The Secret to Small Business Success: Sell What You Love

Like Russ Leiner, your greatest passion could become your small business success

By: Jaron Serven, Staff Writer

Russ Leiner sits back in his chair, the cool early-April breeze wafting past us into the spacious living room, and smiles.

“[Saltwater fish] were the most colorful, unbelievable fish you’d ever seen,” he says, remembering first glimpsing them at 15 or 16. “At that same time, Jacques Cousteau was on television—”

He breaks off, laughing slightly. His eyes gleam with good nature behind his spectacles and his black hair is dappled with grey.

“They didn’t have Discovery Channels back then.”

Russ has good reason to laugh—he’s looking back at the beginning of his success as a small-business owner.

As a country, America has never really been at the forefront of entrepreneurialism when it comes to small businesses. The primary mentality seems to be “go big, or go home.” However, with the recent economic hardship, more and more Americans—about 9.3 million since 2001, Forbes reports—are forging their own path, foregoing the usual routes to success and creating their own  businesses.

Yet there are still many jobless Americans out there who may be thinking about starting their own home-based entrepreneurship without any clue as to which field would suit them best. In Russ’s case, the choice was a very specific one:

“I’m a purveyor of saltwater aquarium equipment.”

Say what?

“I sell on the Internet, and through home-based business, dry goods and equipment for people to put together saltwater reef aquariums.”

Most people who hear about what he does initially meet the news with a mixture of apprehension and surprise, but Russ, like many writers, musicians and educators, is working in one of his oldest passions. Not in saltwater livestock itself, which he admires wholeheartedly, but in literally creating small environments for these beautiful creatures to live in, which he then sells on saltwatercritters.com

This is, briefly, a more complicated science than it seems. You must create the exact conditions of the ocean in the middle of your living room for the livestock to survive comfortably, which includes circulation, neutrality, salt content, everything. Even rudimentary set-ups recommended by pet-stores provide a complicated and thorough step-by-step process, which would prove infuriating to those expecting the easy set-up of a freshwater tank.

He wasn’t always in this field, and the path to it was long and, in its own way, fateful.  Russ originally comes from a background in accounting.  “And computer science…” he adds, smiling again. “But [that field] was a lot different than it is today.” He was a successful contractor, accountant and businessman for years.

Then, an unfortunate car accident left Russ unable to do his regular job, and the career he’d been working on for decades was suddenly gone.

But where some would find mere tribulation, Russ saw opportunity. “I got a chance to go and basically take my passion and make a business out of it.” What started as a childhood passion for colorful fish—one visit to the pet store, and he was hooked—grew into something that could flourish in our day and age. Still, the task of starting a business from scratch was (and is) no joke, especially during a time when the economy was in flux.

It doesn’t appear to have stressed Russ too much. In contrast to your stereotypical American citizen, he has an almost unusually calm demeanor. It might be influenced by that breeze, heralding the incoming arrival of spring and refreshing the living room of his home, or it could be encouraged by his small dog, Scooter, curled asleep in his lap.

That calm, as much as it’s a part of his personality, is also a carefully cultivated aspect of his business, and it’s likely contributed to his success.

“I don’t base my involvement exclusively on sales,” Russ says. “[It’s] actually more [about offering] help and guidance, and through that trust, people will then see my website and see the feedback [and say] ‘Why not get someone who’ll give me the personal service?’”

A personal touch in business is not a novel idea, but in home-based business it may be the deciding factor between flourishing and floundering. According to Inc.com, customers are seeking accountability, confidence, empathy and, most importantly, honesty. In an age where anything and everything can be done online, the personal touch that Russ employs in his business is more important than ever.

It also doesn’t hurt that Russ has the field experience  necessary to be successful: “I’ve been into aquariums for over forty years,” he says. “As a businessman, doing this particular business, it’s been seven years.”

But all of this should not undercut the importance of the Internet in shaping the current state of his business, and Russ recognizes the almost serendipitous timing of its creation. Smiling, he recounts: “[When I was a teen] there was always the unknown of how to go about maintaining the saltwater aquarium, because there was no Internet. There were no books written on it, it was just people in a pet shop telling you how to do it. You could see there wasn’t great success in the hobby in those days.”

He remembers that it was many years before the technology needed to properly keep these fish at home caught up to the enthusiasm that people had for them. In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, the Internet made the practice more accessible to the masses.

“Things started to snowball and it was like a geometric progression,” Russ says. “Bulletin boards popped up all over the place and clubs started forming and people started sharing their experiences so that the hobby became much easier for everyone to do.”

It was those forums that became Russ’s “ primary source of contact” for new and returning customers, and are both the toughest and most rewarding part of the job for him.

“I do have a lot of late nights,” he says. “At one or two in the morning,  I can and do respond to people’s queries.” Those restrictions underscore the main difference between home-based business and working outside of the home—you are never really off the job.

Though he can’t really go on vacation, none of this seems to bother Russ. In fact, he seems to relish it.

“Everybody has the same product to sell,” he says. “The only thing I have different is me. My service. My ability. My experience. It doesn’t pay for me to sell someone something and [have that be] the end of it.”

It’s an odd socio-economic anomaly that while the Internet has made the creation of business easier and increased the speed at which business can be done, it has also created an emphasis on the human element that wasn’t necessarily such a large part of sales in the past. That’s how we get wonderfully off-kilter and triumphant stories of accountants becoming saltwater fish tank gurus—because there is no limit to what a person can do when they have the right tools and the motivation.

Not to mention a certain amount of savvy.

“Learn everything about everything,” Russ says, attributing his luck in the timing and execution of his business as a matter of merely being interested in something. “You never know what direction life is going to take. Keeping your doors open is, to me, a great way to pursue something, whatever that something is… it’s going to differ for everybody.”

Russ is living proof that we can turn passions into careers. There were great costs for him to get to where he is today, but his victories, no matter how small or unique, are still his. If we stay interested, if we keep our doors open, we just may find our own unique victories soon enough.

Visit SaltwaterCritters at  www.saltwatercritters.com. Special thanks to Russ Leiner and his family for all of their help on this and other projects.

Jaron Serven graduated last year as a Master in English from UAlbany, and is now a professional freelance writer/editor in the Greater New York City Area. Follow him on Twitter @j_serv, and check out his music and culture blog at www.jaronserven.com

References:

“The Rise of The 1099 Economy: More Americans Are Becoming Their Own Bosses” by Joel Kotkin, Forbes http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2012/07/25/the-rise-of-the-1099-economy-more-americans-are-becoming-their-own-bosses/

“Think We’re the Most Entrepreneurial Country In the World? Not So Fast” by Jordan Weissmann, The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/10/think-were-the-most-entrepreneurial-country-in-the-world-not-so-fast/263102/

“Follow These 10 Steps to Starting a Small Business” U.S. Small Business Administration http://www.sba.gov/content/follow-these-steps-starting-business

“Personal Touch Means Business” By Norwin A. Merens, Sales Vantage https://www.salesvantage.com/article/1455/Personal-Touch-Means-Business

“7 Things Customers Want Most From You” and “6 Things Every Customer Wants” by Geoffrey James, Inc.com
http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/7-things-customers-want-most-from-you.html

http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/6-things-every-customer-wants.html

“Setting Up a Saltwater Aquarium” Petco Caresheet http://www.petco.com/caresheets/fish/SetUpSaltwaterAquarium.pdf