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What is a business, anyway?
From Making
the Vehicle to Reach Your Dreams
by Ken Stark and Phil
Fournier
It’s
a living thing ~ breathing, sweating, bleeding, sometimes growing, sometimes dying. It’s a projection of its creator.
Sometimes it steals his life. “The Sugar Bowl” stole my father’s. The family had owned several restaurants, which, like most businesses, had given
the bitter with the sweet. The work, while hard, elevated the family to the middle class after years of farming
the northern prairie.
Grandma Wanda and her sister Gussie ran Stark’s and Cronkhite’s
restaurants after moving to Minneapolis in 1921, as well as the Mission Coffee Shop, a Depression-era soup kitchen. Having nothing else to do after WWII, my dad bought The Sugar Bowl with his sister Minnie, and
it gave us a comfortably Middle Class, Leave-It-to-Beaver lifestyle a half-mile
from Lake Nokomis.
It was a no-nonsense diner, down the street from Flour City Ornamental Iron Works, from which
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it drew lots of customers. Its exterior sported
a concrete, faux-pillar motif with “Minnehaha State Bank” beneath the "Sugar Bowl" sign.
Inside were hardback booths and a long, L-shaped counter. A jukebox and pinball machines paid the light bill.
My dad printed daily menus with an ink-jelly transfer process, and I had fun when he let me do the rubbing to make copies.
But I interacted with him more
there than at home. He left for work before breakfast and got home after dinner. I resented hearing his car drive up, knowing that he would poke his head into my room
and interrupt the ballgame on the radio ~ my way of detaching emotionally to lessen the hurt of neglect.
Answering these questions may have helped us.
(Perhaps they'll help you.)
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What’s really important to me?
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How can I keep my business from owning me?
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How can I improve my self-management?
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What changes am I willing to make to balance work and personal life?
• What changes in myself ~ my priorities, thinking, and abilities ~ am I not willing to make, and why?
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