I was introduced to Derek Matthews through Instagram. His product is candles, but I was drawn in by his Reels because they get to the heart of small business ownership. To a background of trending sounds, he overlays bits of truth about what it feels like to see your friends buying from rival companies, how annoying it is when customers undervalue your product by complaining about price, and how embarrassing it is to have an audience while you’re trying to film a Reel. I’ve been wanting to talk with Derek on the Localist for months, and I finally have him on the podcast this week.
One thing Derek made clear immediately: Candles weren’t his first choice of business. For years, he’d been working on a fashion line that felt like a calling and a passion as much as it did a business. He was gaining traction and making progress, but operating costs were expensive, and the barrier to entry for customers to buy his clothes was high — and then the pandemic hit and made all those hurdles even higher.
What Derek did then was something that often makes the difference between a business owner who succeeds and one who doesn’t — he changed direction. He began experimenting with creating a candle to be a part of his fashion line (a lower priced item for people who wanted to connect to his brand). During that process, he realized that candle making was a more stable direction — the business model just made sense. Derek pivoted, and Hoam Candle Company was born.
Walking away from a business is so hard to do. After all, doesn’t every meme tell us to never give up on our dreams? It’s easy to feel like our businesses are “almost there” (even if “almost” has gone on for years). What if you stop right before your big break? As small business owners, what we do is intertwined with who we are; we’re very likely to define ourselves personally by what we do, and leaving that behind is incredibly difficult.
Being an entrepreneur is a tricky game of knowing when to bet on your idea and when to fold. But here’s the thing: Folding isn’t failure. As Derek says, you bring your experience with you. What he learned in his fashion business he applied to Hoam, and it’s helped him to make that company successful in a relatively short time.
I know the feeling. I had a few false starts before starting Church Street Coffee & Books, too. I ran a small card company called Sugartop Gumdrop with a friend, and I absolutely loved the cards and wrapping paper we made together. We screenprinted cards and wrapping paper, and we even had a Design Your Own T-shirt bar.
It was a tiny operation that I thought could’ve been big, and I even left my first job in bookstore management to try to make the company work. But it wasn’t meant to be. Distribution channels were trickier than they are today, online marketing was less accessible, and I personally just didn’t have the skills and knowledge I needed to run a business yet. But I took the lessons that I learned from Sugartop into Church Street. I took them into my freelance writing career. And I still use them today, both at the Localist and at my full time job as a VP at Infomedia, a web development company.
In some ways, Church Street was the same way. I loved that business so much, and I never planned on leaving. But life changed, and when my business partner approached me about selling, I knew it was the right move. It was sad, but it was also good. And I absolutely use the skills I learned at Church Street almost every day.
If your business’s numbers just aren’t working, you’ve been taking too much time away from family and friends for too long, or you’re barely breaking even and don’t see any reasonable way that’s going to change soon, it might be time to move on and use what you’ve learned in a new business.
It’s feedback, not failure. When you’re closing the doors (or the proverbial doors) on your first business, that’s hard to remember: It’s embarrassing to close a business. You feel like you’re giving up. Most people won’t understand, and maybe you won’t understand, either. But if you’re like most of us, you’ll live to fight another day, and your next business will be better and stronger because of the lessons you’ve learned.
I’m thankful to Derek for sharing his story and for reminding me what it’s like to make the scary move of pivoting to a different business — he also shares a lot of great information about using social media (particularly Reels) and naming and branding products. Hear our conversation, in Derek’s Localist episode, and head over to Hoam to buy some candles!