It's all Greek to me: Part 1 🇬🇷

Sheila here, saying Χαίρετε! That’s hello in ancient Greek, apparently. If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you know that I love to connect my nerdy interests du jour to retail real estate. Today we’ll visit the 12th century BCE, where the drama would definitely be on Bravo if Andy Cohen had been there. 

Some months back, I wrote about the story of Oedipus, and how (obviously) it’s a cautionary tale about retail real estate. Lucky for you, my off-duty self hasn’t left the ancient world, and I don’t see a departure anytime soon. Firstly because there’s about a thousand years of material, and secondly because it’s basically Game of Thrones on a recognizable map. 

While many of the stories were not entirely new to me (I did take three years of Latin), I’d never invested much time or mental energy in trying to remember the characters or the plot details like who exactly was hiding in the Trojan horse, or who was Achilles other than a guy with an ankle? Well, seven books* later, I’ve learned a lot and wouldn’t you know it, I found retail real estate gems all over the Aegean coast. I found so many, in fact, that this is going to be a two-parter like The Iliad and The Odyssey, only not that good. So without further introduction…

Part 1: What I learned from Jason and Odysseus

🔥 A hot brand only gets you so far. 

Jason (of the Argonauts) was certainly what we’d call an influencer today. He was essentially an entitled rich boy who was raised by the most elite personal trainer – a centaur named Chiron who had an insane client roster which included both Heracles (aka Hercules) and Achilles. Fast forward to adulthood when Jason is on a quest to reclaim his dad’s usurped throne. Side note: nothing really motivates you like not getting your birthright kingship. 

Jason is not alone on his quest; he’s got a top tier team aboard a massive, state of the art ship called the Argo. So Jason and his Argonauts sail all around doing these quests – the most famous of which is obtaining the Golden Fleece from the seriously disturbed king of Colchis. 

Jason and the Argonauts spend a couple years questing, and all along he is working hard on promoting his brand. Among the Argonauts was lyre-playing Orpheus, who was the most significant musician of his time – like if Prince, Bob Dylan, Beyoncé and Yo-Yo Ma had a baby. All throughout the questing, Orpheus writes songs about Jason’s heroic accomplishments and shares them with his millions of fans. So guess who is HOT STUFF when he returns home? Jason. He’s a legend – and boy, does he know it. 

But as it turns out, once the Argonauts disband back home, Jason isn’t really able to keep delivering on his legendary reputation. Why not? Because his accomplishments were never his own in the first place. He was no slouch, but his most notable accomplishments only happened thanks to the Argonauts and his witchy wife Medea. While Jason was getting all the brand deals thanks to his PR manager Orpheus’ work, he wasn’t ever capable as a solo act. He couldn’t live up to his hype.

So what’s the point here? Any hot new retailer can LOOK like they’re crushing it on your feed, and if you’re doom scrolling after 9pm, you may end up feeling pretty bad about your own “success” or how quickly you’re getting a brick-and-mortar open. But what we can see about someone else’s business is quite literally optics. 

The most common misconception that we hear from prospective Dream Spacers is that opening and expanding a business can be done quickly. As anyone who’s done time in the bowels of small business can affirm, it’s a long road to getting open, and it’s even longer to finding success and/or stability. Hype doesn't pay the bills. There’s no path to long term success that doesn’t require a business owner to become a master through consistent, exhausting effort over many years. 

🧠 Brains > Brawn

I’ll go ahead and assume that it’s been a while since you brushed up on the Trojan War. No judgment — I always had the movie 300 in my head (those abs!), but turns out that was the Battle of Thermopylae. 

Here are the basics:

Who: Greeks vs. Trojans 

What: Swords, archery, violence, blood, death, suffering, humans, horses

When: Roughly the 12th century BCE

Where: Modern-day Turkey

Why: Depends who you ask. Helen of Troy? Maybe. Men with incessant desires for power and status? Definitely.

Since there was no live-streaming in Mycenae or Troy, it’s hard to say exactly what happened, so let’s just go with my version that’s pieced together from my recent reading and lots of concurrent Googling. 

