I spent most of August on a self-styled writing retreat at a gorgeous house overlooking the ocean on Vancouver Island with the intention of completing the first draft of my book. I couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful or inspirational place to write. By the second week, however, I began to go a bit stir crazy and found I needed to get out and have a change of scenery in the afternoons in order to continue writing.

On the recommendation of a friend who knew my passion for all things Asian, my first afternoon escape led me to a little café called Sakura Japanese Coffee and Tea in the nearby town of Parksville.

Walking through the front door I was overcome with “natsukashii” – an expression that conveys a complicated and favorite Japanese emotion, the bittersweet nostalgia for something lovely and loved, now past – and settled in for a productive afternoon of writing. I loved the place so much that I returned there almost every afternoon in that second week. As much as I loved the place, however, it was evident to me by how empty it was that business might not be so good.

Even though I was supposed to be focused on my writing, I can never resist offering a helping hand to a small business in need, so by Friday I was compelled to strike up a conversation with the owner. Naoko, a very young and energetic looking forty-something woman, had emigrated from Japan ten years ago due to her husband’s work. The first few years had been focused on raising their son, but as he got older, she found herself needing something more to occupy her time. After a few years of unsuccessfully searching for work she would enjoy, she determined to open her own business.

I asked Naoko why she had started her business, aside from earning an income for herself. The main reason, she confessed, was that in her forties with her son entering his teens, she was at a point in her life where she wanted to re-establish a life for herself as “just Naoko,” rather than as Mrs. X or X’s mom.

She also loved baking and drinking coffee and had missed the Japanese-style sweets and coffee that she was used to back home. This was the basis of her business concept. She believed she could differentiate herself in the market by running an authentic Japanese café serving green tea, Japanese-style coffee and homemade Japanese-style baked goods.

Unfortunately the market was not too keen on the latter two product offerings. Sales in her first month were dismal. The Japanese-style coffee was too strong for Canadian tastes and the authentic Japanese baked goods were perceived as too high in fat, too sweet, or simply unfamiliar. She changed her menu to offer weaker Canadian style coffee as well as lattes, cappuccinos, and traditional baked goods such as muffins and cookies. This had led to a small increase in business, but still not enough to cover her monthly expenses.

A friend suggested adding Italian sodas, ice cream, sushi and panini sandwiches, popular in other cafés, to her offerings. These items had definitely added to increased sales. Over the few weeks that I was there word seemed to be getting out about the sushi in particular and regular customers were growing steadily. Still, the tables were mostly empty with customers trickling in to order sushi or grab a quick coffee one or two at a time. Most of these customers were summer-only traffic due to her location in a resort area, so Naoko was concerned that her business would not be able to make ends meet come fall.

While we were chatting, one customer stepped in the doorway, looked around and then quickly stepped out saying “just looking” when Naoko caught her eye. Naoko looked at me in frustration and told me that scene repeated itself numerous times each day. Some of the customers did end up coming back in at a later time, but many did not.

As I stepped outside my own original love of the place brought on by many fond hours spent in similar Tokyo cafés and looked at the décor with fresh eyes, I suddenly saw how it might not meet with customers had come to expect from the other coffee shops in the area. The other homegrown coffee shops in Parksville hit the funky-cozy end of the continuum. Naoko’s café, by contrast would have seemed almost stark and cold. In short, Naoko was feeling frustrated and fearful. What had inspired her to open her business to begin with hadn’t been received well by the market and now she was scrambling to compromise in order to survive.

I have seen similar scenarios occur in many small businesses and the results are never good. If they hit on the right mix and the business ends up surviving, the owner ends up stressed-out and unhappy because they find themselves heavily invested both with their money and time in something that they do not have a passion for. If they don’t hit on the right mix, the owner frantically jumps from one new idea to the next trying to figure out what the market wants, leading to inconsistency in both marketing and product offering eventually closes the doors.

So if you find yourself in this dilemma, how do you get out of it?

The ideal would be to avoid it in the first place by making sure you do your due diligence before opening your business. All too many small businesses do not bother to write a proper business plan let alone do proper market research before diving in and opening their doors.

Being an entrepreneur myself, I believe that this is at least partly due to the fact that the entrepreneurial mindset has a tendency to combine risk-taking and pig-headedness in a potentially explosive combination. In our not-so-practical terms this means that once us entrepreneurs get an idea in our head that we believe will work, we have a tendency to tune out any information and opinions to the contrary.

Now I’m not saying that you should listen to every naysayer about why your business won’t work or how it needs to look to succeed. Many of the most successful businesses of our time have grown out of ideas that were contrary to what was endorsed by successful businesses at their inception.

I’m just saying that you need to listen to these opinions and information enough to take them into account and develop strategies and contingency plans to address them.

Assuming you didn’t write a business plan or do market research when you started your business and you now find yourself in a dilemma similar to Naoko’s, stop and take the time to write one now. I’m not talking about taking months to do a two-hundred page document. Probably anywhere from three to ten pages will do for a start, depending on the complexity of your business. If you are in a position where your business is already up and running this really need not take you more than a few hours over a period of a few weeks as the challenges and successes you have had up to this point will have given you a much better understanding of the market and where you want and need to focus your business.

Your tendency even now is probably to ignore this advice. You are probably thinking that it is more important to rush out and implement the latest idea you have to save your business. Stop. Take a deep breath. Now honestly ask yourself whether that “jump first, think later” attitude is what might have brought you here to begin with.

Sometimes you need to slow down to speed up. Take the time to stop and determine how best to build a strong foundation for your business. Don’t give in to the survival fears that may be driving you to just run out and do something, anything, to bring more money in the door. While you might get some short-term payoffs, it may be at the expense of the long-term health of both yourself and your business.

On a final note, never lose sight of the real reasons that you started your business. What were the passions that you were trying to pursue? For most small business owners, their business began as much more than just a way to make money. If, in order for your business to survive, you need to change it so much that it no longer serves these passions, then you are better off to let it die.

Building a successful business requires putting your heart and soul into years of hard work. If your business is designed to serve your heart and soul then all of the hard work is not only worth it, it is a huge part of the payoff long before you see the financial returns rolling in. If your business does not serve your heart and soul then even the perfect recipe for making money will exact a far greater price in misery.

As for Naoko, we ended up coming up with some great ideas to help her refocus her original concept in a way that would be better received by the market and still help her meet her key objective of having a place where she could be “just Naoko” while sharing her love of baking, coffee, and Japanese culture. The key strategy, due to her location being somewhat off the beaten path in a tourist resort area, was that she would need to make her coffee shop a destination – a place that people would go out of their way to come to because it had something special to offer.

To support this she decided to warm-up her décor by making it more Zen and Japanese to draw customers in and encourage them to stay awhile. To further make it a destination and to tie in to her desire to share Japanese culture with her community, Naoko also came up with a plan to promote and run regular events such as classes in sushi-making, Japanese flower-arranging, tea and coffee appreciation, and even baking.

In Naoko’s case, we were able to increase her likelihood of success by amplifying the real reasons she had started her business – to create a place to connect with her community and share her culture – and integrating them more fully into her business concept and marketing strategies.

While this may not be possible in every case, you are always going to build a stronger foundation for success and fulfillment in your business by asking “how can I make more money by making my business express more of who I am or be more of what I want?” than you will by asking “What things that I want do I need to compromise to make this business work?” Remember, you probably left your job because you didn’t want to sell your soul to the company store. Even if it’s your own store, selling your soul still has the same result.

-Andrea Jacques (aka. kyoseigirl)

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