We were lucky to catch up with Kristen Laidig recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Kristen, thanks for joining us today. One of our favorite things to brainstorm about with friends who’ve built something entrepreneurial is what they would do differently if they were to start over today. Surely, there are things you’ve learned that would allow you to do it over faster, more efficiently. We’d love to hear how you would go about setting things up if you were starting over today, knowing everything that you already know.
1. Not hired people just to “help them out” (regardless of their current skillsets) and inserted myself as manager of the business from the start. My presence would have helped keep the staff on task.
2. Analyzed our open hours and stuck to the weekends. We tracked our traffic from day one and realized quite quickly that Sunday – Wednesday we had hardly any traffic. I could have cut our hours to Thursday-Saturday (at least to start) and run my online business during the off days.
3. Focused more on what I’m good at—writing and implementing the marketing plan—and created SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) for the staff to handle all the day-to-day tasks.
Overall we did a lot of things right and the things we did wrong cost us nearly a million $$ and my childhood dream of owning my own toy store.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’m a serial entrepreneur. I was six years old when I started my first business, pulling gravel out of my driveway, drawing faces on the rocks with a marker, then selling them to my friends. I became “so successful” that my father shut me down stating, “The cost of gravel” was “too high.” If I’d known what ROI was way back then, I’d have bought my own bag of gravel with the money I made, replaced the rocks I “borrowed” (aka: my initial capital) and had a couple hundred more rocks to create inventory! But alas, I wasn’t aware of ROI or marketing beyond just begging my childhood neighborhood to buy my knock-off “pet” rocks.
Over the years I helped my mom make and sell stuff at craft shows, sold full-size candy bars out of my locker, created handmade stationery, started a stained glass studio, publishing companies, and online training centers. In the past seven years I’ve opened and managed 6 antique booths, two retail stores, and started a retail entrepreneur incubator marketplace for artists and boutique owners. And now I’m doing something completely different, but drawing on all the skills these various adventures have afforded me!
Seems I’ve paved a path for myself to start businesses, then ultimately sell or close them. I’ve sold several, closed several more, and started dozens of brands. Right now I’m focusing on two different businesses in partnership with my husband:
1. Magickal Bear, an online marketplace for artisan-made products and unique gifts for the soul, focusing primarily on natural stone and crystal jewelry, books, oracle decks, metaphysical kits and whatever else we invent along the way. I handle the daily operations, artist-wrangling (finding and partnering with artists to create exclusive products for us), marketing, product listings, website development, and we have a couple of assistants that help with photography and social media posts. While we actually soft-launched this business in September of 2020 (while hubs and I both had Covid and couldn’t do much else), neither of us had much time to devote to it until January 2023 when we closed our second retail store so I could focus on it. Of course, all that sudden “free” time also birthed another business…
2. RV Travelpreneurs, which started out named something completely different as just a YouTube channel to chronicle our adventure in selling almost everything we own to travel full-time. It has now grown into its own brand with its own website, social channels and even an Etsy shop selling RV-inspired decor and merch! Also in partnership with my husband, right now we’re focusing on building our YouTube audience for the sake of advertising the other aspects of this and other businesses we have. Oh and we officially rebranded and launched this as an actual business a couple weeks before this interview. LOL!
While both of these enterprises are relatively new, we’ve also had antique booths (which we hope to do again), publishing companies, my hubs is working on publishing his first Oracle deck, and we both teach online classes in a variety of subjects (I’m usually called in to teach the marketing portions). We’ve had a sporadic podcast, and I’m the chief videographer and editor for our YouTube channel. We also brainstorm constantly and don’t believe in vacations, as the last few real vacations we ever took birthed our previous retail stores… and several other projects.
So how do I get so many crazy business ideas?
I believe most of my business ideas have started out of frustration. Honestly! I’ve gotten frustrated not making enough money in whatever I’m already doing. I’ve been frustrated with the customer support issues and inability to find good help. I’ve been frustrated that a solution doesn’t already exist for a problem I’ve encountered. And sometimes, I’m just frustrated that I feel like I’m out of ideas and want a change. Instead of wallowing in that frustration, I’ve learned how to harness it to burn like a fire until I find a solution… which… usually ends up being the start of another business! Ha!
