When your business is like your first baby 👶

Opening your first retail location is a lot like having a first baby. The experience takes over your brain and consumes your world.

Though my first pregnancy in 2023-24 feels like ancient history thanks to the fog of parenthood, I remember it all too well. I counted down to every appointment, my husband attended them all, and I recounted them in detail to my mother. (If memory serves, Sheila even attended an appointment! All small businesses are family businesses, amirite?) I read books, took e-courses, traveled to the end of the internet to find the perfect glider-rocker, and you better believe I had my hospital bag ready six weeks before my due date.

I see something very similar with Pedal Retailers who are working to open their first brick-and-mortar business. For first-timers, the effort is all-consuming; there is a nervous energy and a mild compulsion to attend to every detail as soon as possible. The waiting – and regular readers of this newsletter know there is quite a lot of waiting – is agony. 

🧠 Even when Pedal Retailers are working full-time jobs (they often are), the pursuit of the first brick-and-mortar is the mental and emotional priority.

⚡️ Every bit of new information can feel like a tiny electric shock; refreshing email for a lease update, building permits, or mailing list opt-ins is intoxicating.

🌎 Everything is a glimpse into a new world that awaits just beyond the horizon – it’s exciting, it’s anxiety-inducing and it’s totally freakin’ consuming.

On a higher level, there is a massive difference between the first time and every time thereafter; that’s because it’s the first time that changes your identity. The moment of bringing home a baby or opening your brick-and-mortar to the public is a moment in time that changes your life forever because you’re a different person now. 

For first-timers, everything about the process is unfamiliar and a little overwhelming; there’s so much to do, it’s all new, and worst of all, there’s no reference point to determine when and how much to freak out. 👈 Am I talking about having a baby or opening a brick-and-mortar? Both.

✨ All that’s to say that the experience of opening a brick-and-mortar business has an outsized effect on anyone doing it for the first time. This fact is at the core of why we do the things the way we do them in Dream Space Brokerage. The right guidance and support are built into the system.

These past 36-ish weeks have reminded me that when we've done something once, the experience of preparing to do it again is just...different. Partly, this is to do with what my fellow Millennials call “mental load,” and partly it’s to do with identity. When you're already running a brick-and-mortar business, your brain usually doesn’t have space for all of the daydreaming “what ifs” and anxious “when will I hear backs” that came the first time around. 

Furthermore, because you already know yourself as a retailer, you’ve got a much better idea of what your life is going to look like once the second location comes around. That’s not to say it’s going to be easy or exactly the same – more on that next week – but you do have a much better understanding of what’s about to happen, because (I’m sure this comes as no surprise) real business ownership life looks a lot different than it does in the movies. 

🍝 Part of our secret sauce here at Pedal is that we know all the feelings of being a first-timer because we’ve been there ourselves. No question or panicked phone call is unexpected or inappropriate, and holding space for Pedal Retailers’ feelings means that they can relax and trust our guidance.