Focus on What We Can Do

Kathleen wears one of Lori’s mask Creations.

This post was republished on the Hearts, Homes, and Hands blog on 2020-04-13.

Flesh and blood it turns to dust

Scatters in the wind

Love is all that matters in the end

—Robert Earl Keen

Each day brings us new opportunities and challenges—often cross-dressing as one another. Challenges can appear like opportunity to the unwary. That’s why many business people say their best deals are the ones they walk away from. Opportunities usually appear as challenges. That lead Thomas Edison to say, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

The truth is almost any situation can be an opportunity or a challenge, depending on how you choose to perceive it. I wanted to write today about how people are turning shelter in place—it sounds friendlier if we turn it into an acronym: SIP—into opportunities.

I’ll start with my partner at Hearts, Homes, and Hands, Kathleen Caso. For most of her career, Kathleen has worked to overcome isolation in our clients. Under SIP, isolation has become a benefit that helps our clients stay alive and healthy. “We’re doing more shopping for them, and I’m even teaching some of them how to order what they need online.” She said it’s been a real change in mindset.

Almost any challenge can be turned into an opportunity. Let’s keep looking for the opportunities and moving out of the darkness. Wendy rendering courtesy of Bob the Builder

Lori Vega saw an opportunity in the shortage of masks. Many of you know Lori from her sewing and alterations business, Vega Creations. Lori now makes masks to help slow the spread of COVID-19 in our community. Hearts, Homes, and Hands has taken delivery of two shipments to help protect both our clients and our caregivers.

Local attorney Kayla Chandler has been doing video chats because they add more face-to-face contact than just talking on the phone and still help with social distancing. “Video chats are always fun because when one dog starts barking, they all go nuts and we have a good laugh.” She and Matt also planted a garden with veggies and fruit tress. I would say it reminds me of the old Victory Gardens, but then I’d have to admit I’m old enough to remember them.

I heard one podcaster with a good idea. He said, “I don’t have to teach anyone to use Zoom when I interview them.” Everyone has already learned it in the last couple of months. Like Kayla said, Zoom and other video chat software are a good way to feel more connected while maintaining a safe social distance.

Let’s keep looking for the opportunities and moving out of the darkness. We can keep moving forward regardless economic challenges and social distancing. The question to ask is, “What can I do?” Not, “What can I do?” If we focus on what we can do, we’ll see opportunities abound.

What Do You See?

What do you think of when you see something like this? If your first thought is, “I wonder how I can use this location to make money,” you may be an entrepreneur.

This post originally appeared on the Hermit Haus Redevelopment website on 2017-04-25.

What do you see when you spot an abandoned building or a closed business?

The trick of being a successful entrepreneur, especially a commercial real estate investor, is to see opportunity where others see failure.

This fact was brought home to me by the recent closing of the Sonic Drive-In in the small town where I spend most of my time these days. This being a Small Town, the closure was a big deal and sent the small town grapevine into overtime. All kinds of reasons for the failure were floated until another business closed for failure to pay sales taxes to the state. (We know this because the state is auctioning off all their assets.)

But the one thing that nobody talked about in either case was: "What’s going to happen to the building?" Okay. Nobody talked about the loss of a handful of sub-minimum-wage jobs, either, and they certainly should have. Finding new jobs in a rural small town is no easy matter.

Spork intentionally reuses old Sonic locations to its special purpose niche. Photo source: Dallas News

In kind of a combination of those two thoughts, my initial reaction on seeing the sign at the Sonic (I learned about the other closure much later) was, "I wonder what kind of business could go in that location." You see, a drive-in is a very special-purpose building. There aren’t a lot of other options for using it. In fact, there are so few options and it is so costly to build that Sonic has a program to repurpose other commercial buildings as drive-ins.

So there aren’t many alternative uses for a defunct Sonic, but there are a few. I’m going to list some, and I invite you to add anything else you can think of to the comments. I’d like to figure out how to bring at least a few jobs back to the local economy.

• Another drive-in or eatery
  Okay. That’s kind of a no-brainer. I’ve seen several old Sonic locations recycled like this. There’s even a Dallas chain, Spork, that targets old Sonic locations to put in "high-end" drive-ins.
  But the question here, is why did the Sonic fail? Sonic, after all, has extremely well-honed systems and a national advertising budget. If a Sonic with these advantages fails in a given location, what are the chances of a one-off restaurant succeeding there? Restaurants have a higher initial failure rate that just about any other business. One reason may be that they are so easy and cheap to start. Like many mom-and-pop businesses, restaurants tend to be under-capitalized, making it difficult to survive until they can become profitable a few years down the road.
• A used car dealership or other business office
  As with any investment, having more than one exit strategy is key to success.
  I’ve seen this happen in South Texas. The used car inventory was parked under the awning, and the kitchen became the sales office. But that business eventually failed, and the location is now an insurance office with plenty of covered parking. The used car idea is also being tried again in Missouri.
• A flea market or art fair
  Wouldn’t this idea just be perfect, assuming you could get the location cheap enough to be profitable? Each stall could be a vendor’s booth. Customers could drive through the location and only stop if something caught their eye. Of course, parking might become a bit problematic if you had enough traffic.

There are reasons why I wouldn’t try any of these ideas myself in this location. Mostly because we already have more of each of these types of business than I believe the community can support. But I’m sure there is something that can be done. I just don’t know what it is yet. Maybe we can figure it out together.