Back when I was living in East Austin, I hated free time, so on top of work and everything else I had going on, I decided to do some unpaid operations work for the dude who owned the smoke shop near my apartment.

Why?

The bulk of my time is spent as a digital plumber in white collar America, so it was an interesting opportunity to see how a legit small business with a physical product operates.

Also, cheaper than an MBA.

Business Model

Overall the model was simple, purchase things (hopefully with a bulk pricing discount), get some shelf space, and sell it (ideally at a profit).

Start off bootstrapping after the initial capital investment through the arbitrage of your own time and labor.

Then when things are stable enough to scale, hire hands to distribute and delegate work.

Pretty straightforward, it’s a standard playbook.

Inventory

The supply side was pretty straightforward, just about every smoke shop in Austin buys from Austin Wholesale Supply, the initials happen to be AWS. Honestly phenomenal SEO-drifting from the bhaiya who owns it.

Consistency also helps.

Having a schedule where your supplier can reasonably expect you to show up and make selections gives them peace of mind that their warehouse is going to move inventory.

Customers also like knowing when they can expect something to be back in stock.

Ideally you also allocate off time to stock the shelves before doors open, but I’ve seen it more times done live than the number of hot-fixes I’ve deployed. Much like patching production, it’s harder to get all the fine details right when you’re under pressure. Making sure everything is pointing the right direction, rows all contain the same product, items are logically grouped, the counters/shelves wiped, and most important, dusting the dust.

Sales

Not required, but in general it’s easier to sell something when you know what you are selling.

But it is generally harder when you don’t.

Much like stakeholders, customers don’t always know what exactly they want. So they lean on a subject matter expert to inform them.

Saw someone who got hired who at a high-level knew what the products are. But no deep domain knowledge. IIRC they made it less than a quarter. Kinda wild seeing them come back with an older sibling to try to get the job back.

Not gonna self-incriminate, but I did my undergrad in the Beforetimes, and was in Greek Life. Differentiating products is itself a skill. The same way identifying beers, spirits, wines, etc. instead of referring to all of it as alcohol. Or naming the various ways to drink coffee incorrectly.

But I wasn’t gonna work retail for $15/hr when I had a desk job with benefits.

Artists, musicians, and performers tend to be a large market of customers for the product. And Austin happens to have a relatively high supply of those. They also happen to be the same folks where the labor economics make sense.

Didn’t see quite as many as the failed music studio, but still a significant number of interesting characters. This probably applies to most things in life, but it definitely applied here, you get what you pay for.

Dude liked to run a lean ship, so they’d scramble if someone called out. I lived nearby so I’d occasionally do a favor, bring over my laptop, and cover the closing shift. Couple learnings. Modern point of sales systems are an abomination. The fuck is the cash register trying to upsell me services? How is every useful feature to help run the business locked behind a subscription, literally everything but the payment processing could happen on-prem. Also learned how many creative ways there are to ask if a certain kind of pipe is stocked. An unsurprising number of regulars were technology professionals.

Performance

Keep track of what is and isn’t selling.

Knowing what regularly runs out before the scheduled supply runs to do ad hoc ones.

Knowing which customers are frequent repeats and what they like.

Ideally there’d be a database and some analytics reporting. Hell a spreadsheet would work. In reality, oftentimes the only unified aggregate of this is in the business owner’s brain. Equal parts impressed and horrified that the operating model scaled to three stores.

Relationships

Here’s the part no one talks about. Anyone can spend five-figures to buy inventory, sign a lease, and file LLC paperwork.

Unless you plan on completely vertically integrating, you need suppliers who like you (or your money) enough to want to sell to you. You need the same for the labor you employ.

For customers, the back-half is still true. It is easier to convince them to make a purchase if they already have a good relationship with the establishment. Do you have the items they want? Are they treated well? Is the ambiance right for them?

Trust takes time and effort to build, but it can vanish very quickly.

Discovery

How are people finding you?

Imma just say it, I side-eye a business that doesn’t have a website or social media. Ideally both. They don’t need to be posting to the point feeds are clogged, but enough to let folks know who you are, what you’re selling, and where/when to find you.

Y’all would be surprised how tough folks find taking pictures of inventory, moving files, editing, putting them online, and writing up the copy.

Don’t get me started on how much trouble normies have trying to network the multiple domains they decided to buy. Or how grown adults see nothing wrong with copy and pasting the same website with a different address for each location. Who needs search ranking and proper indexing.

Patterns

Harder to see when you’re running the show, but they’re easier to spot when you’re on the periphery.

How often do suppliers send reminders about invoices? Do they ever show up in person? Do vendors cycle?

What is the decision-making horizon? Long or short term?

How are the finances managed?

How often is staff turning over? Why are they leaving?

Important to spot the red flags early before you’re out more than just cash.