Business Lessons Learned From Nick

Starting out as a young small business owner, I quickly learned that success doesn’t come easy. The journey of building Albemarle Paper Supply from the ground up required long hours, relentless effort, and a lot of learning along the way. There were countless challenges, but each obstacle taught me invaluable lessons that helped shape APS into the thriving company it is today. I would love to share some of these hard-earned lessons, that no-doubt some of you can relate to, as fellow small business owners. These insights have been pivotal in my journey, and I hope they can provide guidance and inspiration to my friends and customers. 
 

Major In The Majors
Rather than trying to be good at multiple things or being a “jack of all trades” focus on what you are really good at. For example, Chick-fil-A focuses primarily on chicken because they are a chicken restaurant. They don’t spend time on burgers or other types of food, they just stay good at chicken.

Recently, APS tried to expand outside of paper and disposables into a new territory. Spices. The time spent trying to learn and master a completely new product line took away from the time used to focus on disposable products, which is APS’s major focus.

Don’t sacrifice what you are good at, be the specialist.

Work/life Balance
There are two different perspectives for this. The business owner’s perspective and the employee’s perspective. 

A small business owner is not going to have an evenly balanced life. They are going to have to put in the extra hours to make sure everything is operating correctly. The extra hours the business owner puts in ideally gives their employees better work/life balance.

A business owner’s company will not operate without the right team of employees. When employees have a better work/life balance it helps them feel supported and a well supported team helps the business operate better.

Business owners sacrifice the work/life balance to make sure the employees they depend on have that balance to help grow the company. Employees must come first as the entire operation depends on them. If they are taken care of the company will have a better chance of growing.

Running a successful business is an endeavor that requires focus, dedication, and strategic thinking. Learning from my successes and failures has created a strong foundation for APS and hopefully will allow us to continue to grow. As small business owners, we have a unique opportunity to learn from each other as well. I’d love to hear from you if any of this resonated with you or if you have some lesson  you’d like to share. Text/call me or email me anytime. As much as we’ve all learned over the years, continual learning is the only way to keep moving forward. 

– Nick