A Chat with Fred Meyers, President & CEO, The Queensboro Shirt
CS: What was your biggest challenge in the first few years?
FM: hat's always an interesting question in retrospect. From my perspective now I can say that the biggest challenge was that I had no idea what I was doing. But sometimes your biggest weakness can be your biggest strength. Everything was approached with a fresh perspective. I never capitalized the business; it was always financed from order to order. As we started to get a little traction, and started growing, it was very challenging. But it really doesn't take that long to go from zero to a couple hundred thousand dollars and from there to a million dollars. But there are a lot of physical challenges to managing that growth, especially if you don't have enough money to go ahead and buy a big warehouse. In the first 12 years in business, I moved the whole business nine times. I would keep going into a space that was an adequate fit for where I was at the time, but a year later, I'd be twice as big. And we weren't going from $4 million to $8 million, this was just $200,000 to $400,000. There were a lot of logistics and movement involved. As the business got a little more established, there were some technology challenges, in terms of what the proper platform was for building the business. And if choose wrong, I've seen a lot of people that have gotten taken down. With any small business, finding the right people to help you grow is always a challenge. I've made more than my share of bad hires over the years. Hopefully I've learned something, but I still make bad hires from time to time. You just have to learn to overcome the bad decisions that you make, because it's inevitable that you're going to make plenty of them.