Agamemnon is the king of Mycenae, a city-state in Greece. His brother, Menelaus, is king of Sparta, another Greek city-state not far away. Older brother Agamemnon should have been nicknamed AGGRO-memnon, because he was an incredibly terrible and violent man (more on that next week), and his little brother wasn’t much better. Yes, their family line was cursed, and they could surely blame early childhood trauma for their misdeeds, but don’t feel bad for them. 

For various reasons, the brothers had been itching for a fight with Troy for a long time. Troy was a prosperous city and a “gateway to the east” so to speak, so naturally, hella desirable for any power hungry Greek king seeking to expand greater Hellas. But how to kick things off?...

Oh! Great news! Menelaus’ trophy wife, Helen, just ditched him for Paris, the hot and charming prince of Troy. What a perfect excuse to go “rescue Helen” from those wife-stealing Trojans! But also, let’s tell everyone that Aphrodite gave Helen as a prize to Paris so no one thinks she was in a loveless marriage to a brute. 

The brothers assemble a crew of other (somewhat less alpha) Greek kings and their armies, and they all meet up on the Greek coast, start calling themselves the Achaeans, and prepare to sail across the sea to Troy. Among these new kings is Odysseus from Ithaca, a small, rocky island off the west coast of Greece that everyone dismisses like an Appalachian holler. Odysseus, on the other hand, is widely known and respected for his cleverness. If Agamemnon is an NFL player, Odysseus is the national chess champion.

After a highly inconvenient delay waiting for wind, the Achaeans sail 1,200 ships across the Aegean. When they land on the beach in Troy they have not only 100,000+ soldiers, they’ve also got the top warrior draft picks; Achilles, the prophesied MVP, his centaur-trained boyfriend Patroclus, and Ajax – so strong we named a corrosive cleaning agent after him. While the Achaean army outnumbers the Trojans 10:1, Troy is a heavily fortified city with its own roster of 30 under 30 warriors.

Once the action started, the fighting lasted for ten whole years. For TEN YEARS these guys fought with swords and shot arrows into each other’s necks until finally, someone had another idea. That someone was Odysseus. He was the one who said, “Ags, my man, this war is getting old and so are we. How about we fake like we’re packing it all up to go home while we secretly build a gigantic wooden horse. Then we stick a bunch of our guys up inside the horse and roll it up to Troy's front gate. We ring the bell and yell, ‘sorry for all the death, here’s a present.’ Then we go hide in the dunes, the dumb Trojans are like ‘omg what a fun wooden horse!’ and roll it inside their walls. We wait for nighttime, then our guys jump out of the horse like, ‘jk suckers!’ Then we finish them off for real and go home.”

The plan worked. After all that, the sword-fighting and centaur-trained archery couldn’t get the job done. It was the mind-games – the strategic trickery – that turned the war decisively and cleared the way for Greek victory. 

Now I realize that I’ve yet to mention anything about retail or business or real estate, but here it is: all the blood, sweat and tears won’t bring success unless they’re matched with a really smart plan. You just can’t muscle your way to victory. 

So many new and emerging brick-and-mortar business owners want to get right to the action and can’t muster the patience to develop a solid plan first. They race their boats across the sea with “sack Troy” as a plan. They land on the beach and start receiving incoming arrows without ever really thinking through a long-term strategy. This is exactly the reason why Pedal requires new businesses to complete the Dream Space Accelerator before beginning brokerage. 

Brick-and-mortar business ownership definitely feels like hand-to-hand combat sometimes, but the surest way to suffer for ten years is to start the action before you’re really prepared.

Stay tuned next week for more blood, some vengeance, and a Minotaur.

*If any of these stories spark interest, here’s my reading list:

Stephen Fry’s Mythos, Heroes, and Odyssey
Madeline Miller’s Circe and Song of Achilles
Retellings of the classics from a feminist (and obvs better) perspective:
Ariadne by Jennifer Saint, Clymenestra by Constanza Casati, The Witch of Colchis by Rosie Hewlett