Owning and operating three unique and unrelated businesses could bring anyone to the brink of exhaustion. But Pat manages to put in 15-plus hour days every single day without giving in to stress or burnout. This is how she does it.
Pat's Story
"I started making stuff and eventually grew that into three businesses."
Third Street Stuff started at my apartment on Third Street, and it was a lot of odd things. It was handmade jewelry, hand-painted and hand-sewn postcards, purses - this was in the '80s. Everything was very glittery and funky and full of lots of layers and toys, painter dinosaurs with ribbons and little toys and jewels all over. Things just kind of rolled along and changed with time and changed with the economy. I found a commercial space that let me add a little store where I sold the stuff that we made. The little store did very well after a while, and I was able to accumulate enough money to start buying restaurant equipment, coffee equipment, ice machines, refrigerators, something that I really had never in my life though that I would be doing. Well, two years ago I opened a coffee shop. Now I've got three businesses going -- the store, the coffee shop and an art business where I paint furniture.
"I've never been too big on sleep really, even when there was just one business."
The hours that I had in the store were 10 in the morning until 6 or 9 at night, depending on the season. With the coffee shop, we start every morning at 7 a.m. and close at 11 p.m., except for on Sundays when we open two hours later. I like to say we're closed on Thanksgiving, but that's a day I come in and work really hard to straighten everything up. When people say that I work a lot, I guess what they mean is I am at work a lot, and they assume that must be tiring. If I get only two or three hours of sleep a night, I am tired, but I am not tired because I've been here for 15 hours every day, seven days a week. I actually regret sleeping because there's this block of the day that I'm just not getting anything done.
"Even with all my commitments, stress only comes very rarely."
If something seems to be going really wrong financially, that brings me the most stress of anything. But over the years, my attitude has changed some to where what I thought was high stress before isn't quite so stressful. Even in the short time I've had the coffee shop, I have found that I don't have to panic just because we don't have turkey or something. In the scope of things, not having turkey is not that big of a deal.
Reaching that vantage point of not feeling stress about everything is probably an accumulation of experience and having panicked like 5,000 times, and it doesn't really achieve anything. I figured maybe if I learned how not to panic, it makes the day go by better.
"I have a lot of good people around me all the time."
An incredible bunch of people work here, and I finally have sort of realized that everyone around me is teaching me things. Especially when someone seems to be so different from me with their attitude or their way of approaching life, if I can watch, I find out that they are really teaching me things. That has seemed really sharply brought to my attention just recently. I work with one person who just stays incredibly relaxed and good natured and extremely outgoing and friendly at all times. Nothing ruffles his feathers, and he's always just very relaxed and happy. I watch him do that, and I feel like I can learn something from how he faces everything. Everybody has little lessons like that to teach me.
"Everything I do is self-motivated."
I am working for myself, and I think that's very different from someone making you be at work and telling you, "You've got X, X, and Y to do before you go home." Everything that I do, no one has told me to do it. For some reason, that totally doesn't tire me out, working on my own projects. This is like my own project. It is just like one ongoing project, and the more I work on it and change it, the better I feel about it.
