Channel your inner salmon to make it as a retailer 🐟

Apparently we’re in the tail-end of salmon migration season, and that’s got us thinking about lessons we can learn from these delicious piscine endurance athletes.

You already know that it’s a challenging journey to open a bricks-and-mortar store, and perhaps you find moments of respite in imagining the day when things line up perfectly and you can sit back and just enjoy the ride. But seasoned retailers will tell you that at some point (sooner or later) you’ll realize that this day of coasting will never come.

So if the salmon were giving a TEDTalk about retailing, they’d tell you:

You will always feel like you’re swimming upstream. Salmon swim some 900 miles, which is completely amazing because that’s exactly how long the road is to opening a bricks-and-mortar location. Just kidding, but it’s a loooong way, and there will always be resistance. Some miles will feel easier and some will require you to dig really deep, but you will always be exerting energy.

You will encounter rapids and bears, and you will forget to eat. There are scary and dangerous parts of the retail journey, and it’s critical to prioritize your self-care even in the smallest ways. You need a lot of sustained energy over a very long period of time, so you can’t burn it all up in the beginning. Also, you have to remember that not everyone with you at the start is going to be swimming with you the entire time. Your best manager will be eaten by a bear, and a bald eagle will grab your favorite bookkeeper and take her to graduate school.

You should allow yourself to believe that you were made to do this. Salmon have some totally insane electromagnetic thing in their heads that helps guide them back to their original spawning ground. So if salmon can be guided by some internal magnet, we won’t think you’re nuts if you believe that you were meant to be on this retail journey to open your store or cafe or whatever it is that has you reading this.

Is all this a bad thing? Not necessarily — it just depends on your outlook. If you can let yourself feel the honor and dignity of sharing your passion and delivering value for your customers day after day, the retail experience is a very rewarding journey. And unlike the salmon, your journey will probably not end with spawning, rapid deterioration, and death. We can hope, right?