The Day That Changed My Life Forever

So, not much happened today. My daughter is teething (2 year molars - yikes!) and all of us are a little out of sorts. What I have decided to do with days like this, since getting any actual work done is not going to happen, is I will make sure to write about an experience I've had, good and bad, to hopefully give you, my loyal readers, a little insight. Check out how many commas I laid down in that last sentence. Pretty impressive from my standpoint.

Let's start this off with a fun one. We'll call this one, "The Day That Changed My Life Forever". How's that for the dramatic? So my wife, Martha, and I had been seriously talking about opening our first business. We were living in Minneapolis and I was working for Select Comfort. I was a salesman. A good one, I'm proud to say. But I digress, on this particular day I was at a sales meeting. Basically once every couple months we were all pulled into the back room of one of our stores and taught how to sell Select Comfort Beds. Generally, as with most sales meetings I've been to, out of a 5 hour meeting there was roughly 6 minutes of real information and a free lunch. After being with this company for 3 years, these meetings were a real drag and I would much rather have been at the store making money. I mostly doodled, joked around and fought off sleep. This particular day it was mostly sleep I was contending with. As far as our business went, we had an idea that we wanted to move back to Chicago and open a baby store. Martha's brother, Mike, had offered up some money as an investor but at this point we had no business plan, no name, no identity for our business. Just a kernel of an idea.

When I had left for this snoozefest of a meeting that day, Martha had told me she was going to try and find us a location. "Right", I thought. To me, this was putting the cart before the horse. Just so you know, as an entrepreneur, this is where the cart always resides. I've got a lot more stories related to that for slow days in the future. But I digress once again, I left for this meeting thinking Martha would spend a little time on the Internet, not find anything, and spend the rest of her time brainstorming about our dream. Boy was I wrong.

Right before lunch, literally as I was giving and and letting my eyes close, one of the salespeople from that location came into our meeting and interrupted Alan, our Regional Manager. They said I had an urgent phone call. I jumped awake and ran out to the desk. I was panicked. Was Martha hurt? Had something happened to my parents or her parents? Was one of our cats dead? God only knew what the crisis was but I knew it had to be bad for her to call me out of this meeting.

When I picked up the phone, Martha said, "I found it".

"Found what", I asked.

"Our store", she said. "It's what I've been drawing as a perfect store"

She faxed the blueprints over to me and sure enough, it was exactly what she had been describing to me. It had two store fronts with lots of windows. It had a large room for furniture with an smaller room off it for strollers and bedding. It had a large main room for clothes, toys, gifts and all the other stuff we crammed in there over the course of 3 years. I guess I just blew the ending, we ended up getting the space and at the time, it seemed perfect. The reality that hit us later was it was $10,000 a month in rent and the utilities alone averaged $2,500 a month. This was way too much for first time store owners and pretty quickly we knew it but we were stuck with a 5 year lease and my horrible money handling.

To finish up the original story, I went back into that meeting and was no longer tired. I don't think I blinked for the next 3 hours. I knew from that moment forward, my life would never be the same. And it hasn't. That was the beginning of the most wonderful, painful, joyful, stressful, terrifying, exhilarating time of our lives and now I know, that it was just the beginning.