Frankly Speaking: Three lessons I’ve learnt from the first year of running my small business
Chryssie Swarbrick shares three major lessons she has learnt in the past twelve months of running her cafe Two Franks.
I’m not the first to compare starting a business with having a newborn and I certainly won’t be the last, but being a working parent, I can’t help but draw parallels between the two.
Both involve a huge commitment, a complete lifestyle upheaval and the taking on of a new identity as a caretaker and responsible adult. The beginning of both life as a parent and a business owner is ripe with crossovers: sleepless nights, second-guessing every decision you make, and in both instances, you are wary of leaving your baby in the hands of others.
But over time, things change. You find a routine, you gain confidence in your abilities, you let go of your iron grip. All of a sudden your baby is one and life starts to find equilibrium.
My sister and I recently celebrated the first birthday of our cafe, which we opened last year across the road from our childhood home.
Here are three major lessons we have learnt in the past twelve months of running our business:
Managing young workers can be challenging
By its nature, hospitality is a transient industry – uni students biding their time until graduation, travellers, teenagers dipping their toes into working life – and so you find yourself building and managing a team of young workers.
When I think back to my own hospitality and service jobs in my university days, I now see how formative it can be. There are lessons I learnt bartending and in customer service that I have carried with me in surprising ways into the corporate world.
Simultaneously, I look back and think of my managers from that time, reflecting on my behaviour and attitude as a young worker and seeing how much I have professionally grown.
Young workers are wonderful, vibrant, hard-working, enthusiastic and caring.
But to return to the parenting analogy, sometimes it can feel that you are not only managing the professional performance of your team, but their emotional growth too.
Those late-teen to early-20s years are tumultuous times and as a manager, you will contend with younger workers bringing their outside lives and emotions into the workplace. There’s interpersonal relationships to contend with and a careful balancing of personalities to ensure workplace harmony.
Additionally, workplace health and wellbeing provider, TELUS Health Australia, recently released their survey findings that “younger workers had high levels of anxiety and stress” and “they were two-and-a-half times more likely to feel burnt out compared to older workers”.
I have learnt it is imperative to keep these sensitivities and vulnerabilities in mind, to create a warm working environment with open communication and regularly check-in with our team to keep track of their wellbeing.
Younger workers need a lot of guidance, but it is so rewarding to see them grow.
You can’t do it alone
Running a business is hard. Running a business as a working mother is harder. Trying to do it on your own is nearly impossible.
After a year of running our cafe, I have been endlessly grateful that I can share the load with my sister and we can each pick up the slack of the other when the need arises. We have school drop-offs and sick kids to contend with, personal commitments and professional goals, but taking on the challenge of a business with a partner has kept a sense of balance in our lives.
Finding the right business partner is its own challenge, but an absolute must to retain your sanity.
Owning a business can put pressure on every relationship in your life – from the friends you don’t get to see as often, to family members who get emotionally involved, to the partner who has to pick up more of the responsibilities at home when you can’t – so to have a business partner who is as equally invested as you, who can act as your sounding board and support so other relationships in your life don’t have to, is an absolute must to keep you from burning out.
Work to your strengths, outsource the rest
There are some elements of the business I am very, very good at and others that make me break out in a sweat (hello, taxes and payroll). I believe that the more time I can free up for the tasks I am good at and enjoy, the better off the business will be.
There is pressure for business owners to do everything, but it’s important to reserve energy not just to keep the cogs turning, but to allow you to grow the business as well.
Along with my sister, my brother-in-law also works with us and we split the essential operational tasks between us based on our interests and skill sets – ordering, invoicing, rostering, payroll, maintenance are divvied up so that no one person has too much on their plate.
We have an accountant to keep across our finances and have employed an HR service to assist us with staff procedures, hiring and incident reporting.
While we sacrifice some of our business income to outsource these tasks, it alleviates the weight on our shoulders and ensures we are ticking all the tricky legal boxes businesses face.
The more we hand over, the more we feel able to delve into diversifying the business into multiple income streams and can spend more time on our marketing and promotion, without feeling like we are letting the business suffer.
As we head into our second year, I find myself shaking off the fear and uncertainty that comes with being a new business owner.
While there are plenty more lessons ahead, I have conquered the steep learning curve and find myself calmer, more confident, and ever so slightly stepping back, seeing the future potential in my business and proudly watching it grow.
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