Entrepreneurship and Romanticism

Is it just me or the concept of entrepreneurship has changed radically from what I saw of my father? I have been to a couple of entrepreneurship seminars lately and the general impression I’ve gotten from them is that entrepreneurship nowadays is about start-ups. You get an excellent idea of a product or service with a good market and either you hit rich, for example Google, or you sell your nascent business to a giant and move on with your life, or rather, move on to another idea and another start up.

Where is the concept of developing your client base, being loyal to them and gaining their loyalty? At least that’s what I saw in my father’s business: a hardware store. He started almost from scratch with his two business partners and slowly and with hard work built their business. Yes, many people must've just walked in and bought in their store only once but many returned because business was about getting clients, gaining their trust, remaining loyal to them and maintaining their loyalty based on good quality products and customer delight, not just satisfaction. It was a personal relationship between the customer and the salesman. It was a long-term person-to-person relation, the salesman knew the customer name and the customer knew the salesman name. And the employees were not just a sales force or a team; they were friends, almost family.

My father probably didn’t write a business plan and didn’t carry out a market study. He just worked hard with his partners and employees at delighting their customers. It wasn’t the most efficient or profitable business but it generated employment; and most of his employees stayed with him for many years. One of them, Don Ignacio Rodriguez, stayed with him until my father died.

Not long after my father’s death we had to close the stores, two at the time. Business didn’t go well anymore. Maybe customers were so loyal to my father that they went away after his death, or they were already moving on to the new hardware stores run by franchises. My father successors, i.e., my mother, my sister, my brothers and I didn’t contemplate paying royalties to a franchiser.

Now that I see modern hardware stores, I believe my father wouldn’t have liked to be part of one of those franchises. If I got to know him well, he would’ve felt like betraying his customers. We would’ve had to surrender not only our business identity but my father’s very own philosophy of business: close personal relationship with clients; clients you know by name and clients that know you by name too. It was not only about selling the highest quality tools or the cheapest, but chatting with the customers to really find out the right tool and price for each one.

It was not probably the most efficient business model or the most profitable, but that business provided for all of us and for the families of the employees. Probably business was not about becoming rich but about profiting just enough while enjoying good friendships; the sense of belonging; feeling part of a family.