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One must wear many hats when owning a small business, whether it’s managing the books, overseeing employee training or running the customer complaint department. Only other small business owners really understand all the roles you have to play. I doubt the Harvard Business School offers a course to prepare their students for life as a do-it-all owner.
But even I didn’t expect that one of my duties in operating a High Street record store for nearly 25 years was becoming an administrator of street-level justice.
Let me explain. Nasty stuff happens in the neighborhood. Some folks don’t like to deal with it, preferring to say the bad dudes will get theirs someday. And while this is perhaps cosmically true, I regard it as passing the karmic buck.
The karmic buck stops in my store.
I follow two rules: Keep it legal and make it cinematic.
Of the latter, I draw inspiration from tough-guy movie characters in handling certain matters involving employee discipline and customer relations.
Here are three examples:
• My store was burgled early one morning. I pretty much knew who did it and found the perp in his house. He immediately confessed to stealing nearly $300 in cash to support a drug habit. I really don’t think drug use should be a criminal offense, but ripping off my store certainly is. How should I impress upon him I was serious?
I reenacted Warren Beatty as Bugsy Siegel in the 1991 movie Bugsy. There’s a scene where the gangster intimidates an underling who stole from him by shouting, “You thought you could steal from me? You thought you could steal from Bugsy Siegel?” Of course, I changed the dialogue to fit my name and also faked throwing a punch at the end of each exhortation. It did the trick. I got my money back plus enough for a lock change.
Would I have been as effective if I’d channeled Angela Lansbury instead?
Don’t think so. (And I must admit it was kind of fun.)
• I do a pretty mean impersonation of an old-school Clint Eastwood, if I do say so myself. The secret is to get close, speak softly, don’t say too much and, most importantly, don’t blink.
I did my best Clint on a guy I hired who I later learned had been fired from his previous job for theft. When I confronted him on his lack of candor on his application, he confessed. I got close, spoke softly and never blinked while concisely spelling out the penalties for so much as taking home a No. 2 pencil. He became a model employee.
• The Godfather series is ripe ground for the administration of small business justice. Indeed, anything Al Pacino has done, from Michael Corleone to Scarface, is prime material. Once, after tackling a kid who stole a giant poster from our sidewalk sale, I got a chance to reenact a scene from Serpico, in which Pacino plays a cop battling corruption in the New York City police department. I threw the kid up against a wall, turned to his friends and screamed at them just like Pacino did at the detectives as they stood watching as he roughly tossed their cop-killer pal into a cell. The puke handed over a $20 bill for my $10 poster.
It looks as if cinematic crime-busting pays off in more ways than one.
