The truth about going mega-viral, part two

Everyone! Hi. Hello.

First: if you haven’t read part one of this essay, it’s here, and this piece will make infinitely more sense if you go read that one first.

---

When I started my stationery company in 2012, I fully agreed with the statement, “if something works, expand it.” Why not? If customer demand is there, wouldn’t it be the goal of any business to serve more people, make a bigger impact, make more money?

I sold my work online, and wholesale to retailers, but my vision back then was to also have lifestyle stores, like Jonathan Adler. Part of this was because I was (am?) a creative person who had a billion ideas for products and wanted to bring them all to life. Part of it was because I had no fucking clue what running a store was actually like.¹ And part of it was believing the capitalist narrative that growth is proof of—and required for—success.

By 2016, I had fourteen full-time employees, which might not sound like that many—it definitely didn’t to 2012 Me, who wanted lifestyle stores—but as it turned out, 2012 Me was also kind of an idiot. I am very good at mentoring, teaching, creative directing, and being friends with people, and as a result, I assumed I’d be great at being a boss, and that I’d love it. But I was not, and I did not.

My first error in judgment was having bought into the fetishization of entrepreneurship that took hold in the mid-teens on social media. Influenced by the #girlbossing of Instagram, Pinterest, and “female entrepreneurship” conferences, I’d pictured my team and me roller skating around our studio (never mind that I can’t roller skate?), dancing joyfully while we packed boxes, high-fiving over pizza, throwing confetti around. There would be balloons everywhere for some reason. Teamwork making the dream work!

I am embarrassed for myself as I type this. But it was a powerful myth. By now, I’ve attended (and spoken at) enough of these conferences to know how many smart people, particularly women, were led to believe, on some level, that running a small business would—or should—look like a sleepover party with money.

It is no coincidence that this fantasy also sold a shitload of conference tickets.

There was no in-office roller skating, no confetti, no glitter. (Thank God; have you ever tried to clean up confetti and glitter?) Having employees was not, in fact, a giant party. But the bigger thing I’d failed to account for, in assuming I’d be a great boss, was the speed of our growth, and how this would impact my ability to lead. It takes a lot of capacity and skill to effectively manage a team of people, and to constantly interact with many more—like our 120 sales reps, half-million social media followers, thousands of retailers and customers. Especially if you care about not being a dick. And especially if, like me, you don’t enter into it with great boundaries. When the business took off, I didn’t have the capacity or skill required to navigate all those relationships, and I didn’t have the time or space to develop it.

Leadership—including being a public figure, even an extremely niche, F-list one like Kinda Well-Known Greeting Card Lady—is a job in itself, and it takes time, energy, and care to do it well. As I learned the hard way, it’s damn near impossible to do it when you’re in constant problem-solving mode, perpetually scrambling to restructure a structure that made sense two months ago. And it’s not possible at all when you’re wearing so many hats, you’re basically a one-woman Coachella.

---

The introduction of the Internet redefined the whole notion of business growth. Digital businesses, not limited by geography or physical capacity, are infinitely more scalable and potentially profitable, hence the explosion of the venture capital industry in the 90s. The measure of success for a VC-backed company is its ability to scale, since astronomical growth (and a subsequent sale) means investors get rich(er), and apocalypse bunkers in New Zealand don’t buy themselves.

For the last three decades, startup culture, and the mythology surrounding it, have had an outsized influence on American entrepreneurship. The “grow if you can” imperative is now so baked into business here, so normalized, that it’s hardly questioned. On Shark Tank, the first question they ask is “how can this scale?” There are infinite podcasts, consultants, coaches, books, Instagram accounts, conferences, etc. dedicated to helping people grow their already-profitable businesses. The assumptions they rest on are:

1. You should want to scale (if you don’t, you’re preventing your business from “living up to its potential”).

2. Your business will be more successful if you figure out how to scale.

3. The more successful your business is, the happier you’ll be.

None of these are necessarily true.

Growth-as-goal is a success metric predicated on a single factor: increased revenue. Its math does not include the calculus of your humanity, your health, your personal values, the health of the collective, the health of the planet, or anything else.

The growth imperative is also why, only 250-ish years after the Industrial Revolution—a millisecond in planetary terms—we’re scraping the bottom of the natural-resources jar and participating in Earth’s meltdown in real time. Perpetual growth is an extractive system; nothing in nature grows in perpetuity except cancer, which ultimately destroys everything it touches.

And here’s the stupid irony of it all: devastating costs to people and planet aside, it’s often the case that choosing to keep a business smaller is also the smarter move for its longevity and profitability. When you don’t have outside funding, you are both the investor and the investment. Destroying yourself in the name of growth is not only bad for you, it’s bad for business.

---

Here is what I know now, the hill I will die on, the thing I will say over and over to any small business owner:

If your growth trajectory isn’t sustainable for you, it’s ultimately destructive.

If your business model requires you to ignore and override your human needs for any significant length of time, it can only be so profitable before it murders you—and itself.

The hierarchy has to go like this: Your needs -> the needs of your business -> the needs and wants of your customers. 

