Honoring Small Businesses

It's Small Business Week here in Canada. In fact, October is Small Business Month.

This topic is close to my heart as my parents were small business owners and now as a freelancer/solopreneur myself, I can appreciate what they went through.

I watched my parents sacrifice, take risks, fail, get back up, and do this over and over for 30+ years. Statistically speaking, the stats of restaurants surviving are grim so I try to remind them often of their accomplishment.

Even though my parents retired, resulting in the sale of both the restaurant and house, in 2015, I still receive messages of how much they are missed in their old community.

Small businesses are an integral part of our communities, they create jobs and opportunities, and support the local economy.

I could go on about the importance of small businesses in our communities but instead I wanted to share lessons and perspective through the lens of growing up in a family business to taking a more traditional career path but always feeling the pull to start my own business to becoming a solopreneur. And maybe also to plea with you to support local, small businesses.

Side note: No shame if you order from Amazon, shop or dine at big chain franchises, in all honesty, I do the same. I love having things come to my door and with a child with a severe food allergy, the big chains can be more accommodating. So as always, there's context and nuance.

Growing Up in a Family Business

For further context, my parents immigrated from Hong Kong before my siblings and I were born so English was their second language. My uncle had established a restaurant in Northern Ontario and after a house fire destroyed our family home, my parents bought a property 5 hours away in a small town on Lake Huron and moved the family there to start over.

Being in a restaurant was really all I knew as a child. While my classmates were enjoying trips and weekend time with family, we were raised by my grandmother, babysitters, and eventually my eldest sister. Luckily I had 3 sisters and a brother to play, argue with, and annoy :)

My parents worked all of the time. They took a few days off - the restaurant was always closed on Easter weekend and Christmas Day but other than that, I only remember a handful of family trips through out my childhood.

My siblings and I looked out for each other, waking each other up for school, staying up to help each other with school work and projects, and showing up to each other's school events.

As I got older, the stresses of running a business became apparent. Competition was pretty fierce being 1 of 4 Chinese restaurants with what I would say the worst location of them all.

Finding and hiring help was also tough. Part of the problem was that they only needed part-time help as they did a lot of the work themselves, my mom running the front of the house (until we were old enough to do it) and my dad cooked and ran the kitchen. So it's understandable that many employees left for full-time, post-secondary education, or other opportunities.

This is the stuff we don't see from the public perspective - the daily stress of making payroll, keeping the business running, finding reliable help, sacrificing time with your family.

And sure, you could say this is a choice.

But sometimes starting a business is the only choice a person has due to their own family's circumstances, their upbringing, and the opportunities they're presented with.

My Own Career Path

All of my siblings and I started as dishwashers and then eventually split off into either servers or kitchen help.

Because it was my parents' restaurant, I had little appreciation for this opportunity. I didn't have to go looking for a job, I didn't have to wait until I was "old enough" to find a job, it was there, waiting for me. Whether I liked it or not.

I also could see so many ways that I would do it differently. As most teens, I thought I knew better - until a later time when I learned that I really didn't know much at all.

Looking back, working for my parents was the best training grounds for me. I had an inside look at the trials and tribulations, the decisions, the opportunities, the failures, the hardships, and the wins.

And while I loved the idea of working for myself and building something from the ground up, I still took the traditional path.

I went off to post-secondary and then landed a job while always keeping an eye out for a better opportunity. I worked for a couple of television stations and then moved into construction.

My partner and I started investing in real estate and we thought about growing that into something full-time for both of us.

But that little desire to start my own business grew with every passing year but especially after I had my daughter.

It took me 5 years after she was born to finally take the leap and pursue my own thing. My own experience gave me new perspective into my parents' daily stressors.

Small Business Appreciation

When you work for someone else, you may not recognize that there are different departments doing different things (or maybe even your boss wearing all of the hats). Unless you're the marketer, someone else is doing that. Unless you're the bookkeeper or accountant, someone else takes care of that.

But when you're the business owner, while you may hire out, the responsibility is still yours to ensure that the business runs.

All of the things I judged my parents for not doing, I realize that they didn't necessarily have the bandwidth to do. They were already working so hard that marketing, branding, pursuing new opportunities was outside of their capacity and especially they had a brick and mortar vs my online work. Having a physical location requires far more upkeep and maintenance and a much higher overhead. And they would have been held more accountable to their business hours than I am. Plus with tech, I can take work on the road with me and do things while waiting at appointments, something not possible with a brick and mortar.

So I have a much higher appreciation for the mental, emotional, physical labor my parents and business owners go through on a daily basis.

And not to say that as an employee, it isn't stressful because it totally is.

But when you have people counting on you to feed their families and keep the lights on.

When you have bills to pay whether or not you're making enough money to pay them.

When you have the weight of the risk on your shoulders and bet on yourself.

That's a level of stress that only a business owner can appreciate.

And this is why supporting small business matters. Some small businesses are literally scraping by, they're just trying to keep food on the table, and a roof over their heads.

Don't get me wrong, running a small business can also be very rewarding. In some cases, you can determine your hours and your rates. You get to see your vision come to fruition. And you don't have to answer to a boss (but you are held accountable to your clients). And you build incredible relationships along the way. Some of my fondest memories of the restaurant include getting to know some of the regulars and chatting with employees.

My ask is to support small business when possible - it can mean leaving a review if you've had a good interaction with them, referring if you're happy with their service, or choosing to shop/eat local.

Happy Small Business Week/Month!!