In My Shoes

Introduction

I didn’t realise it was so easy to run and cry at the same time.

It was super early and I couldn’t sleep so I went for a run. As I turned for home, the tears started flowing, mingling with the rivers of sweat already trickling down my face. That’s why it’s easy, you see—people you pass don’t realise you’re sobbing when you are already sweating and looking red in the face from running in the early morning humidity. Sunglasses help, but now you have both sweat and tears seeping into your eyes.

I tried to run faster. The tears kept up with me.

There are times when owning your own business can be overwhelming, suffocating even. You become obsessed with it and the pressure is relentless, especially—oh, so especially—when business is unexpectedly slow. On this particular morning, with sales having slowed beyond what had ever happened before, I was suddenly slammed with the enormity of my situation: the realisation that there is absolutely no one but me who knows the whole picture, the extent of what is happening, and no one but me who can devise a strategy to fix it or face failure. Yes, I might have staff, a team of experts, and supportive family and friends around me, but they only know bits of my business and they are certainly not responsible for any of it. I alone am responsible and I am responsible for it all. At its most basic level, I need to keep getting the dollars in every day so I can pay my bills and have enough left over to support myself.

The professional just got very, very personal. There are no safety nets—just me.

And that’s why I love it. It’s unbelievably liberating, amazingly exciting, damn challenging, always exhilarating, constantly evolving and impossibly scary, but you have this incredible opportunity to create an entity that represents you at your very best. You’re tested on so many things at so many levels and so frequently because suddenly, like in a game of tag, you’re ‘it’.

Nobody else gets a turn because there is no one else.

This book is about how I left a successful 23-year career in journalism, PR and fundraising to open my own longer sized, women’s shoe shop, and my first four years of being a proud solo business woman. I have no experience in shoes or in business; I have completed no degrees, subjects or courses in business; I have never worked in a shoe shop; and I have no flair for finances (words were my thing, numbers terrified me). Looking back, the things I didn’t know were vast and astounding.

But what I did know was what it was like to have size 12 feet and not be able to find shoes that fit, let alone were fabulous. That, I knew all too well.

While my darling parents had their own small business for nearly 40 years, I had no direct involvement in it. I do fondly remember helping Mum hand out the wage packets on a Friday afternoon after school and it was my job to get everyone to sign the payroll book. Yes, that was long before online banking! I knew my parents struggled and it was hard, but I didn’t comprehend just how hard. I had a better understanding as an adult, but still didn’t do it justice.

This is the book I wish I could have read before I started my own business.

I like to think I’ve moved beyond the theory and have dived deep into the everyday, grassroots reality of owning and running a business, sharing with you everything that I have learned these past four years: all the mistakes I have made and the things I have got right, too, even if sometimes by accident!

This is not your typical book about business. I’m not telling you what to do; just sharing what I did and hopefully giving an entertaining insight into what it has been like. It’s very honest.

I want to explain the emotional journey of taking a giant leap into the unknown from the relative safety of being an employee to the rollercoaster of being self-employed. Few people talk about that, but it was much more of an adjustment than I ever thought.

I will also be giving you a peek inside the shoe industry. So often when I tell people what I do, women will remark: ‘Oh, that must be heaven!’ Lots of people have tried to define why so many women adore and worship shoes. All I know is that if you have a longer foot, you are especially in awe of gorgeous shoes.

It took me four hours one day to decide to open my own shoe shop, and a little over five months later I proudly opened the front door of The Shoe Garden. Ironically, given my former profession as a journalist, it took much longer to decide to write this book. Was my journey into small business of value to others, I wondered. I actually had to figure out if I was worthy. That may sound dramatic but it’s true. I am clearly not a celebrity or a well-known identity; I am an everyday person. Then the obvious occurred to me: most readers of this book will be everyday people and most small business people are everyday people, too, and that is what we all have in common.

This book doesn’t promise the secrets to being successful in business like many other books. I’m still figuring that out, but I can share what’s happened in the past four years and all that I have learned. I reckon the first four years are crucial … you experience a lot of highs and a lot of lows during this time. To get beyond that period, you have to learn a few things, and to some degree I have developed my own way of doing business to help me move forward in a model that I think is empowering, interesting and relevant.

As you read through the chapters, you’ll literally see a picture emerge—appropriately, given the name of my business—of a flower in which each petal contains the elements I believe make a successful small business. But not just any small business. While each element is important for all businesses, my model—for once—is focused on a small business designed to be run by a proud solo owner who chooses not to build an empire.