Problems related to rapid expansion are commonly referred to as “good problems to have,” as opposed to the other kind. While I’d technically prefer growth-related problems to the ones where the business is hemorrhaging money (having had both), I might call them “better problems,” not good ones. A good problem is still a problem, and characterizing it as “good” always made me feel like my stress wasn’t really allowed, like sure, but you should be grateful for this.²

The thing is, our minds know the difference between “good” problems and bad ones. But our bodies can’t tell. To our nervous systems, overwhelm is overwhelm.

When I say it takes time to metabolize success, this is what I mean. As a leader, slower growth allows your nervous system time and space to get accustomed to each new stage before piling on more. A bigger operation requires greater skill and capacity that can’t be developed overnight, no matter how smart you are. Slow growth (or, gasp, not growing!) allows for your OWN inner growth, for experimentation, for taking the time to repair mistakes or harm before being swept along to the next thing. It allows for learning as you go, and implementing that learning in real time, instead of just in hindsight. When your business grows at a pace that doesn’t give you enough time for this process, it’s not sustainable.

When a body exists in a perpetual state of fight-or-flight—which mine did, for about seven years—the choices we make tend to be reactive instead of responsive, which also leads to crappy business decisions. If you’re rushing and overwhelmed, you’re much more likely to grasp at whatever solution sounds good in the moment; the fix it fix it fix it coming from your lizard brain is more powerful than your rational mind. When you have the space to stop, breathe, and respond to changes with a relaxed nervous system, you will not only have a better time, but you’ll make smarter, more thoughtful choices.

If you’re feeling discouraged by slow growth in your business, or comparing yourself to others who are expanding faster, please hear this: slow expansion is the most sustainable expansion. Not just from an operations and systems perspective, but also for you as a human being. 

In an effort to condense my 2015-2017 into an easily digestible narrative, I’ve rewritten this section so many times that I’m now just mad at it. It’s too much, too many details, to put in a newsletter. Maybe it’s a book. A miniseries? A musical? IDFK. Here is what I think you need to know:

In the aftermath of our Empathy Cards press wave, several big publishers reached out, wanting me to write and illustrate a book. I absolutely did not have the bandwidth for this, but when they said, “you should really do this book before someone else does,” I quickly agreed. (The scarcity model: driving fear-based decisions since the beginning of time!) By the time I finished the illustrations—400 of them, which after months of delays on the publisher’s end, I was given three weeks to complete in order to make our publication date—my sciatica was so bad, I couldn’t walk.

In the year in which I was working on the book, we also outgrew our Los Angeles warehouse; moved all our inventory to a fulfillment house; outgrew that; built and staffed our own warehouse in Las Vegas; and moved everything there. I know people say “never say never,” but building and operating a warehouse in a different state is, with certainty, a thing I will do only once in my life.

By 2016, after three-plus years of grinding and runaway growth, I knew we needed a drastic change to our business model, because I was physically and mentally unable to keep going, and if I went down, the whole company would implode.

Most of our competitors focused on wholesale, but I’d started my brand on Etsy before adding a wholesale arm, so our revenue was split 50/50 between wholesale and direct-to-consumer online. These two audiences wanted to buy different products, had different sales seasons and customer service needs, and required totally different marketing—so catering equally to both of them meant basically running two separate companies under one roof. I dreamed of letting one of them go, but how, and which one?

Then, an offer came that felt like a lifeline: to license the wholesale end of the business to a long-established company with a solid reputation. (Remember what I said earlier about making decisions from fight-or-flight? I learned this the hard way.) I’m tempted to go into lots of overly complex detail here that will bore the 99.5% of you who don’t run stationery companies, but I won’t. Here’s the shortest version:

We partnered with this company, and they took over our product manufacturing and the wholesale side of the business. It was a big, exhausting push to get this set up, but it was, in theory, a great solution.

Or, it would have been. This company also failed to disclose (went to great lengths to hide) the fact that they were on the brink of bankruptcy. Nine months into our partnership, with no warning, everything began to fall apart. There were lawyers and threats and secret meetings and very panicked strategizing, and a phone call with my CPA where I walked in a small circle around the same tree for ninety minutes, smoking cigarette after cigarette, something I had not done in fifteen years. At the end, there was a serious conversation about hiring my college friend, a former nightclub bouncer who looked the part, to round up a crew of intimidators to show up with two semi-trailers at the other company’s warehouse, demand our inventory, and not take no for an answer.

Oh, and this all hit the month the book came out. Sorry co-author, sorry publisher, sorry agent, sorry potential future opportunity to sell another book. My (wonderful) co-author Kelsey Crowe was the one with the research, but I was the one with the audience, so promotion was my job, and I failed. I just couldn’t prioritize it.

In order to save my company, my team and I had less than two months in which to scramble to buy the whole business back from our failing partner: a multiple six-figure expense that involved having to move warehouses (again), staff up again, nearly cost me my house, and—after we managed, improbably, to pull it off—left me with the same problem I’d had a year earlier. Except now, I was that much more burned out and exhausted after our frantic year of transition and de-transition.

I was a piece of toast with a pulse.

