"It's Just Business."

I'm probably the worst business owner I know. Now, before the people I love rush in with their extremely well-intentioned chorus of, "noooo, Chris, you're so passionate, you're so ambitious," I want to tell you that it is objectively true. I'm impatient, disorganized, overly-sensitive, and allergic to money. I have never had a marketing plan. I lose the "why" of what I'm doing on a daily basis. I have raging imposter syndrome. I hate being in charge of everything with nearly every cell in my body, and the attention of running something makes me ill. So why do I do this to myself? To answer that question, let's go backwards.

I opened The Sidekick, a cafe x comic book store in Toronto's East end, in 2015. I was 23 years old. I was depressed, overwhelmed, and deeply in the closet about being a trans man. After dropping out of an arts program at an acredited University and hobbling together a painting practice while being a barista and dog walker, I wanted to create something. I spent all of the disposable income I had on comic books and no comic book store in the city would hire me (and I gave them all my resume on a quarterly basis). I had a meager savings and I applied for a business loan for the rest of the money, through a youth business incubator. I had a best friend willing to quit thier job, a boyfriend with a burgeoning renovations career, and the idea that I could create a space for misfits like that would make me want to get out of bed in the morning. That was the goal. The build out still remains one of the most fun and fufilling times of my life. We were covered in dust, we were spending way too much money, we had no idea what we were doing, we got open in three months and had a packed first day. I learned everything I came to know about ordering comics and running a cafe on the job. I was a terrible boss because I wanted everyone to have a great time. I was a terrible entrpreneur because I paid myself dead last. There were no systems for anything, we had no online store. But we paid rent and staff on time every month of our 10yrs, we had a group of dedicated regulars, and I made some of my best friends in that space. Being the owner of the Sidekick required me to consistently show up for my community, required a painful level of dedication, and gave me the confidence to grow into myself. I would not be the man I am today without it. From an outside look, that is success- and from inside, too, I will always feel like it was. The Sidekick was beautiful, and if you handed me 100k tomorrow I would build her again. I have not learned better. I would do it the same way.

I won't ever forget one of the first negative reviews we recieved on our Google business profile (and yes, I do still feel the sting of every single negative review and yes, I should stop reading them but self-harm is an ADDICTION). It was our second day open. 2/5 stars "The owner seemed distracted and unprofessional." I wish I could tell you I remembered who this person was, however... I was distracted! And probably unprofessional! I don't know if anyone reading this has ever opened a cafe x comic book store with no experience opening any business in thier early twenties, suddenly responsible for repayment of a large high-interest business loan and commercial rent, with no family locally, no staff but their extremely soft and supportive best friend... you get the picture. I was excited but also felt like my chest was full of bees. However, I am not sure how professional we are expecting the indie cafe x comic book store owner to be. When I look back at it, I wonder who they were hoping to find behind the counter, what type of person they thought would be spending all their time making coffees and bag-and-boarding new indie titles for display on custom-built pipe shelving. In the coming weeks, I made fast friends with the owners of the local taco shop, the low waste bulk food store, the dive VHS bar, the staff at the barber shop, the local butchers, the indie cheese shop... the list goes on. We went to each other's businesses, comiserated, passed around the same $20-40, collaborated on social media posts and I hosted their events or they hosted mine. We cared deeply about what we did and all had the same dream: To make a living doing something we felt good about. Most of us seemed in charge by accident- just the folks with the idea crazy enough to dedicate all their waking hours to trying to make it work. We were greatful to our staff. We worked way more hours than seemed healthy. We were making it up as we went along.

It was always my hope that The Sidekick would become more of a collaboration. In the beginning, we talked about my friend becoming an owner. We talked about my boyfriend becoming an owner. In the end, no one stuck around for that- if you aren't 100% in, I don't reccomend you run a small business. The love of the game is the only thing that will get you through the enormous amount of bills and headaches and disputes and bad reviews and and and and and. Even when I was at -$500-7000 in the account and a staff member phoned me to say that the water heater was filling the basement with water AGAIN, I woke up in the morning to set the coffee grinders and dust the bookshelves, looked around at her with enormous love. The Sidekick was special magic. I didn't want anyone to pitch in financially and stand with me in it unless they also felt that way. Which is of course, a completely impractical ask, and not at all what you'd be told to look for in a business partner. Unfortunately, I have always lead with my heart.