Due to the dramatic failure of our first retail store (our second, a pop culture collectibles store, actually did well.. we just recently closed it for personal reasons) I’ve really struggled to be proud of myself for anything in business. I went from making nearly 7 figures/year down to losing money, due to many mistakes I made with the retail store decisions. However, I’ve been working with my coach (everyone should have a coach!) to tackle those self-worth issues born out of living in survival mode for the past several years, and have started to discover my inner fire again. Now with our entire lives completely changing as we transition to full-time RV life and taking all our businesses on the road, I’m realizing just how much wisdom the School of Hard Knocks gave me. Could I have avoided learning a lot of those lessons the hard way? Probably. Would I have made those mistakes anyway? Probably. All in all I’ve discovered that the lessons I’ve learned are helping me create smart decisions now so our current start-ups have a much better chance of succeeding right out of the gate.
Conversations about M&A are often focused on multibillion dollar transactions – but M&A can be an important part of a small or medium business owner’s journey. We’d love to hear about your experience with selling businesses.
I’ve sold a few businesses, and for each one I wanted out due to various reasons. In one instance, we were moving to a different state and I didn’t feel capable of handling the move, finding a “real” job, and running the publishing business all at the same time. So I sold the business on a commission structure. It worked out to mid-5-figures, which isn’t too terrible, and it could have been much lower.
The next business I sold basically to divorce my ex-husband. I let him “have” the business as compensation and to help give me an out. At this point in time I’d already started another, much more profitable business that could sustain me on my own, so it seemed a fair trade: the old, established business for my freedom.
My online training business was hugely successful (even got mentioned on a sitcom!), but I was bored with it! I wanted out, wanted to focus on the pop culture retail store full-time and get it profitable. You could say I had Shiny Object Syndrome… so I sold that company for upper 5 figures, but I also held a working capital loan on it, so essentially I walked away breaking even.
If I had to do it over again, I’d have still made the same choices for the first two examples above, but the third one I’d have gotten professionally valuated and sold for 4 times what I ended up selling it for. We got our retail store valuated before putting it up for sale and that was one of the smartest decisions we ever made! There are many reasons why a sale on the store didn’t go through and we ended up closing it instead, but needless to say I was pleasantly surprised when the valuation came in… and through the closing process we made more money than we would have if we’d sold it outright, which I consider to be a win!
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Above I mentioned selling my online training business so I could focus on the pop culture retail store full-time. What I didn’t tell you was that the transition occurred in January of 2020. Yep, you read that right. Three months before the entire world shut down and many indie retailers were forever impacted!
While I’d been working on the website for that business, it wasn’t launched yet. We relied heavily upon foot traffic for all our sales. And right before that, the staff that had been causing us some grief all quit when they heard I was coming on board full-time. Which in hindsight was a huge blessing in disguise!
Thankfully there was a lot of government relief at both the state and federal level, and I went for (and got) all of it. It helped us keep our vendors paid while I heavily evaluated what pre-orders to keep and which ones to let go, and worked nearly around-the-clock on the website.
Our POS system also integrated with our website and launched curbside pickup as an option to help retailers during this crazy time, so our local hardcore customers were still able to support us. I had some customers making small purchases every week just to show their support. I started doing local delivery, and through all of that I ended up establishing some of the coolest customer-owner relationships I’ve ever had. I was honestly surprised at the outpouring of support!
We were forced to be closed for 3 months, and in that time I got the website functional and selling, built extensive relationships, and that year we saw an increase in our sales by 225%! I personally believe if I’d not made the decision to sell my successful business and focus on the retail full-time, not only would I have not been able to build that retail business, but we would have ended up another statistic and as a result possibly lost a lot more than just the business. Believe it or not, I feel Covid was the best thing that could have ever happened at the perfect time for that business and for myself.
Did I question my life choices to move into retail full-time right before a global pandemic? Absolutely!! Was it the best decision for me at the time? In hindsight, yes! Without making that choice, I wouldn’t have the skills I need today to make the two businesses I’m currently focusing on wildly successful in a fraction of the amount o ftime..
Contact Info:
- Website: https://RVTravelpreneurs.com
- Instagram: @RVTravelpreneurs
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rvtravelpreneurs
- Youtube: https://RVTravelpreneurs.com/yt
- Other: https://MagickalBear.com
Image Credits
Tony Laidig & Kristen Laidig