There’s No Business Like Small Business

Hoyt Zia

This was very much a small, family business. What we did was make products like carousels (see the inset photo) on a music box movement that played Brahms's Lullaby and bassinets with a ribbon and lace skirt and canopy stapled to a paper vase with a tarred bottom inside to hold water, also with a music movement attached. My mother spent her nights sewing the skirts and making ribbons for the products while we kids spent our afternoons after school and weekends painting and putting the pieces together, and my father would put them in his station wagon and peddle them to florists from New York to Washington, D.C.

Of course, we kids hated the business. Instead of being able to play outside with our friends, we were stuck making these things in our home workshop. To add insult to injury, my father was very secretive about his business, and we could never tell our friends what it was that he did. Only years later did we realize that he was probably violating any number of local ordinances by operating his little manufacturing business in our residential neighborhood and did not want the authorities coming around. Of course it was not also until years later that we appreciated what he and my mother had to do to make this little business support a family with six children, and how much of the work ethic we now have came from the responsibilities that were imposed on us at a young age. All we knew at the time was that we did not want to be doing this when we grew up.

Looking back now, however, I think my dad may have been on to something. Most of my career has been spent in the private sector typically working 50-to 60-hour weeks; I don't recall my father usually spending that much time at work, but if and when he did, he did it when he wanted since he made his own hours. Needless to say, he and my mother had no health insurance or any of the other benefits we now take for granted, and I am sure those issues remain a challenge for many of the small business owners who comprise around 97 percent of the Hawaii business community and especially so for the estimated 50,000 people who are self-employed. Yet they evidently find it worthwhile despite the lack of material benefits. So as we congratulate our largest companies in this our annual Top 250 issue, let us not forget the small business person: I believe they may be on to something that the rest of us can only dream about.