It is about twenty minutes after noon on Saturday, and I am at the store. It was three years ago this week that I resolved to take action and incorporate Pinctada LLC, with the dream of building and buying businesses in markets and industries which supported my interests, hobbies and passions, and which were organized around my vision of where we are heading in the future as a country and as a species. At its core, my thesis was that I could use the professional skills I’d built as a management professional working for others in legacy institutional configurations to do things I thought were fun and interesting instead. I thought that eventually this would be a more successful way for me to achieve my ambitious financial goals versus working another twenty years for ungrateful* owners and managers. (* a euphemism I am using for what I really think of some of the people who have served as my ‘betters’ over the years). I had learned the mechanics of corporate life too well. I was disillusioned and unhappy. I felt as though I could see the final 20 years of my productive life ahead of me, and while there was a chair for me to sit in and a steady paycheck that I didn’t really have to do any work for, all I could see was a long stretch of life during which I would need sedation. I didn’t want to sleepwalk to the end of my life.
I had lots of Big Ideas for transforming the mortgage industry where I had spent my career, and where I knew there were many structural weaknesses one could exploit. I dreamed of building seaweed farms and producing useful by-product materials. I had a lot of things that interested me, and which would be multi-year projects I could really sink into.
But more practically, I had dreams of building a community resale marketplace leveraging technology to access far-flung and super-niche markets, thereby improving my community’s access to liquidity for their abundant, better quality used items. I dreamed of bringing better quality used goods from wealthy, mature geographies to ‘emerging’ markets, whether in smaller, younger towns or to other countries. I dreamed of building systems for harvesting the incredible abundance of food and bio products that are everywhere around us, in our yards and gardens, parks and community spaces to build resilience and resources for neighborhoods and improve the quality of our supply chains. I could, I thought, start here. I would stand this business up, get a team, and move on to my next project(s). One month after incorporating Pinctada LLC, I incorporated what I planned to be its first holding: Good Find Stores.
I did the work. I built the financial models to see if what I thought made sense. I surveyed the resale market locally, regionally, and nationally. I built a roadmap covering three years, with the idea that I could open four stores in that time. In October 2018, I quit PennyMac to begin my new chapter as entrepreneur.
At first, things went very well. I looked at a few existing resale operations available for purchase, but also started looking at retail space. I ultimately signed a lease for a small retail space, and in December 2018 I opened for business taking consignment furniture, art, and housewares. I contracted with a website developer and built out a decent site. By February 2019 I hired my first part-time employee and by April I had two part-time people on the team. I brought aboard an outstanding PR/online branding professional. I bought advertising in popular local publications and sales grew each month. My costs were still low, and revenue was growing.
Then life happened: A divorce. A pandemic. My own bad choices that come from being too isolated, or in too much pain.
I am not successful. I had to let the staff go in September 2019 and I have worked the store myself since that time. Though there have been some successful months, the business is still not proven, and certainly I have not expanded into three more stores. There have been some deeply miserable times, and sometimes I think the periods of depression I experience will finally end me. I have lost my wife, my house, my dogs, and a consequential amount of my financial resources and personal property. My physical health has suffered, too.
This morning I was awakened by my phone’s programmed reminder to make my annual filing for Pinctada. That is what has had me reflecting on the last three years. My first thought upon waking and seeing the reminder was wonder. I was struck by how much life has happened in that time. It seems as though an entire epoch of human history has transpired. The next thing I experienced was a feeling of profound gratitude. For all that these last three years have not even remotely resembled my plan for them, I have lived them very deeply. Nested within my trials and hardships have been countless blessings. I have found new communities, made new friends and relationships, learned, and learned, and learned. Importantly, at my very core, in the space between my bellybutton and my heart and in the space between my left ear and my right ear, I just feel…better. I feel better about how I spend my days. I feel better about saying ‘no’ when something isn’t right for me. I feel better about a future with limitless possibilities, even though that future is entirely unstructured, and it is up to me to mold and shape it. I feel better about being adaptive and changing. About being a dynamic character in my own story. I feel better living wide awake, with my whole heart.
Happy birthday Pinctada. Sit tight. This is how pearls are made.