The Long View // A series on legacy, philosophy, and stewardship

One Year In

A year ago this month I bought a hook company, and I thought I understood what I was buying.

I had been a customer for four years. I knew the hooks and beads.

The rest, I assumed, was inventory and phone calls.

It was a lot of inventory and a lot of phone calls. I got that part right.

The year did not go the way I drew it up. Some of it went to plan. More of it took longer. The work turned out to be smaller and more repetitive than I pictured. The right sizes on the shelf. The order out the door the day it comes in. The call returned the same afternoon.

None of that is a strategy. It is the job, and then it is the job again the next morning.

What I did not see coming was how much people would hand you before they knew what you were going to do with it.

Earlier this month a commercial tyer wrote and offered one of his patterns for the Bench. I had not asked and when I wrote back to thank him, he told me to use whatever else of his I wanted.

Two anglers have sent essays this fall, written on their own time, for a journal that is not yet a year old.

Shop owners picked up the phone when they had every reason to let it ring. Some said no. Some said not yet. The ones who said yes did it on the strength of a conversation and a promise that the packs would be there when they reordered. That was the whole offer. They took it.

And then there are the tyers who stayed. People who kept buying through a stretch when the company nearly was not there at all, and who were still here when it came back.

I came into this thinking a brand is something you build and people come to. A year in, I think I had that backward.

I inherited something people already cared about. Then they gave me time to prove I was worth trusting with it.

Their trust. Their patience. Their name next to ours. A little slack when we did not have something right yet.

You do not own those things because you bought the company. You hold them for as long as you keep earning them.

That changes what the work is for.

The goal now is to be worth what was already given, and you pay that back the same way it came in. Quietly, and one at a time.

The packs are on the shelf. The letter on Sunday says something true. The order ships.

In July I wrote that we are early. We still are. One year is not a record of anything, and I do not get to know yet how this turns out.

Year two started this week.

Same work.

~ John