This Instagram post from December 2017 sums up some feelings.

For legal reasons, I didn’t share any of these business challenges publicly, save a few cryptic posts.

That same year, we got our own branded end-caps in Target; displays of our cards with my name on a giant sign. I wondered why it didn’t make me happier.

---

If you’re self-employed, or you’ve ever downloaded someone’s business freebie, or watched an Instagram reel, even by accident, from a coach who coaches other coaches, or someone who sells courses on how to make money selling courses, your feed is likely now filled with the phrase SEVEN-FIGURE ENTREPRENEUR! I became one, and you can too! It’s not just on social media; it’s Forbes, it’s Business Insider, it’s everywhere.³

Seeing this phrase naturally triggers a lot of assumptions in many of us: “that person is so successful! And rich! They must be doing something right! I must be doing something wrong.” Well. The first thing to keep in mind is that this person is probably trying to sell you something, and they’re leveraging these assumptions in order to do it.

The second thing to keep in mind is this: “seven-figure entrepreneur” can be misleading AF, because this phrase doesn’t tell you anything about profit.

If it costs your company $1.95 million to make $2 million, you are technically “making” seven figures, but you’re really making 50 grand. Your job entails essentially creating, and then solving, a complicated and expensive problem. But “$50,000 entrepreneur” doesn’t quite have the same seductive ring to it. As someone who’s been self-employed a long time and knows a lot of people in different circles, I know for a fact that a lot of folks with “seven-figure entrepreneur” in their social media bios are also spending seven figures to get there.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with having high overhead and relatively low profit, especially if you love what you do and you’re happy doing it. But it’s a problem if you’re also promoting the fantasy of “seven-figure entrepreneurship” as a one-way ticket to a mansion with an infinity pool. Or whatever very rich people buy. Health care?

Anyway, my point is: like the montage NBC put together about my (fake) life⁴, like my assumption that managing a team would be dance parties and confetti—people and entities who sell the concept of self-employment using only a revenue number is another way entrepreneurship is fetishized in American culture. It also results in a lot of people feeling like their businesses are unsuccessful, when they compare their own, smaller numbers to what they assume other folks are making.

“Seven figures” is a vanity metric that I badly wanted to hit, and I was happy when we did. It felt like fuck you and told you so, which are two phrases that motivated my work for many years. I was satisfied, for about ten minutes. And then I was back to frantically putting out fires—the same ones I’d lit when I decided to grow the business.

When you scale a business, particularly one like mine that sells physical products, overhead increases. Overhead is typically defined as a cost in dollars, but the actual dollar amount is only one aspect to consider. Higher overhead also means more complexity, more people and systems to manage, and more time and energy spent managing them. All of these are costs, too.

Another misconception: increased revenue does not translate into a commensurate increase in profit. More profit, yes. A LOT more profit? For a business like mine, not really.

In 2014, we had a sweet spot, in which our model was still relatively simple, we didn’t make a zillion different products, and we didn’t yet sell to mass accounts (i.e. Target) or have international distribution. We had a handful of employees, the logistics weren’t overwhelming, and we were profitable.

Due to my desire to grow—and my belief that if customers wanted our stuff, we should make it available in as many ways as possible, and my lack of understanding of what I’m now writing about—we blew through that “sweet spot” phase. As we started to grow bigger, we needed a new warehouse. And a new inventory management system. And then another warehouse. And then people to staff it. And all of this created so much more work. Revenue went up a lot. Profit went up a little. And everything felt (was) way harder. More money, more problems. Biggie wasn’t wrong.

My job changed, too, with scaling. Executing the work—actually writing and drawing the products, the thing I loved most and was objectively best at—began taking a back seat to the management of people and finances and processes. I made the decision to squeeze in most of the creative work—the thing the business was actually dependent on!—after midnight, when there were no meetings or emails. (In hindsight, a terrible idea.) I would eventually become a creative director, teaching and guiding other people to do the work. I do enjoy creative direction, but I’ve really missed being an artist and a writer.

As a founder, you have to delegate pieces of your job in order to grow; you physically can’t do it all yourself (and shouldn’t try). But sometimes, the tasks that make the most strategic sense to delegate are also the ones you most enjoy—the things that actually feed your soul. The things that got you started in the first place.

I wish people talked about this part of it more.

Thanks for reading, and for being here.

1. In my house, we use the term “Burning Man” to describe things that are definitively not for us, but we’re happy they exist for the people who love them. I now know that the business of owning a retail store is, for me, Burning Man.

2. See also “the good cancer,” which I heard a lot when I had Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Are certain cancers more treatable than others? Yes. Do people still die of Hodgkin’s? Yes. Does the treatment really suck? Yes. Does it also suck to survive it and then worry for the rest of your life that it (or a secondary cancer caused by the radiation) will come back and kill you? Again, yes. Calling any cancer “the good cancer” is alienating; it makes the person who has it feel like they’re not entitled to their grief, anger, fear, and sadness.

3. Back in the day, a.k.a. five years ago, “seven-figure” was “six-figure.”

4. The story about this is in Part One. (I told you to read Part One!)