I don’t want more Shoe Gardens in Brisbane, interstate or overseas. I used to feel guilty saying that; not anymore. I’m proud to be small. I want to be the face of my business. I want to work in my business and I want to work on my business. I want to be at the centre of my business, just like the bud of a flower and, with a strong formation around me, I believe I can be as successful and happy as I want to be by purposefully staying small.

I have read dozens of books on business and found they can mostly be divided into two camps: those written by uber successful business giants succeeding on at least a national level, if not internationally, with inspiring stories, yes, but light years away from the reality of my little shop in Brisbane, Australia. The other half were ‘how to’ books and I learned a lot from them, to be sure, but they offered mainly lists of things to do when starting out and lots of definitions, but little or no ‘real life’ experience.

That is what I craved and that is what I’m offering in the pages ahead.

Carol Haffke

Brisbane, October 2016

1

Owner

I was in my teens when I realised I was different. My friends could wear whatever beautiful, on-trend shoes they wished—but not me. From the age of 14, I had size 12 feet and I remember many tearful visits to shoe shops with Mum, asking for longer sized shoes and being rebuffed continually. Some sales assistants could barely conceal their horror as if it was my fault that I had ‘big’ feet.

Then, for some time, there were two shops in Brisbane that did specialise in longer sizes (they closed many years ago) and they became my sanctuaries. I didn’t bother going elsewhere, as it was too traumatic. At those shops, I’m sure I met some of my future customers, unaware that a couple of decades later I would no longer be a fellow customer on the search for the elusive beautiful shoe that fit our slightly-longer-than-average feet, but a proud shoe shop owner able to offer them so many gorgeous choices.

It was also in my teens that I desperately wanted to be a journalist. At high school, they even called me ‘Jana’ after Jana Wendt, who was a huge sensation in the early 1980s and such a role model for a young, starry-eyed, would-be journalist. I wrote countless, earnest Letters to the Editor for the sheer joy of seeing my words, and my name, in print. I had a brief moment of fame when one letter that was published in the long-defunct Daily Sun elicited an unprecedented response from readers and the current affairs show Today/Tonight (also now defunct) interviewed me. I had written in despair about how adults were ‘stuffing up’ the world. I agreed to the interview on the proviso I could have work experience afterwards!

I was overjoyed when I got into university to study journalism, despite a school guidance counsellor warning me I needed to take a dreaded science or maths subject to increase my TE Score (yet another long-defunct entity!) to qualify, and purposefully used work experience while at uni to get my first job as a fourth year cadet journalist at The Gold Coast Bulletin in 1988.

When I was in my 20s, I really wanted to be a journalist working in Africa. One day I rang a newspaper called the Windhoek Advertiser in Namibia and asked for a job. The owner said ‘yes’ and I was soon on a long flight, via Harare, to this wonderful southern African country that at that time had only recently gained independence, having suffered intolerably under apartheid and, before that, as a German colony. While I had asked for a job as a journalist, I somehow stepped off the plane in Windhoek and was made editor of the daily edition and sub-editor of the Saturday edition.

It was a disaster. It was a toxic environment (the newsroom, not the country, which I adored) and I lasted six months. The editor before me had lasted only a few weeks so I took some comfort from that.

Before I left in disgust, I took another chance. I had a German passport, which opened up work opportunities in Europe for me, thanks to Dad still being a German national when I was born in Perth in 1967. Mum, rightly so, wasn’t impressed that her German citizenship apparently wasn’t relevant! Both became Aussies not long after I was born.

Anyway, from the library I found the information I needed (remember, this was long before the internet had been invented!) and rang a newspaper editor in Portugal who owned the Anglo-Portuguese News and asked for a job. He also said ‘yes’ (I had learned by now that if something works once, it will often work twice!) and so I flew to Lisbon and settled in Estoril as deputy editor of this English language weekly. It was a success. Everything my former boss was not, this delightful English gentleman was. Nigel Batley was kind and thoughtful. He taught me so much about subbing, headline writing and lay out—all by hand, mind you. He was old school. Sadly, he has passed away and the paper long closed.

