Last week’s trip to the LAKE was the last hurrah before the boys started school last Wednesday.  1st Grade for the big boy, new preschools for the other boys.  I’m very ready, like every other Momma in the world, for a routine and some rules to live by for a while.  It was a great, though, having the 1st grader with me in the store every day this summer…

{Delivery basket designed for Shop Kid scooters for the purpose of delivering notes from one store owner to another.}

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The most amazing thing happened this weekend.  I left town without the lap top, turned off my cell phone, and took a BREAK.  You know what happened??  The store survived without me.  It was still there this morning looking just the way it had when I left.  AND I had sooo much fun with my boys.  We fished and swam and tubed {OMG, I’m in so much pain from tubing!!}, we ate and drank and LAUGHED. 

While we were away someone asked me if I worry about the store when I’m gone.  I told him “No, I quit that a long time ago ’cause I know that it doesn’t do any good.”  And I meant it… now I’m feeling refreshed and recharged and ready to face back to school and the frenzy of fall with the peace of knowing that if it gets to be too much I can always take a BREAK and back away for a few days and it’ll all still be there when I return.

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This summer has blown by ~ like it always does ~ and especially the last few weeks when I’ve become completely overwhelmed with projects and tasks.  As a girl with a entrepreneurial spirit it’s easy to YES to new projects with the hope of great opportunity.  As a girl with a thin wallet, it’s hard to take on so much without the ability to hire much help.  Whenever I begin to feel inundated I find that the best way to re-focus is with a LIST.  I come by this honestly as my Mom is a tenacious list maker; and, even in the last days before losing his battle to colon cancer, my sweet Daddy was making lists of things we needed to do when he was gone.

{image courtesy of Library of Congress}

I actually start off every day with a LIST of things to do and it is always waaaay more than I can accomplish.  As the day progresses I cross off the things I’ve completed and re-prioritize.  By the end of the day I’ve usually gotten a fair amount of work done and have made a new list for the next morning.  It’s a system that works for me.  The lists help me to #1 ~ FOCUS ON WHAT IS IMPORTANT, #2 ~ STAY ON TASK , and #3 ~ PRIORITIZE BASED ON MY GOALS

Last week I was feeling even more swamped than normal when I took on inventory in the store the same week as the Weston 10 Mile Trail Antique, Art & Garden Show.  I’m not sure what I was thinking other than the fact that there is always some excuse notdo inventory, and, as I admitted last week, I’ve been procrastinating for, well… let’s just say a while now.  Regarding the 10 Mile Trail, by the end of the week I got to the point that I was saying to myself “WHY, exactly, are you doing this???”  My husband tuned in with the same question and a valid point, “if you’re not benefiting financially from this then you should quit.”

So I got to thinking, why AM I doing this?? 

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{image courtesy of Vint Pix}

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Last week I started the new Shop Girl series which is a collection of my ramblings about owning a retail store, having the heart of a merchant, and the daily roller coaster ride that one takes when running their own shop. 

Last week I was telling you about the retail store I worked at while I was attending  Texas A&M in College Station, TX… the store was Charli, an upscale boutique where she carried beautiful clothes, formal dresses and jewelry.  About that same time I was trying to figure out what I was going to be when I grew up. I went to A&M because I had brief notions of being a ranch manager… a thought that a professor nixed my very first day of college when he asked everyone what had led them to College Station.  I stood up and said proudly, ’I'm from Houston and I want to be a ranch manager.’  The professor asked me, in front of the whole class, what a city girl knew about running a ranch.  He had a point.  I was immediately thrown into a career crisis at 18 which led me to join the legion of students who were also majoring in ‘UNDECIDED’.

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I’ve decided that I’m going to start writing about my experiences as a SHOP GIRL.  It has taken me twenty years of working in retail to finally embrace the fact that I LOVE owning a retail store ~ every difficult, wonderful, mind numbing part of it.  I have finally realized that this is what I’m supposed to do, that if I’d been born 150 years ago I’d be selling fabric from the back of a wagon ~ it’s just in my heart.  So I’m going to write down how I got here & what I’ve learned along the way. 

You’re welcome to read along & chime in.  I know that a lot of people think that owning a little retail business is a dream job ~ and it is, but it’s also really, really hard.  There are a dozen different kinds of retailers and stores nowadays ~ brick & mortar, online stores, pop up stores, traveling stores, stores within stores, and any combination of them all.  The more we all talk about being merchants, share ideas and experiences, the better off we’ll all be.  So, here we go…

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