Learning to Love a Business
I have a different perspective on the classic adage: “Do what you love for a living.” Indeed, there are few people who can actually find a calling early in life and then pursue that dream as a career. So, are the rest of us doomed to a fate of unsatisfying career compromise? I don’t think so. From my experience, I hold that it’s possible to start a business for practical reasons and then learn to “love it.”
I got into the wig business as a side hustle. and I admit I was not part of the demographic for the very products I was selling. I didn't shop for wigs personally (I'm thankful for my full head of hair) and I wasn’t invited to enough costume parties to justify buying wigs for fun.
Despite my personal reticence to buy wigs, I still saw a unique and well-timed opportunity. Other online wig businesses were generating revenue, but they were largely not technically savvy. I knew that I could leverage my web background to disrupt the market and capture market share.
Of course, breaking into the industry wasn’t as simple as adding my technical know-how. Although I was confident that I could build a functionally optimized website for my products, I still lacked the breadth of skills necessary to scale a small business. Moreover, my company was bootstrapped so I didn’t have the funds to pay for employees to fill every business element. For my new business to survive, I had to wear multiple hats and take on all the skill sets I was lacking - a blessing in disguise.
For instance, I learned to create and read a financial report, something vital to assess the health of the business. From my P&L Statements, I learned all about my expenses and identified runaway expenditures, which allowed me to optimize our cash flow. I even learned how to combine revenue and cost projections to predict future trends. Despite studying tons of math since grade school, I was now using math in a practical, grounded application for the first time.
Another example is how I learned to properly run marketing campaigns. I learned that running paid marketing campaigns on Google ads was just like playing real-time strategy computer games, something I enjoyed doing my entire life. Using my gaming mindset, I created campaigns and keywords which looked for strategic weaknesses in my competitors’ coverage, and then I deployed and monitored spending to see if those “attacks” were successful in generating orders for my store and capturing market share.
Yet another example is how I learned to prepare my own product images. I have always loved photography as a hobby, but it was my business that gave me the opportunity to turn the hobby into something professional. Hilariously, all the camera and lighting equipment I coveted became a tax-deductible write-off in my quest to produce better product images. Chasing better images in turn gave me the inspiration to redesign my website, and I was able to evolve to become a more-competent web designer.
Basically, I discovered my joy in learning things which led me to run the business better and more profitably. Although my college education careened me into a specialized path, my actual business experience gave me an expansive education in areas such as finance, marketing, and design. All of these skills were essential for the survival and growth of my business. As my business grew, I eventually assigned many of these tasks to staff, but I’ll never forget the empowering feeling of being able to handle problems across all dimensions of the business.
I admit that I didn’t fully love the products I sold. But I did love learning how to solve the problems I encountered while selling those products. The better that I got at various skills, the more fun it was to run the business. In short, I learned to love the business.
