At Bison Mat, we are in a business that’s easily taken for granted. How many times, after all, do you walk into a person’s office and pay attention to their chair mat? Probably not often.
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The culture you create at your workplace is a reflection of the brand you’ve built. While some of the customer-facing dynamics of your brand may be unseen or hidden behind a corporate identity you're putting forward, you're still communicating something with every decision you make.
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It’s been said that entrepreneurs are the only people who will work 14 hours a day so that they don’t have to work 9-5. There’s something uniquely wired in an entrepreneur that just has to be creating something. For some, the idea that things are already built or steady is a sign that it’s time to go do something else. It's not for the faint of heart.
Starting your own business or being self-employed is a major commitment. These people sometimes risk everything to make their ideas a reality. Even in a setting where being self-employed isn’t taking a huge financial commitment from someone, it’s still, in the eyes of many, an altogether unconventional or downright scary way to live and work.
Here are some things we’ve discovered along the way as you manage the life of an entrepreneur:
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At Bison Mat, we’re a small operation. There’s just a few of us at our shop, and we each wear a variety of hats. No two days are spent exactly the same and not many days are spent doing the same thing all day. We’ll do sales calls while we change out blades in our production equipment. We’ll ship out an order to the West Coast, wrap up some invoicing, and then work together to build out an order of 160 mats. We’ll install software, go to sales meetings, Google things like, “how to fix a forklift,” and sweep the shop floor before we grab a Chipotle bowl for lunch. The point? The work we do is good work…but it also requires versatility. Flexibility. The ability to do things like “roll with the punches” and “stay the course.” It requires flexibility and commitment, being willing to do whatever it takes to get a job done.
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If you looked at us on paper, you’d probably wonder if we should be business owners. Don't get us wrong. We like what we do and we love our business, but we didn’t necessarily picture this as something we’d end up doing. On one hand, we have a lot of family members who are business owners and we’ve learned a ton from them. We grew up entrepreneurial. We grew up with responsibility and having to take responsibility for our lives.
But as business owners, we also recognize we don’t necessarily fit into a traditional mold.
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