder” approach. The world today is also more accommodating to entrepreneurs. It took me 10 years to get a credit card back then, making it almost comic to arrange travel to national confer- ences. Of course, today’s easier access to credit is a double-edged sword, which creates another decision / pitfall for business owners to navigate.

Whatever stage you’re at in your business, the question of what you’re willing to do is pivotal. Remember that it’s not a litmus test of your skill or heart as an entrepreneur. It’s just a straightforward question: How much fight do you have in you, and what does that fight look like?

Does your business have to look the same in its next version? We know that retail shops can become e-tailers, and that restaurants can become food trucks. But can a computer manufacturer become a human resources firm (Control Data/Ceridian)? Can a book seller become a perfume maker (Avon)? Can a paper mill innovate cell phones (Nokia)? Yes, apparently they can. For more examples, use your search engine to look up “companies that transformed themselves.”

You won’t see my example there, but I enjoy laughing about the first year of my five-year survival vow. That’s because I didn’t start out as a career strategist, but as a typist. I still have the window signs I commissioned for my storefront across from a college, proclaiming “We type term papers.” Six months later the college opened a computer center and my business nosedived. In the seventh month my company became a resume writing service and that’s the direction we’ve maintained in the 35 years since.

What will you do this summer? Maybe you’ll put your business on ice, or perhaps you’ll transform it, or maybe you’ll be operating as usual. If you decide to shut down, square your shoulders and go out with your head held high. There will be something else for you around the corner, and you’ll want to be ready to meet it.