Lower Overhead by Dr. Juan Harrison
Lower Overhead
My friend Karen has a booming business in her café in an old filling station in a nearby town. It ain’t much to look at, but it’s full of my kind of working and retired folks just looking for some good home cooking and good conversation. My buddy Ray made a small fortune selling BBQ out of a corner of the meat locker for 50 years. You stood in line and sat on your tailgate if you wanted a seat. What they and a lot of us small business owners understood is the key to surviving is low overhead. My next door neighbor and bank president once told me I was the smart one keeping a low profile with my business while he spent almost every spare moment committed to some civic or business event. I retired earlier to avoid having to do that anymore.
A friend of mine once commented to me that a couple we know living in the big house had a high maintenance marriage. I seldom see them together with their busy lives. Sometimes people look back on their lives and wonder how they got where they are. Whether it’s running a small business or a family, the end product is the result of a series of decisions, not just one or two. People don’t eat at a restaurant or café or BBQ stand for the beauty of the building. The key is good food, low prices, and a good atmosphere. If the building’s nice, it’s a plus. Actually a lot of folks prefer the older homely atmosphere to that of a spiffy shiny modern one.
More than ever, small businesses and families have a similar goal. They’re trying to keep down the overhead and stay in business. Sometimes you see little old cafes and businesses hanging on by their toe nails while fancy smancy high falutin ones close their doors unable to keep down the overhead enough to stay in business. A lot of marriages and families face the same battles. Life’s pretty tolerable when things are going okay. Hit a financial bump or two and there lies the rub. You can max out the cards trying to keep up appearances, or you can scout around and see if there’s any loose change or a service or two to be modified or discontinued. People are having to make these decisions as the elderly folks in my SS class confide in us of their challenges.
It’s not fair. We worked hard. We deserve the good life we dreamed of. Old Man Inflation. He had to rear his ugly head just as a lot of us older folks thought we could keep hanging on with our fingernails. I told my wife the other day I could get a dozen canned drinks from Braum’s for $6 or spend $24 at my favorite drive-thru for the same thing. Not everything in life is that simple. Still, it behooves me to do all I can as financial times get harder to keep an eye on how the money’s spent rather than putting on a blindfold and swiping the card. That growing interest is gonna bite you. Lower that overhead. Pay a little extra on the card if you can. Don’t let that marriage or relationship crater under high overhead. We want to survive, make it a game or a goal to kick Old Man Inflation’s tail.
By Dr. Juan Harrison
