You Can Take Him Out, But You Can't Dress Him Up

Last week I had to put on my only pair of big-boy pants and drive into Cambridge for a meeting with Lemelson MIT, Blue Hills' most lucrative client. Since Anne works at MIT, this was a routine matter for her, but driving into the city is always a white-knuckle experience for me. More to the point, this was the first business meeting I've had to attend in at least 13 years. Since my previous two jobs didn't require business attire, all of my "nice" clothes are 20-25 years old. I only ever wear shorts and T-shirts during the summer or jeans and flannel shirts in the winter. Fortunately, Greater Boston is not a fashion Mecca (and, hipsters aside, Cambridge is even less so), men's styles don't change drastically over time, and nobody cares what a 60-year-old man looks like as long as he makes the effort to conform. The main problem is not so much that my "nice" clothes aren't very nice, but that they don't fit very well because my girth has expanded over the decades. 

If my new profession is going to require more meetings, though, I'm going to need to buy some new clothes.

I am tickled that MIT is paying me, a person with only rudimentary education and no science training whatsoever, to write technical articles for a lay audience.

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Hard to believe that it's time for Curio City's July numbers already. The first really substantial Blue Hills activity renders my usual QuickBooks report meaningless...but, just for yucks, here are the numbers for Kraken Enterprises:

July

Total income: +396.6
Payroll: +1,508.9%

Marketing: -12.2%
Net Income (Profit) vs LY: +89% (+$149)

Actual Profit/Loss: -$18

2017 YTD

Total income: +74.1%
Total COGS: +7.1%
Payroll: +297.2%

Marketing: -22.6%
Net Income (Profit) vs LY: +205.1% (+$4,359)

Actual Profit/Loss: +$2,234

Pretty amusing, huh? Excel says that Curio City ended July short by $1,100, but the YTD is still running $1,200 ahead of LY. Curio City is still $3,800 in debt, though, and I'm not entirely confident that it will ever dig itself out. Ultimately, I might have to poach some of my Blue Hills revenue to pay off the Amex before I can close Curio City next fall. 

(I should mention that, for the first time ever, I didn't pocket all of the payroll. My wife is officially a sometimes-employee when she takes income under the Blue Hills name, and I actually wrote out a paycheck for her this month. This is particularly funny since all of Blue Hills' business comes from her contacts and reputation.)

Tuh-MAY-toe, Toe-MAH-toe

I briefly took umbrage a few weeks ago when a reader commented "Based on the posts here at least, [Curio City's] been in a slow death spiral for years". That's true no matter how you slice it. And yet, somehow I still don't think of my store as a failure, maybe because I set such a low bar for success. (Incidentally, I like getting comments, so don't let this anecdote discourage you from sounding off.)

Curio City grew by double digits from 2006 through 2009, when my salary topped out at $16,737 and a year-end profit brought my total compensation to $20k. I wasn't exactly closing in on my ultimate goal of earning $50,000 a year, but things were moving in the right direction. When growth fell to single digits in 2010-11, I chalked it up to the Great Recession. Curio City's first-ever decline in 2012 was only 1.4% -- hardly cause for alarm. Alarm would come with 2013's unexpected 21% drop.

Perhaps I should have seen the handwriting on the wall at that time. Instead, I decided it was a fluke; every business has occasional bad years, right? 2014-15 extended the losing streak to four consecutive years, but those declines were just 1% and 2.2% -- again, not good, but not significant. 

The scales finally fell from my eyes when Christmas 2016 fell a record 24% and left me deeply in debt. A retailer that fails Christmas is a dead retailer. I think my posts this year have been clear-eyed about that.

So yeah, failure. The thing is, I could still turn this around. It would take money -- a lot of money, enough to both get out of debt and renew my product selection -- and effort. Money is always hard for honest people to come by, but not impossible; it's just money, after all. It's my enthusiasm that will never recover. Even if I were to redouble payroll to its former level after my debt is retired, it still wouldn't pay much. Realistically, I'd need at least three successful years just to climb back to the 2009 peak. By then I would have spent 15 years, or a quarter of my life, doing something that doesn't matter and that I no longer care about. I hope to "retire" (i.e., start drawing Social Security, although I'll never stop working) in seven years. I don't want to spend half of those years clawing my way back up to 2009. 

In retrospect, I wish that I'd realized that in 2013. I have a life history of staying in losing situations long after normal people would have cut their losses -- partly because I hate change, and partly because I cling to optimism too long. If I've learned anything by now, it's that when any organization's glory days are gone, they don't come back.  
   
Booming sales this May and June made me second-guess my decision to close. But all of that business came from kites. Those sales are already petering out and they'll be completely over in a few weeks. Everything else I sell is moribund and I have no new product lines to pick up the slack. If I had the stomach to launch an all-out effort, I could probably still turn this Christmas into a winner and restore the ground that I lost last year -- remember that I'm running 15% ahead of LY so far. But my commenter also observed that "your new business pays a lot more with far, far less overhead". That's undeniable. Blue Hills isn't reliable enough to replace Curio City yet, but -- if we continue to avoid the overdue next recession -- I'm confident that it will get there within the next year. I would rather spend my last official working years writing and editing than taking stuff out of big boxes and putting it in small boxes.

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Just for the record...last month did finish as the second-best June ever, and only missed first place by $300. July might have extended the winning streak if I hadn't closed the store for four days. During every vacation I've taken over the past 12 years, I suspended my advertising but kept the store open and monitored business while I was away. Because I only took three days off this year, I actually closed for the first time ever. Statistically, I forfeited $600 worth of business...but since that only would have put $60 in my pocket, it hardly seemed worth intruding on my short getaway. Ignoring Curio City entirely for three days whetted my appetite for the day when I never have to think about it again.

Anyway, this July is indeed running about $600 behind LY, and I don't expect to make up the difference.