Weekends Off

This weekend will be my first "official" weekend off since starting the store over three years ago. The first year I worked every day, about 361 days that year. I took off Christmas, Thanksgiving New Years and July 4th. Other than that, I had nobody else to help with the store. I'm not one of those control freaks, there just wasn't any money. The second year I made the difficult decision to hire someone for Sundays and to stay late Friday nights. That was really hard. The gulf between doing everything yourself and hiring someone to do even a little bit of your job is vast. Many store owners can't do it. They just stay closed a day a week, rather than risk hiring someone.

Now, once you've hired someone for even a day, it's easy to keep going. You start thinking you're some kind of management genius, at least until you have management problems, usually the same ones that repeat themselves over and over again. Management is just another kind of work, as opposed to the holy grail of work efficiency. The ideal would be to hire someone for my own job and go work on some other majestic business development plan, such as a second store, or my own line of gaming accessories. That's many years off.

Now that I have weekends off, I start looking at my schedule and realize that although I "officially" have Saturday off now, there are at least three Saturdays over the next two month that I might need to be at work anyway. We've got a big Magic tournament that requires two people for the afternoons. I also have a trade show in late January over one weekend. Dundracon and a game auction are scheduled for February, and both take Michael working off the sales floor. To paraphrase Hillary, it's not just about hope, it's about working to make the change. I may need to hire another employee to truly have weekends off, someone who can work Saturdays when it's busy.