We recently connected with Timothy Wurman and have shared our conversation below.
Timothy, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear your thoughts about family businesses.
One of the driving factors for us opening the store was to open it as a family business. We believe strongly that family businesses and other small businesses provide something that corporate business do not – and that is community. We wanted to share our family values with our community, and we’ve been able to do that through our story times, tiny bookstore concerts, free yoga, and open mic nights. We believe in promoting literacy, highlighting marginalized voices, and bringing community together over the love of books – and we put those values into everything we do, especially in how we display and highlight books. Because we are a family business, Jordan and I are both able to be heavily involved with all operations at the store, and we also both get to spend a lot of time at home with our three year old daughter. It gives us a level of flexibility that we would not otherwise have, and that is very important to us.
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.
Mid-pandemic, I was working for a trading company as a software engineer, and I was very depressed. I am an extrovert, so being isolated from my community was very difficult for me – especially because I was unknowingly struggling with bipolar disorder, something I would discover almost a year later. During the pandemic, I had started an instagram account to connect with friends and family over a love of books. I’ve always wanted to start my own business, and all these factors planted the seed for Three Avenues Bookshop. I love books – listening to them, reading them, collecting them – and my favorite genres are mystery/thriller, science fiction, and fantasy. I also love community. I love connecting with members of our community over a shared love of books. And I love hosting events that bring value to our community – yoga, open mic, story times, and author events. We also help schools connect with authors for their students, and that is amazing too. We provide a unique service that our competitors – namely Barnes & Noble and Amazon – do not; we are heavily involved in the planning and coordination of author events and book fairs for schools, and we take our role in partnerships very seriously. We are efficient, organized, and thorough – qualities you won’t find anywhere else.
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
So far we have only spent money on advertising one time, and that was to run an ad in our local chamber of commerce neighborhood guide. We believe in word of mouth advertising – we provide such a unique and quality experience that our customers tell other people, and that is how we grow our community.
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
The first thing with managing a team is hiring. Hiring decisions are the most important decisions you can make for team morale. You need to hire employees that compliment yourself and each other, and who bring value to your culture.
Since we’ve opened, we’ve had 5 total employees work for us. We believe in empowering our employees – letting them make decisions, allowing them to take ownership of projects, and be autonomous at times. It’s not perfect – sometimes they make decisions that we do not agree with, and we address it them as needed. But it really drives our culture and allows them to feel like they are making a difference (because they are).
One thing we avoid is sales targets. We believe that creates an inauthentic experience for customers and team members, and ultimately detracts from our culture and community.
Contact Info:
- Website: threeavenuesbookshop.com
- Instagram: @threeavenuesbookshop