THE VISION OF A MAY WOMAN
By Barbara Daly
A friend has a small business here in town.
It has been open for three years now and it seems like it has been a success.
It is about providing a service, not essential, but useful, to the local community.
There is talk around town that it is fantastic to have that service available locally and that it is provided to a very high standard.
My friend loves what he does and has all the right skills and experience. It was made for work.
It’s hard, physical and often dirty work, but he doesn’t care. He loves being his own boss and every day is different to some extent.
You can hear a ‘But…’, right? And there is a but, a very significant one.
Unfortunately, for my friend, the business is not financially sustainable.
The overhead costs are too great and since you are a single person with space to do only one job at a time, you cannot make enough profit to pay yourself a decent salary.
He’s earning a salary that most self-respecting 20-year-olds wouldn’t work for.
He is 52 years old, has a mortgage and two small children.
So what does he do?
You have just received a civil liability insurance bill for almost 1,000 euros. He needs to pay for it but has serious doubts that it will remain open for another year.
He has started looking for other jobs, jobs that pay a living wage every Friday. A job where you don’t have to worry about whether you’ll be able to pay your bills next week or whether any equipment will need to be replaced anytime soon.
I feel sad for him.
He is sad to have to give up this business that he has worked so hard for and was so proud of. He feels that he is failing, but he knows that he would be a fool if he continued to work so hard for so little benefit.
For the first two years he received a return-to-work business grant which, in retrospect, made the business look more viable.
It was a great help, but when it was finished there was nothing he could do to replace it. He physically couldn’t work any harder and with the bad weather, the cost of living crisis and the general unpredictability of customs, he couldn’t be any busier.
And then there were the rising overhead costs. Everything he needed to run the business costs more than it did three years ago, but he doesn’t think he can raise the prices for fear that he will outbid them himself.
Many clients have less money and are not willing to part with what they have.
Theirs is the only service of its kind in the city and the closest service is in Westport. It’s a much bigger system and if my friend goes out of business, they will no doubt gobble up their customers.
Another small business will close and all that effort, energy, and customer goodwill will be for nothing.
This is how small rural communities decline. This is how their energy and life is taken away.
The community I live in used to have one or even two businesses in every building in town. This is hard to imagine now.
It must have been such a vibrant and inhabited community. Nowadays, a brave few, like my friend, open a much-needed new business in town and after a struggle close it again.
Supporting small businesses is essential so communities can thrive and prosper.
People could live in these communities again and give them new life.