Learning the Hard Way is the Hard Way! by Elke Sager CEED Business Development Officer
Growing up in a business-oriented household, I swore that I would never marry a businessman or start my own business. The long hours, business dominated conversations, and revenue dictating what and when we could afford expenditures, other than the basics, was something I didn’t want running my adult life. A nine-to five-job and a regular paycheque were what I dreamt of! I escaped from Germany all the way to Canada. What I didn’t count on was the fact that business is my veins and, if I wasn’t going to find it, it was going to find me. And it did. I married an entrepreneur.
My husband had started his business the way most entrepreneurs did at that time, flying by the seat of his pants. His idea of success was to collect as much cash as possible, stash it, and make a deposit whenever he got around to it. Ours was a wholesale business and most retailers paid in cash. Needless to say, there were often phone calls from the bank that the account was overdrawn. In response, my husband threatened to take his overdraft somewhere else. Slowly, we installed order in the system but were still totally ignorant about the importance of reading and understanding financial statements. Every year we asked the question about how we generated a profit but had no money in the bank.
Not until I started studying accounting and business did the light come on. By the time we were ready to sell the business, 20 plus years later, we finally had a grip on managing a business. I’m sure that we spent a substantial amount of time and money needlessly. If only we had taken advantage of business training and professional advice much earlier in the game!
I learned all my practical business management skills the hard way. Another typical adventure in doing it without prior knowledge or advice was my retail enterprise. But that’s another story…
