The Long Way Home 10.18.24

It's funny how our sense of smell evokes powerful and nostalgic memories. The scent of a particular cologne or the aroma of a familiar dish can instantly transport us back to a specific time and place.

When our son warms up his RAM before going to work in the morning, a whiff of its diesel exhaust takes me back to my teen years when I began working for a trucking company in Roseville. 

My first duty every morning was to complete a trailer inventory. As a dozen or more trucks idled in the yard, the sweet rumble of well-tuned engines and the smell of diesel exhaust wafted over me as I strode along the fence, from trailer to trailer, making sure the ones that were supposed to be empty were actually empty. 

As a naive suburban youth wandering the ground zero of my freight career, I was fond of the smell of diesel and wondered as I moved from trailer to trailer where all this equipment was going that day. Half a century later, I’ve done and seen almost everything in the trucking business. Yet the smell of diesel takes me back to those first days, clipboard in hand, inspecting those semitrailers and imagining the big world out there that I was a small part of.

In those early days, I couldn’t imagine being a boss someday, a business owner, or a so-called leader of others. But the smell of diesel reminds me it was less than a decade before I was, in fact, president of a fast-growing freight company. I tended to bristle under authority figures, so maybe I should have foreseen I’d spend most of my adult life as my own boss. 

Business ownership quickly makes you a grown-up or kills you for trying. The shroud of responsibility for the well-being of employees, customers, and vendors weighs heavily over the responsibility for your family. 

Done well; business ownership is not for the faint of heart. And it’s not easy.

I’ve always loved the independence and the smell of diesel that came with the burdens of a highly innovative and competitive business. I lived to see the day when transportation (what the cool kids call logistics now) exceeded agriculture in size and scope.

I’m an entrepreneurial fossil now, but I still follow the business world in my newsfeed and social media. I love stories of people taking the plunge into small business ownership. And, with rare exceptions, I despise the venture capital industry for the many negative changes that happen when industries consolidate—and almost all of them do. 

Studies show an unchanging truth about small businesses: A significant percentage fail within their first few years of operation. Various factors contribute to this, including lack of capital, poor management, competition, and economic downturns. When our business celebrated its fifth anniversary, I remember breathing a sigh of relief. We might make it.

A story off the interwebs this week got me going. 

A survey by Xero, a cloud-based platform offering accounting services to small businesses, revealed that many U.S. small business owners need more financial literacy.

Financial literacy includes understanding basic accounting principles, financial statements, income statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements, and financial management tools like budgeting, cash flow management, and debt and equity financing. Financial literacy is crucial for business owners because it enables them to make informed financial decisions, manage risk, and ensure long-term financial stability.

In the survey, half of small business owners admit they have encountered fiscal challenges due to limited financial knowledge. A significant number of those affected have not recovered from these difficulties. 

In the same way that we all think ourselves better than average drivers, spouses, and thinkers, more than half of business owners surveyed rate their financial literacy as “high.” Most likely because they’ve survived or are recovering from fiscal challenges.

When I get nostalgic smelling the diesel fumes, I am reminded of the mentors and advisors who played a pivotal role in helping a young, naive freight broker like me gain a solid bit of financial literacy over the years. Their guidance was instrumental in my journey, and I could never have achieved what I did without them.