How SMB Owners Can Take Control of Their Cash Flow - A Story About My Parent's Gas Station

My parents owned a gas station in the 1970s. It was a Texaco station with a couple of bays and 3 pumps. It was located on Kennedy Blvd which dissected Jersey City down the middle, so you were either West or East of it. It was a busy street, lots of car volume, perfect for business. As a kid, I remember playing in the back of the station, I'd stack up the tires and make obstacle courses or play hide and seek with my sister. It was like our own little playground.

My parents had lots of stories about running that gas station - the good times and the bad. Unlike today's gas stations where 60-70% of the profits come from convenience store sales, back then the profit driver, the real money, was service and repairs. My father loved cars. He was a gearhead, and the station was his dream workshop. The gas station was his playground.

But it wasn't all fun and games. This was the 1970s and it was a time of gasoline shortages and price controls. My mother was a CPA, and she looked at the receipts daily, but she did more than bookkeeping. I think before it caught on at other stations, she was already modeling how to change the rations daily to serve the community fairly. For my dad, it was opportunity to share his love of cars and fixing them and sharing that knowledge with the neighborhood. Before man caves became popular, I guess he already had one because after the shop closed, there were always a few folks, watching him repair and rebuild any part of the car. He was showing them how. He was a master mechanic, who knew how to teach. My mom graduated high school two years early and was awarded a full scholarship to study accounting and believed in the value of education. At first, she was thrilled to see her husband as an educator.

As an independent franchise for Texaco with a husband-and-wife team with two little kids at home running a small business is an optimization problem of time and money. Fuel margins were volatile and so service & repairs consistently brought in positive cash flow. My dad was teaching others "after hours", and my mother would be annoyed as she saw them as potential customers whereas my father would call them friends, which was probably the beginning of resentment. My mom knew if you are in business and not making a profit, you are going out of business.

My parents divorced after 10 years and ended up selling the station. They both went on to have successful corporate careers and relationships, but I wonder what they could have done differently.

As I think about their entrepreneurial journey, I realize they had so much passion and ambition. Staying true to their gifts, my dad could have pivoted to teaching automotive repair and my mom building a business centered on education.

My sister and I have inherited that entrepreneurial spirit. We are still figuring out our own journeys, but we know that staying true to ourselves is the key.