Reluctance or Revolution

People get an odd chuckle out of the title of this blog. It is tinged with a bit of confusion. What's the reluctance?

Its not the retail per se. I've always had a hard time "selling". I prefer to serve than to sell. The difference is not subtle. The question is whether one can be successful in business without "selling". Skeptics say no.

What do I mean by serve rather than sell? Semantics become important when articulating something like this. I am using the word sell as an action where the "sale" is the be all and end all. It is not qualified by anything except the dollar signs on the cash register. There are people who are masterful sellers. They can get you to gladly (at least in the moment) part with your last dollar for a plastic toe ring when you are in a desert dying of thirst and you know the next person you see will have a bottle of water to sell.

In the study of economics there is no value system other than increasing the digits after the $ sign. An economy with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $4trillion is better than an economy with a GDP of $3trillion. Full stop. Even if the $4trillion dollars is completely comprised of the sales of exploding vanilla wafers and the $3trillion dollars is comprised of the sales of a food that prevents cancer. Though the development of economic measures that assess the quality of goods and services exchanged and the quality of life achieved has been discussed in academic/intellectual circles for at least 3 decades, there has been little progress in implementing any such thing that influences our economic choices.

We are so trained to value the exchange of dollars for any sake without any value assessments, that we have come to believe that it is all that matters and that it is all that you have to focus to create a success . Sell, sell, sell. On a macro level, who cares if there are 3 million little broken plastic toe rings in homes, gutters, landfills? Money was exchanged. Hurrah! On a micro level, who cares if you couldn't really afford that $200 shirt and aren't buying groceries this week? We made a sale!

Now, certainly, to have a successful business you must generate more sales than expenses. You have to pay the rent and pay your vendors. You won't last long if you don't. Like everybody else, I would like to have a financially stable, somewhat comfortable life. I need to support my daughter and be concerned about my own well being. The question for me is the ethic or deep inner ecology of how you get there and how far you think you need to go. The toe ring in the desert example speaks to what I mean about how you get there. How far you need to go is another aspect of the ecology of business.

In any financial class you take, you are likely to learn about the expectation of net profit growth. That is, a successful business is that shows a constant increase in profits. An increase that is greater than the general economic inflation rate. It is not good enough to achieve profitability and just hold that profitibility. If your company earned $1M in profit this year, the shareholders expect you to top that next year. Perpetually. What is the ecology of this model? There is no organism in a healthy ecological model that has perpetual growth. When growth is too rapid, the organism dies young. Generally there is physical increase in size until maturation. Then when we might see some kind of transformation in form to represent further maturation. In natural ecological systems, everything has point of growth that is satisfactory and lives out a life span at that size.

All of this is a long way of saying that I rebel against our accepted principles of economics and business growth. Being who I am, I can't make a sale solely for the sake of the sale. I must feel that I am meeting the needs of the buyer. I don't want to partake in an unhealthy, destructive behavior (addictive buying) and I don't want to derail someone from their own path with my agenda (knit this because its what I have instead of knitting what you really wanted to knit.) I hold the ideas that if I create an atmosphere that honors the customer as a person and works to meet that customers needs, they will be compelled to buy products from me. As a business, I need the sales. I can't deny the self-serving aspect of it, but my goal is that the sale be a mutually beneficial transaction. One that everyone feels good about. That my business succeeds because I offer products and services that are truly appreciated. It is a heart-more transaction rather than a heart-less one.

Circles is not financially successful yet. I have my shortcomings (not very good at creating retail displays, for instance.) The business was bootstrapped and that has inherent shortcomings (any small financial setback doesn't just halt the ability to grow, it pulls the company backward.) I aspire to a much higher level of customer service and much deeper/broader offering of product/services. But my vision to create a successful business steeped in a different economic outlook and a different business ecology has not yet been proven ludicrous. (Even if we were to fail, it could simply be my failure, not a proof that the theory is bad.)

Beyond selling products and services, I strive to help people get the most out of their knitting experience. To capture the highest potential that knitting can bring to their lives. This isn't always about buying more stuff. Often purchases are made as a self-soothing tool. A moment of human transaction. A moment of power. A moment of _____. (you fill in the blank.) Often these moments are deceptive and ultimately self-destructive. The real need is not being met. The being with people. The tapping into the true power of your creativity. The healing of the alpha waves (the same waves generated by meditation) that are generated by the very actions of knitting. The ________. (You know what to do.)

Creating the kind of place where people have the opportunity to have quality exchanges is a slower building process than creating the kind of place where people come to be "sold" to. Its more complex. Its more challenging. Frankly, I am more exposed as a flawed human being. It takes a different kind of energy. Energy that can detract from the energy it takes to maximize sales. Attracting clientele that aren't used to this approach, articulating and creating the experience you envision, building a clientele that appreciate what you are offering, maintaining what you are offering and converting that experience into sales is more like cooking in a crock pot than a micro-wave. It takes exponentially longer, but the flavor is so much richer.

Now we're at a critical point. For Circles to be successful we have to make changes. We've been mulling the options over for a while - contract, transform, expand - and we've chosen a brazen one. Really test the concept of the experience fueling the business. The experience is created for our customers. If they are the ones experiencing and the ones who fuel the business let them merge. Let them be part of broadening the experience and increasing the pool of people who bathe in it. Embed them as a way of generating more people who embody the vision and carry it into the rest of their world. Not just for the success of Circles but the propogation of an idea.

Is this revolutionary? We are not the first to see our customers as the source of the capital to build the business and to embed our customer base into the business by making them owners. But we are part of a lineage of businesses that buck the valueless ideals of economics as we know it. We are trying find smart business strategies without giving up those ideals.

Am I a reluctant retailer? Yes, because I'm not sure I'm very good at it, per se. No, because the direct exchange of goods and services is at the core of human interaction. I like being at the core. Yes, because I want to serve people, I don't want to sell. No, because I see it as it as the chorus in a church. More people will come to church when there is music. Once they are they there, they may check out and find value in the other offerings. Circles is a place where the yarn is the music. Classes, field trips, events, stories about where the yarn came from, a cup of tea, a community and place that sees you as much more than a 'sale' are the other offerings. I am not reluctant to retail. I am reluctant to pursue it valuelessly. So often retail can represent the lowest common denominator in our mass psyche. I don't believe that we find that satisfactory. I believe that in the pursuit of dollars as quickly as possible business leaders have left us little choice. I believe people are inspired in more ways than one when they experience something different.

Is it all enough to motivate people to buy their yarns here often enough to enable us to build the business and offer more? Or even enough to sustain what we have? That is still to be seen. And for me, it is a test of a little revolution in that perpetual motion machine that I call a brain. I am not the first. Far from it. But it is still a revolution.

Now we'll see how many revolutionaries will join the cause of trying to make money while changing the way we approach it.