We were lucky to catch up with Kimberly Kriegh recently and have shared our conversation below.

Kimberly, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. So, what do you think about family businesses? Would you want your children or other family members to one day join your business?

The decision to leave corporate careers and start out on our own was not a difficult choice to make, but difficult to facilitate all of the working pieces to make our dream a reality. Several years ago my husband and I both had careers we had spent over a decade working for. Our days were like most working parents, when our children were young they went to pre-school so we could maintain our jobs. Long commuting hours, rushed dinners and no real quality time was able to be had. We took a family trip to Hawaii and it ignited a fire that could never be burned out. We returned from our vacation asking ourselves, “there has to be more to life than this”? Both my husband and I pride ourselves on being hard working and always going above and beyond. What if we could take this ambition and apply it to a business of our own? The possibilities seemed endless. We spent many nights searching for the right business in an area that would allow for a better quality of life and more time together as a family.

We made the decision to purchase Pauwela Store, quit our careers, and make the move across the Pacific Ocean with all the hopes and dreams for a better life. Neither my husband nor I had ever even worked at a grocery store, so the learning curve was steep. However we have persevered and made Pauwela Store into the thriving business it is today. I can’t say that we work any less, but with more control over when we work, our quality and time together as a family has changed completely. It brings us such joy to work together as a family, and to be such an integral part of a small community. The challenges are difficult at times, but rewarding all the same.

We would absolutely love to have our children join our business one day, but only if it is something that they will be passionate about. Even more so, we would love to see them succeed in a business of their own. I strongly believe that having a family business gives families something to be proud of, teaches a strong work ethic and offers working opportunities for younger children to learn and grow in a real time work environment with actual hands on examples. It teaches them about community and people and helps them to think outside the box than a traditional job working for someone else would.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

From a young age I have been very active in performing arts. I have a passion for music and everything singing. I was a part of a professional singing ensemble from a young age that taught me discipline and hard work, but also creativity. Working a traditional job didn’t allow me to use my creative side as much as running my own business. I look forward to overcoming obstacles to challenge me, and I appreciate being able to offer the community something that they want or need and enjoy seeing them happy when I am able to do so.

Although I have never even worked at a grocery store before, it wasn’t hard to know what it needs and how to do it because we all shop at grocery stores! The foundation was already there, I just needed to put my attention to detail and ideas to make it even better. I love everything electronic, and also have taken several courses in project management, so the first thing I did was overhaul and streamline our inventory process. This allowed me to see what was selling the most, and what wasn’t, keep better track of all of our products as a whole, and eventually increase sales by allowing us to zero in on what our customers really wanted.

When we purchased the store, it had some wonderful supplies and products. One of the things I am most proud of that we did was differentiate the items, offer a broader selection that allowed everyone in the community a selection and items that we can all use. I made it a point to source locally first, and showcase the many local vendors that Hawaii has. We brought in jewelry, staple “junk food”, more healthier options, local grab and go foods, and hard to find wines and spirits.

It brings me such joy to be able to source an item or product that our customers suggest. Being a small grocery store in a small community I am able to talk to our customers personally and try to bring in what they like or need. You can’t get that at a major box-chain store. I make it a point to try and meet as many of our customers as possible. I maintain an open line of communication for our staff and customers to show them that I care about them & their ideas or requests.

Being a smaller grocery store, we don’t always get the case discounts that larger stores get, but we try our best to keep costs affordable. The ever changing economy and freight and delivery obstacles and increased pricing have been challenging. Our customers are loyal and have stuck with us through the pandemic, to life as we know it today. I believe that our pride of ownership shows when they see us all working together as a family, and the respect they are given for their thoughts and ideas.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Social media is all the rage with it’s ability to reach thousands of people each and every day. When we purchased our business the social media side of it was lacking and still really needed to be developed. I struggled at first to think of content to post from a grocery store that would be both engaging and eye catching. Surely taking pictures of the products you sell is a great idea, but there is something very unique about a family business, YOUR FAMILY! People want to feel that they are apart of something they understand and want to support. I started making small posts about us. Instead of just basic product photos, we add recipes. If we were at a special location, I always made sure to snap a pic that we could use for the store. Anything from something we were eating, so our stores hats! We used hash tags to promote our store, it’s location, and other popular tags to get people who may not be looking for “grocery store photos”. Slowly but surely our following began to increase. We post other local business stories to our story on Instagram. We use our social media to let customer’s know abut items that sell fast when they are delivered, this help to increase followers as well, we let them know that by following they gain inside knowledge of certain items. Tell your story, be uniquely you (in my case we are pretty sarcastic), think outside the box that is your business.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

The grass isn’t always greener, and the same is true for business owners. It seems that every where I turn someone is trying to sell me something, or wants me to sell their items. It feels impossible to get my work done responding to so many inquiries. We ended up falling for a sales pitch for the “latest and greatest” point of sale system. Everything thing we needed that we didn’t already have was promised to us wrapped up in a little bow. We trained our staff for days, we had to count and re-count inventory in preparation (at the time we had over 8,000 different items). Since retail inventory is a living document (meaning that it is constantly changing) we couldn’t migrate from an old system to a new without inventory counts being off. We launched our new system in the middle of the night to do it.

At first launch we discovered perhaps half of our inventory would not ring up, somehow the software push with such a large inventory library glitched causing the errors. We couldn’t do much about it while trying to have “business as usual”. This entire debacle messed up sales reports, inventory counts, future orders. The company that had promised us the world prior to the sale was no help, and everything they said we could do with the “latest and greatest” turned out to not be true. We fumbled through trying to correct the damage we had ultimately inflicted on our selves, only to return to our old system three months later.

The moral of the story, not all businesses are created equal. Be sure to explicitly explain how YOUR business operates so you aren’t promised the world, think of all avenues. Move slowly to make huge electronic changes to be sure that it’s worth the time and change. I wish we had never switched in the first place, I spent more time that year fixing problems than focusing on growing.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.pauwelastore.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pauwelastore/?hl=en
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/pauwela-store-haiku-pauwela

Image Credits
All images are ours