By the time I was in my 30s, I had moved into PR, lured by more money and more opportunities, although I would often say, with some degree of truth, that I had crossed over to ‘the dark side’. I really wanted to work overseas in international aid, an area I had become increasingly interested in, with almost all my travel to date being only to developing countries. I applied to be a United Nations Volunteer. I had everything crossed and was sure that I would land a role back somewhere in my beloved Africa, but it wasn’t to be. I was offered a job in Public Information for the United Nations Development Programme in Hanoi, Vietnam.

It was another disaster. I used to say that I expected the bureaucracy of the UN but never the mediocrity. There were some great people who tried desperately hard to swim against the current but they were too few and often too junior to have any effect. It was devastating how bad some people were at their job (keeping in mind our mandate was to fight poverty—a pretty important mission) and as someone whose job it was to promote the organisation, I couldn’t do so without shame so I broke my contract and returned home, exhausted, disillusioned and not knowing what to do next.

By my late 30s, I was happily ensconced in the world of fundraising back in Brisbane, having finally sated my need ‘to do some good’. I literally skipped back to ‘the good side’ of PR, given I was now promoting the work of two amazing charities that were relatively small at the time but amazingly effective. Shockingly, it was the first time since leaving journalism for the world of public relations that I actually believed in what I was writing and speaking about. It felt great.

First came RACQ CareFlight (now RACQ LifeFlight), a medical and rescue helicopter service based on the Gold Coast. Soon after I arrived, the only other fundraising person quit and I suddenly became ‘it’. With no actual experience in fundraising, just like I never had any experience in PR, I did what I always do: I made it up. I used every skill I had, read a lot of books on subject areas I perceived I was weak in, and dedicated long hours to work with lots of passion and purpose, inspired that I was finally doing something of value.

I thought those five years were the happiest in my career until I started with the Spinal Injuries Association (now Spinal Life Australia). I applied for the role of managing their schools-based injury prevention program but soon after was promoted to the Senior Executive team and asked to create a Fundraising and Communications department. The first four years weren’t without tough challenges, but working with a CEO who I hugely admired, with a fellow executive team I adored, for a cause I wholeheartedly believed in, and with my small team of staff who, by the time I left, were the most talented, compassionate and trustworthy team that I had ever managed, I was in my element.

Or so I thought.

By the time I turned 44, things had changed again. There had been many challenges and changes during the previous year, and I was exhausted. I had nightmares about one particularly destructive colleague for years after.

A major gala fundraising dinner that didn’t go as well as I had hoped was the last straw. I woke up the next morning, barely able to move without sobbing. I only realised months later how exhausted and burnt-out I really was. It was certainly clear to me that I needed and wanted a change. I knew I didn’t want to return to journalism, realising how lucky I had been to be a young journo in the era well before newspapers, and the rest of the media, started to be so compromised and culled. While those 10 years in fundraising had been the best of my career to date because I felt I was making a difference, it was a tough gig asking people for money every day, be they individual donors, corporate sponsors or event attendees. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I was done.

So on that day, sniffling on the couch, my head thumping from thinking and fretting and worrying about everything, I decided to open my own women’s shoe shop specialising in longer sizes. It was something that I had never considered in the past. Ever. Until that Sunday afternoon I’d had no dreams or aspirations to work in the shoe industry, let alone to start my own business. That made it even more breathtaking that it felt so right; a decision made from start to finish in about four hours. The tears soon stopped and I started to feel excited and inspired.

By the end of that day, I knew what I had to do. Eleven days later, after talking to my parents, bank manager and accountant, I resigned and gave three months’ notice. I put my townhouse on the market so I could invest my own funds into the business, rather than having the stress and angst of not only applying for and securing a bank loan, but also paying it back. My real estate agent raised an eyebrow when I told her I wanted to sell to an investor so I could rent my townhouse back, but that’s exactly what happened. I lost my house but not my home and I’m still living there today.

I finished work on 31 January 2012, and on 14 April that year, I opened The Shoe Garden.

The days in between were a happy blur. Whereas once I couldn’t sleep because I was worrying about work, now I couldn’t sleep because I was so excited about work.

I’ve always been passionate about the organisations that I have represented, especially in my fundraising days, and I thought it would take me a long time to ‘let go’ of the Association. Surprisingly, I forgot all about my old life and job the day after I walked out the door for the last time. The mountain of work ahead of me and the realities of what I had done were too all-consuming to pine for what was.

For me, this period was dominated by lists—so many lists. I have often read how people leave a notebook beside their bed so they can write ideas down after waking up in the middle of the night. I hadn’t even got to sleep each night and I was still writing long lists. And when I woke up,