Family. Business. Values. Community.
What happens when you consciously chart a course for your life, a course guided by your ethics and values?
What happens when you truly recognize and embrace community?
So often business books tell us about how to earn more, how to make our businesses more remunerative, how to become more influential. Seldom do they address the small business and its impact on the life of its owners and those they employ.
There are almost 30 million small businesses in the United States, employing over 56 million people, or 57 percent of people who work in the private sector. For the small business owner - for any business owner - life balance can be elusive. Too often family and relationships suffer as we pursue a career, letting workplace demands take precedence over all else.
SMALL BUSINESS, BIG HEART is about a couple who, like many of us, lost their balance. But it is what they did next that makes their story inspiring.
In their twenties Sal and Cindy Rubino dreamed of running a little café. Cindy had the chef's palate, Sal the marketing instincts. But things didn't go as planned. Returning to Cindy's hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, with their culinary school diplomas, Sal waited tables and Cindy found herself in a basement butchering chickens. Their first try at entrepreneurship-a pair of seafood restaurants-collapsed, driving them near bankruptcy and threatening to tear their family apart amid long workdays, restaurant party culture, and soul-crushing business competition.
Reassessing their values and making family a priority over wealth, Sal and Cindy reinvented themselves. As they struggled to start a more modest restaurant, their new church family filled their tables with customers. Hiring refugees and people in addiction treatment provided long-term and loyal staff. And success followed.
For anyone seeking to create a better-balanced life while building their business, the lessons learned from Sal and Cindy - perseverance, compassion, high standards, and living the same ethics in church, at home, and at work - could well be the secret of success.
Paul Wesslund has led a full life. A writer and communications strategist with more than four decades in daily newspapers and electric co-op communications, he is also a husband and father. And like many of his generation, he is a retiree who never quite retired. After retiring in 2015 as the vice president for communications and editor of Kentucky Living - a position he had held since September 1995 - in 2016 Wesslund created Highway 61 Communications, LLC through which he writes about energy and other subjects, consults on communications strategy, and advocates for the profession of co-op communications. During his 20 years with KAEC, Kentucky Living increased in circulation from 400,000 to more than 500,000 and annual advertising income rose from $750,000 to more than $1 million. Whether working as a reporter and copy editor for newspapers, working with the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association in Washington DC, or on his own projects, it is the power of communication that has always held Paul's focus, particularly the power of honest communication to bring people together and move society forward. It was in large part how two restaurant owners communicated with their staff and how they encouraged the staff to communicate with each other that Paul found intriguing enough to be the catalyst for his first book, SMALL BUSINESS, BIG HEART: How One Family Redefined the Bottom Line. Married to his wife Debbie, a public education advocate, since 1986, Paul says that she and their daughter, Emma, the Coordinator of Institutional Giving in the Development Department of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., are the biggest blessings of his life. When not writing or spending time with Debbie or Emma, Paul fills his time attending events of the Louisville arts scene, adding to his eclectic music collection, working out at the local YMCA, and walking the family beagle, Bentley.
