What is Main Street Mindset?
A weekly newsletter that translates business, leadership, and entrepreneurial topics into small business parlance.
Dear Readers,
I was at one of our industry’s annual trade shows about five years ago, having a casual meeting with one of my long-time suppliers. The supplier was someone we had a great relationship with, the kind that goes back multiple generations on each side. In discussing our business goals for the coming year, he asked me what my KPI’s were.
This put me in a very uncomfortable position. I had no freaking clue what a KPI was, which left me with one of two options. I could smile with unjustified confidence and gloss over the question in a way that hopefully didn't raise any eyebrows, or swallow my pride, ask what it meant, and hope my lack of knowledge of an odd acronym didn’t reflect too poorly on my ability to run my own businesses.1
This type of interaction is not a one-off in my experience. I run three separate, but related, small businesses. These companies have nearly 50 employees in aggregate. Amidst the typical ups and downs of business cycles, we’ve been quite successful over the last ten-plus years by any definition. We have always gotten through bad times with no staff layoffs, and we have expanded greatly during good times. With the help of those around me, I’ve built companies that run smoothly on their own, with only my oversight needed, while leaning heavily on my passion for psychology and published research.2 And I continue to develop my management skills each day, sometimes with a short article from a respected media outlet, sometimes through years of research on a vaunted sports owner.
Generally, I feel like I’m pretty good at my job.3 And I feel like I’m fairly knowledgeable about the factors involved in running businesses. But more and more recently, I’ve found that the business world has turned overly corporate, even at the small business level. Articles claiming to be about small business management are clearly written from the perspective of someone who has a very different definition of what a small business really is. Books about leadership and management are all about topics that really only apply to companies that have 17 levels of hierarchy. Tell me the last time a Harvard Business Review article applied to a small business owner. What Wall Street Journal writer focuses on anything outside of big corporations? Are there a lot of business memoirs or biographies that relate to anyone desperately trying to make ends meet in their nascent small company? Not all of us are trying to take our small company public and become a billionaire. Most of us are just trying to be successful in our own way. Over time, this lack of bona fide small business writing has seen my feelings evolve from annoyance to curiosity.
Rather than dig into it and find out why, it’s more my style to simply try and fill the void.
My family has been in small business since 1954. My grandparents risked their entire lives to open their first company and, 70 years later, I am the third generation to run our family businesses – companies that have expanded dramatically over the years. Our small business deals mostly with other small businesses of various sizes, both on the customer and supplier side. I’ve always had the desire to help colleagues that may not be quite as exposed to the business world as my family has been in our unique position of working with manufacturers, retailers, and consumers across the world. I’ve spent years working to better educate those in our industry, and utilize others’ expertise to better my own understanding. We all have strengths and weaknesses, and working together to share what we know can only help make us better at what we do. None of us are the sole authority on what makes a business successful.
As small business owners, we often have the first glimpse of what’s going on in the economy and in the world, well before any of the analysts or professionals know.4 I remember being on a conference call with one of our company’s financial advisors in 2021, a few months before inflation blew up across the world. After the COVID-19 business boom that our industry experienced, we were starting to see prices go through the roof for everything: international freight, domestic trucking, wages, insurance, raw materials, etc. We were already desperately trying to keep prices at the same level, but were failing miserably in doing so. But because the giant companies like Coca-Cola, Apple, Nike, and others were not yet bending the knee to inevitable inflation, no one in the larger business world seemed to think there was a problem. Our financial advisor mentioned that his firm found that the inflation rate was “only” at around 5 percent. I literally laughed out loud, and said “you better look deeper than that, because it’s going way higher than that already.” He assured me that their data was accurate.
The data and information coming out of Wall Street, big firms, and even government agencies are certainly accurate for what they measure. But what they measure doesn’t always tell the full story. It’s like looking at political polling. An average person looks at a poll saying “Candidate X leads Candidate Y by three points,” and they take that to mean that the poll is predicting that Candidate X will win the election by three points. But that doesn’t tell the full story. For example, a poll has a margin of error (which is usually more than three points, especially in a smaller poll). Also, a poll is not a prediction, it is simply a snapshot at a point in time – and as we know, things can change overnight, let alone within a few weeks.
All of that to say, there has to be a better way to break all of this down into easy-to-understand pieces that shed light on topics relevant to small business, while also helping make all of us better at our day-to-day jobs.
That’s the basis for Main Street Mindset.
My goal is to write weekly articles that will deliver directly to your inbox.5 These articles will always have a business lens to them, but it will cover a range of topics, stretching from finance, entrepreneurship, and marketing, to broader topics such as leadership, psychology (and how it affects business), even lessons from the sports world. Occasionally I’ll include a book suggestion/review if I found it to be helpful. And hopefully I’ll get over my crippling desire for privacy to share personal stories that help shed light on some of these topics.
I don’t claim to be an expert or to know everything. In fact, as one of my first articles will show, humility and knowing what you don’t know is one of the most important qualities of good leadership. Too often we write with the hope that everyone agrees with us, or we only read what we agree with. But that’s not what my goal is here.6 I want to hear from your experiences, what you agree and disagree with, so that we can all learn from one another and work to improve ourselves every day. One of the lines I repeat at work is, “We can always be better.” All of us should strive to improve, both personally and professionally, just a bit each day. That’s what I hope to achieve with Main Street Mindset.
Let me know what topics you want to read about, which articles clicked for you, which didn’t, or any other thoughts you have. I look forward to your feedback and continuing the conversation!
Sincerely,
Alan