Risk and the reward
As persons have been reading my blog posts, I’ve received great feedback. What I would enjoy is to hear how other women face challenges and find balance in family, work, and life. E-mail your stories me. They don’t have to be polished - or even amazing. Sit down, type something up, and send it in. - You don’t have to use your real name. Go with something like “Minneapolis 5K Mom” or a “Woman with hidden talents and no time to express them because my kids take all my time” . You get the idea....
Today’s thought is about the balance between stretching oneself in work goals, what is the payoff and is it worth it?
The ol’ risk and reward kind of thing. I had a fun talk, as I always do, with Kevin O’Connor, who worked for us long ago and who has now owned Gear West Bike and Tri for over ten years. He purchased the bike/tri part of the Gear West business when it grew too much for me and Brian Knutson to handle a specialty sports business needing serious love 12 months of the year. We knew it was time for our very talented employee, Kevin, to take over the part of the GW business he loved, triathlon bikes. We needed to reduce some of the retail demands on us. When the 2000 Birkebeiner ski race was shortened at the last minute due to warm weather we returned to the store (after selling wax and promoting skiing to a melting marathon ski race), and found 80+ bikes waiting for repair, also, because of the early spring. Many of our mechanics were still at school, so it took a few 50+ hour work weeks to keep caught up. We knew then that to keep Kevin in the Gear West family, he needed the challenge of owning his own business. Together the strength as ‘sister companies’ (Gear West Bike & Tri and Gear West Run & XC Ski) would be healthier than Brian and me running ragged to keep a family and two weather-based businesses running its best 365 days of the year.
Splitting the stores however, did not free up a lot of time. It made sense to add running shoes to balance out the summer business with just ski store, and we were a triathlon destination anyway. Plus I love running, it’s a key component of training for so many sports and we have so many great running/ walking trails around our store in Long Lake. So we added a full line of run and trail shoes and of course track and xc spikes since our key employees coached running and our key High School skiers are runners. Of course the next step was how to get product to our customers who did not want to drive west to Long Lake, so we focused on building a web business and shipping product around the country. The result? We needed more space.
I could have halted retail ‘progress’ and just focused on the task at hand, selling running shoes and xc skis a quarter a miles west of Kevin’s Gear West triathlon store, but we didn’t. As more room was needed, I learned a crash course in commercial real estate development. We eventually purchased an old gas station, dealt with petroleum issues, built the white Gear West Cross Country Ski and Run building and connected it to Kevin’s Triathlon store. Three years later we opened an additional clothing store with a friend, originally called the “Buckhorn” (our partner eventually moved to Excelsior) and continued to grow it into the new Gear West Adrenaline, in a rented building a mile west of Long Lake. We added soccer, lacrosse, Alpine skis and service, and expanded our clothing lines. But the location proved difficult with this new store loaction, so we obtained a loan to construct a new Gear West Adrenaline building next to our Cross Country Ski and Run store. The new retail goal was to create a specialty sport ‘campus’ for Gear West to increase convenience for our customers (and for us).
Perhaps navigating my way towards this most recent goal triggered my evaluation of just how much risk do I want to continue taking before the toll is not worth the reward? I return to my talk with Kevin. He focuses on his business of bikes and triathlons seriously and he does not let other shiny objects or ideas pull him away. His sells his services and products, and does not build stores and expand into other retail avenues. Perhaps Kevin has assumed other risks unbeknownst by me, but certainly he has avoided a certain level of business angst by ‘not getting bigger’.
We decided to ‘Get Bigger’ and to follow some ‘Big Idea’s’ and have risked a lot doing it alone. The pressures Brian and I invited into our lives by expanding the Gear West business and campus weigh heavily on our daily activities 14/7. Lesson #349, never think petroleum issues are buried deep enough on a gas station site. All I can say is commercial building is not for the weary. Governmental rules and regulations will bury all but the few headstrong individuals who think they can stomach conforming to the codes of commercial development whether they make economic sense or not. The lessons I learned certainly makes for spirited dinner conversation, but they have left me with a bruised and disillusioned view on the future of small business growth. Maybe the payoff will happen, but at what cost? I am not saying I regret my decisions, but the financial and mental drain was more taxing than expected and I am a realist.
So it intrigues me to evaluate my peer group: Who chooses simpler careers? How have their priorities played out in terms of life’s happiness? I tell my sons, “hard work pays off and really smart hard work pays off more”, but maybe the “hard work bar” should not be as high as I so often thought. Completing the Hawaii Ironman is thought to be a pinnacle of triathlon achievement, but finishing a sprint tri can produce the same purposeful feeling given a different mindset. How much worry or stress do we want to add to our lives before hope of financial pay-off or sense of ‘being the best of something’ rings hollow when there is less time to enjoy fun activities?
Most of this discussion is elemental- it my spin on the basic choice of life balance, risk and reward, family and career and how we fit our opportunities into our short, face paced lives. For me I am finding that burying myself into my goals of always trying to grow, thru athletics and thru a career, needs a pause. For me to consider alternative routes towards ‘achievement’ takes a serious kick in the ass by person(s) or event(s). I have to think that others too, have worked very hard to ‘get somewhere’ and to support and direct our kids, and now, in our 40’s or 50’s, are reviewing the results of our efforts and choices. The way I look at it, there is still a lot of time (we sure hope!) to refine the direction of our efforts to make sure we are experiencing the pleasures and the bit of the contentment we seek.