I finally went up the the Small Business Advisors, up at COCC, in my fourth year of business.

A little history.

I bought my store with a small, co-signed loan in April, 1984. I'd worked in the store from the first year, 1980, and had been the (largely powerless) manager for a year. At the time, what I paid seemed like a bunch of money, and now looks like ridiculously little money. Even so, it was more money than I had, and I probably technically overpaid. In fact, when I sat down with a calculator, I figured that I needed to gross at least twice as much as the store was currently doing in order to survive.

I bought the store anyway. I knew that the potential was there. The absentee owner had stripped the store twice to begin stores in Portland, and had pretty much neglected and underserved the Bend store for a couple of years.

I was able to pay half down to the owner, and keep back a couple of thousand dollars for an infusion of inventory and emergency cash. Which I spent almost immediately. Sales reached survivability and stayed there. I had to make monthly payments to the owner.

I struggled with cash-flow for the next couple of years. I never had enough material, but I couldn't afford to buy more. I began to realize that I was not coming even close to the potential sales, but couldn't do much about it. Lifting oneself by one's bootstraps sounds great, but is nearly impossible in reality. Ironically, the success of baseball cards, which I brought in my second year of business, actually compounded the problem. I never had enough money to buy enough material to satisfy demand.

So I went up and had meetings with the SMA folk. The advisor listened to me and said, "You have a primitive sophistication."

This became my favorite saying for the next few years. A beautiful oxymoron. And exactly what I felt myself. I was in fact doing all the right things, but just doing it the hard way. For instance, he gave me the "Break-even" formula, which is; Fixed expenses, divided by your protfit margin, must equal gross sales." Simple, and yet so telling.

So the advisor put me through my paces. He made me come up with a business plan, do research, think it all through. Now I'd pretty much been doing that, informally. But it didn't hurt to do it formally, as well. The upshot was, as some point in the discussions, I said frustratingly; "I believe that I could reach xxx in sales in five years, if I just had the inventory to serve demand."

He looked at me and said, "Why couldn't you do that THIS year."

It was like someone had taken off my leg irons and cuffs. "Yeah," I said. "I could easily do that.....if I had the money."

The advisor went with me to a bank loan officer, who gave me a loan that was 4 times what my original buying price was. And I was off to the races.

One of the interesting things the advisor said was, that most of the people who went through the formal process of making a business plan, would decide that their idea wasn't feasible. I've always remembered that, because I sometimes think people put more thought into buying a car than they do in opening a business.

My own situation -- of deciding that I could make the store work even though it was currently grossing only half of what it needed to gross -- was a lucky break. (Not completely lucky, because over the years I've decided one of my talents is doing a realistic appraisal of future sales....)

Still, it taught me that a good idea isn't enough; there has to be a realistic approach to implementing the idea.

And as my wife says after listening to this entry......"MONEY."