Over the course of The Sidekick's 10yr run, I watched nearly every business listed above (and so many more) close their doors. Some of this was completely circumstantial. COVID-19 closures did a ton of damage to local spaces that survived just barely on walk-by traffic, and not everyone could pivot to online. Some closed before that as tight margins on business owners with families & mortgages meant that it wasn't sustainable to give all their time to something that paid barely minimum wage for maximum effort. No matter the reason, I held so many hands as people I had come to admire and adore admitted they couldn't carry it anymore. The Sidekick picked up staff from other spots, locals whose resumes I never even glanced at knowing that they were great people- as I told so many, "I can teach you to make coffee, I can't teach you to be a fucking gem of a human being." Every time it was destabilizing, for the staff and the regulars, every time it broke my heart to see another go. In the years after COVID, I felt their pain as I watched the sales numbers and knew the decision was coming for us, too. After many pivots and reinvestments and skipped paycheques for myself, staying open didn't make sense. I didn't want to wait until a rent cheque bounced or those deficits hit the team. We shut down in 2024, and it was completely necessary. Logically, it should have happened a year prior... Maybe even before that. And yet, I don't know if I will ever make peace with it.

I have been owning small brick-and-mortar businesses for 11yrs now, and when I say it is a different time, I really mean it. Businesses in capitalism run on a model that requires endless growth to keep up with inflation (loan interest, rent, energy costs, shipping costs, wages, the subscription model of payment processing systems and websites, costs of goods sold). I have watched those costs skyrocket in the time I have been running physical shops, beyond the point of the math really making sense, of growth being able to outpace them. Large companies run deficits and recieve enormous bailouts. Conglomerates and drop-shippers create online stores that sell goods at a loss to squeeze out smaller businesses. Seasonal workers are hired and dumped, making good wages and job security scarce. All of this is more true every minute that I type this. No one in their right mind would open a downtown store now without a ton of capital, marketing prowess, a back-up plan, and an exit strategy, some kind of metrics that would tell them when it's time to pull the plug. At no point should any piece of this story add up to telling you that I am a person with a right mind- unfortunately, my brain is capable of putting these pieces together and then watching in abject horror as I build bookshelves and fill out loan applications. I am not a sane person.

I may be a small business owner, but The Sidekick (and also Little Ghosts Books, which deserves its own story) was a business only in name. I am incapable, it feels, of running something that exists for commercial purposes alone. It's part of the downfall of what I create, but also the key element always of what I want- a reason to get up in the morning, a reflection of the good I still somehow believe exists in the world. Inside the other people I saw running spaces on main streets alongside me, I saw the want to steer their own ships, to have their unique vision exist in the world, and to create community. In that way, every business closure marked a success, someone who built their own destiny and was a safe haven for a small set of people, ridden until the wheels fell off. It was also a heartbreak, someone throwing in the towel on a dream. To this day, I run markets for free, create neighborhood maps of other local businesses, do shout-outs and collaborations, mentor, run work-in-progress nights for authors, host panels. And to this day I get paid last, work too many hours, have raging impostor syndrome, and am uncomfortable with attention. I fear that while it seems impossibly unsustainable to keep doing this to myself, I have become completely unemployable. I am loudmouthed and protective of my community, opinionated, boisterously creative, a series of unrestrained impulses. I'm terrifyingly without boundaries, I give all of myself to my projects, and I still take everything way too personally. Good thing my spaces are barely businesses because if you showed me just me on paper, I would say I would be a terrible, distracted, unprofessional business owner.

I don't know that anyone who has ever run any storefront, bar, restaurant, studio, or service job I have ever loved has ever been a good entreprenuer, and I don't think I would want them to be. People are messy, passions are unrefined, and culture thrives at its best when folks are given the space to try interesting things. In the current endless growth economy, it is tried and tested and profitable or bust. I wish we lived in a world where someone could open a small 5 table restaurant and serve their family recipies four nights a week and survive. That we could have shops dedicated to handicrafts run by those crafters, hosting small socials on weekends. Increasingly these small models of family businesses and community spaces are run out of cities because they aren't scalable, they don't make enough money to absorb the freakishly exploding costs of operation. I think we are all poorer for it (and most small business owners, poor enough to close). I'm writing this because every year I wonder if I will be able to keep doing what I do, and these past couple it has been harder than ever. Part of it is maybe that I've always been badly suited to business- but to me, it has never been just business. It's always been about growth, community, and making space for misfits like me. If those goals were the yard stick on which we measured success, I know with my whole chest I would be one. It's never just business. (Here is the comic I made about The Sidekick's closure).