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I have never lived the "boss life," so reading Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business (Blue Rider Press, August 4) was revelatory. The memoir offers an intriguing behind-the-scenes look at one challenging year (2012) in the professional and personal life of Paul Downs, an independent furniture designer and manufacturer who opened his business in 1987. There is fierce honesty here, as he chronicles the day-to-day challenges faced by a gifted craftsman who has had to learn how to be boss, small businessman, salesman, accountant and much more, with varying degrees of success.
Rebecca Fitting, co-owner (with Jessica Stockton Bagnulo) of Brooklyn's Greenlight Bookstore, offered early praise for Boss Life and Downs, whom she began reading years ago when he wrote for the New York Times' You're the Boss blog.
Recalling those columns, Fitting said, "I was heading into my first time being an employer (not just a manager), and they informed my overall philosophical thoughts about what kind of employer I wanted to be. He is a good employer. I would read his blog, and it would help me frame the conversations Jessica and I would have about Greenlight's infrastructure. The way that Downs writes about his employees is incredibly profound to me. He is also so self-effacing about not knowing some things, and about how that's totally okay. I'm very much a self-taught person, and his openness about ongoing learning in his business life, whether it was about HR, cost of goods or equipment purchase decisions was very comforting and reassuring."
Fitting has enjoyed "reading his book as we navigate our internal reorganization and growing pains. I read him back then as he was just starting to blog and as I was just starting to become a small business owner. Now I'm reading him again, as he's graduated to being an author and I've become a more seasoned entrepreneur. I find his ways of thinking through business challenges just as interesting and just as accessible as I did back then, but I read him now from a different perspective. I think this speaks well for the reception his book should have."
Downs told me he "wanted to tell a story that hasn't been shared before. Business journalism is almost entirely advice, not acknowledgment that the experience of business is, for both boss and worker, often difficult and confusing."
Being a boss, he observed, is "like night driving, but the car is moving at high speed and the headlights are pointing backward, while animals of various size jump into the road. The most difficult task in small business is figuring out what's going to happen next. All of your data is being collected on things that have already happened. You can expect similar results from repeated actions, but the situation at any given moment is subject to so many complex, interacting factors, with a few new ones thrown in, that there is no way to be certain what the future holds."
One of many revelations in Boss Life is his unsparing, sometimes humbling and often suspenseful account of the roller-coaster ride inherent in the "numbers game," as Downs pores over spreadsheets trying to make the figures work for another week, another month. He also shares those numbers with his staff. "I think it's incredibly important," he said. "I've found that, in the absence of accurate information from the boss, employees make up their own 'facts' about any given situation. When it comes to money, most employees think that the boss is taking home a lot more than they probably are. Giving my people a better idea of where the money is going has helped them to understand how the company is actually performing, and how their own actions affect that."
For Fitting, the "boss life" experience has come "a bit full circle now. Greenlight turns six this fall and we're in a place where we need to reinvent our infrastructure again to adjust to the change in our marketplace, and (thankfully) to adjust for growth. We're creating new positions, we're (yet again) considering how health insurance may or may not fit into the mix, and as there's all this national talk about the minimum wage and the fast food minimum wage, Jessica and I are having a lot of conversations about what kind of employer we want to be in terms of how we pay our staff. It's such a difficult balance--to be an employer that pays at a living wage but to also be a retailer in a set cost industry, and these are not light decisions."
Change, as the saying goes, is the only constant. Downs said there are two narrative arcs in Boss Life: "The first is the unbelievable transformation of the economy from the 1980s to now. When I opened my doors, the phone answering machine was cutting-edge technology. Now look at the world we live in. The second is my own maturation from tyro to adult, both in business and in my personal life, including a surprising opportunity to add a second line to my résumé: writer. That's been entirely unexpected, but a terrific experience (so far!)."
Fitting agreed: "I'm so, so proud that Greenlight is hosting Paul Downs for his book. Personally this is one of the events I'm most excited about on our calendar. Downs has no idea how much he informed Greenlight at the outset, and to host him in our store next week... it's a bit of a moment for me." --Robert Gray, contributing editor (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)