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My business mentor, Charles Fisher, was a prankster aficionado. He did things like poke a tiny pin hole in the side of your soda can, just below the tab opening, so that every time you took a sip it would dribble down your chin. For all new employees, he would leave pink return call slip on their desk with the phone number to a funeral home asking them to return a call to “Myra Maines.” He always had a joke ready for any occasion.

Synonyms for small business owners: problem solver, therapist, lender, mother, teacher, enabler, enforcer, sympathizer, promoter, communicator, capitalist, and optimist. Take out capitalist and lender and it could be a job description for a preacher or homemaker.

A few years back I took a leap of faith and hired for a new position, a sales assistant position. My thought was, this new person could help streamline and alleviate some of the busy work of my sales staff, thus freeing up my experienced salespeople to use their time more wisely, ie. selling. It worked. Sales increased, morale increased, and a team atmosphere was garnered.

In FlagandBanner.com’s parking lot stands an 80 ft. flagpole with a 15×25 ft. American flag. The past few Mondays as husband Grady entered the parking lot, he noticed that over the weekends someone was driving circles around our flagpole.

At first it was a curious site, like a crop circle, but as the circular ruts in the lot deepened, the problem of potholes and strewn gravel became a nuisance. As Grady pondered who would so consistently be returning to do “donuts” in our parking lot, a suspect came to mind.

In order to mitigate risks, large companies become inflexible and impersonal. Avoiding the risk of discrimination is accomplished by discouraging nepotism. But, at FlagandBanner.com, we feel a societal duty to support our employee’s families and train the young. So much so, that our employee roster reads much like the book of Numbers in the Old Testament.