Daily Snippet

In the early days of my business, I experienced typical ups and downs. But at one point after hiring my second employee, money was extremely tight; in fact, I wasn’t sure how I would meet my next payroll. I was literally sitting at my desk with my head in my hands, staring at my financial woes on a spreadsheet, when I received a phone call from a local optometrist.

The eyeglass store in the mall had just closed, and he had purchased their customer list. He had all of the data on a disk, and he wanted to create a personalized letter to each customer, explaining how he could meet his or her eyeglass needs in the future. This was the early 90’s, so the average person was still struggling to operate a mouse. More complex computer operations were out of the question. “Is that something you can do for me?” he asked.

Of course we could do it. It required nothing more than a simple mail merge in Microsoft Word. But the task didn’t stop there. He wanted us to print the letters as well — 2500 of them. Such services were not part of my “core business”. I owned a training firm, not a Kinko’s. But I needed cash, so I agreed. Because I had limited funds on hand, I quoted him the labor and a reasonable printing charge if he would provide the paper. He agreed.

The next day the doctor dropped off the 3.5″ floppy disk of customer data and five reams of thick, light green paper — exactly 2500 sheets. We quickly created his form letter and performed the mail merge, producing 2500 personalized letters ready to print. At the time, I owned the average printer of the day for a small business. The Hewlett-Packard inkjet printer could feed about fifty sheets of paper at once, but, as I soon discovered, it could not feed the thick, light green paper provided by the doctor. Oops.

If I had been smart, I would have surrendered right then. I would have called the doctor and explained that I assumed he would supply standard, white copier paper and that my printer simply could not handle the task. But I was young, unwilling to admit my mistakes and afraid to fail. So, with the little money that I had, I bought a more powerful laser printer. At that point, I would not even break even on the project. Ouch.

The first 500 letters printed beautifully, albeit slowly, on the new laser printer, and the second 500 letters were humming along nicely when the printer ran out of ink. I soon discovered that ink cartridges for the laser printer were much more expensive than inkjet cartridges, and it didn’t take a mathematician to figure out that I would need at least three more cartridges to print the remaining letters. Now I was spending money I didn’t even have on supplies for the project. Ouch again.

The next day I had to be out of town. I charged one of my employees with the task of printing the remaining letters. When I returned to the office that evening, a note was sitting on my desk. “Debbie, I’m sorry, but I accidentally printed the same batch of 500 letters twice, and quite a few sheets were lost because of printer jams. We have about 525 letters to print, so we’ll need two more reams of paper.” I did what any good entrepreneur would do in this situation. I threw my stapler against the wall. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Again, I plowed forward. I drove to every store in my small Indiana town in search of thick, light green paper only to discover that it wasn’t a stock item. After a few desperate phone calls, I located the paper fifty miles away. The next morning, I drove 100 miles roundtrip to spend more money that I didn’t have in order for us to complete this dreaded green paper project.

By the time it was over, I lost more than $500 dollars on the project, and I was left with more than 400 sheets of that thick, light green paper to remind me of my foolishness for many years to come.

I learned more lessons from the green paper fiasco than I could ever list, including the important economic principles of “opportunity cost” and “sunk cost”. I should have remained true to my core business; in other words, it would have been better for me to sit and do nothing than to churn endlessly on a foolish project, wasting time and money.

Now, whenever I learn another valuable, painful lesson, I simply smile and say to myself, “That’s another green paper lesson.”