We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Bill & Lindsay Gibson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Bill & Lindsay, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
Our mission from day one has been to not just promote literacy, but a love of reading. We were avid readers as children and have been for the last ten years, but there was a period in-between where we both became burned out from school and work. This period was the genesis of our mission. We believe if we’d had easier access to books, we’d likely have continued reading during this time. Our mission includes working hand in hand with our local library to help promote literacy.
Literacy and continued reading are important to us because the benefits are far-reaching. Reading promotes mental, social, and physical health. Even reading fiction has been shown to help with increasing people’s analytic skills and their understanding of the world. Once basic needs are met, we feel it is one of the easiest (and most enjoyable) ways for people to improve their lives.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
Very early in our relationship, we established a tradition of going out to lunch/dinner on New Year’s Day and discussing what we want out of the next year and into the future. During one of these dates, we started discussing what we’d do if we could have any career, realistically speaking any way. We both landed on bookshop owner. Then several years later, an opportunity to take over a shop came up and we decided it was time. Ultimately, that opportunity didn’t work out, but we were committed by that point to open a bookshop in Saline.
When we first opened, we were asked often “Why books? How can you compete with Amazon?” Our answer has been, since day one, “we don’t.” We offer a service Amazon could never: community. We will walk with you around the shop to find your next favorite book or the perfect gift for any occasion. We donate to local programs and charities when we can. We offer a “third space” to those that need one. You’ll see us out supporting our neighbors. This is the community we are working hard to build because we want our city to grow and be inclusive and diverse.
Any advice for managing a team?
Our advice for managing a team is to give your team agency in the business. By doing this, we have fostered a sense of ownership in our employees to where they want to see our business succeed as much as we do. It has also demonstrated the trust we have in them and in return, they trust us when we make decisions that are best for the business when they don’t necessarily agree. We still seek their advice and suggestions when faced with decisions both big and small. We are candid with them as well.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
It’ll seem counter to the goal of this series, but the lesson we had to unlearn was advice from experts is always “good” advice. This goes all the way back to our wedding when we were given advice from couples married 30+ years and we kept thinking “that doesn’t seem right, but you’ve been married that long so what do we know?” What we realized is the advice was sound, but it didn’t work for us. It became clear this was true in business as well. There is really sound advice out there that you personally should ignore if it doesn’t fit your model.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.fineprintbookshop.com
- Instagram: fineprintbookshop
- Facebook: fineprintbookshop