This past Sunday, the wife and I ran a few errands, stopped by the cemetery to visit my mom and grabbed a quick bite to eat.
This isn’t out of the norm for us. It’s pretty much our standard Sunday routine.
I was craving a steak — and not just any steak. I wanted a 24 oz Arthur’s DelMonico Ribeye.
You can easily put this steak up against any high end, award winning steakhouse in Manhattan and you’ll likely choose this one over and over again in a blind taste test.
So we headed to Arthur’s for a late afternoon dinner. You need a few hours to digest this bad boy before you try to go to sleep. It will literally give you the meat sweats!
After we parked, we walked to the restaurant through a section of Morris Plains that’s filled with OLD restaurants.
I’m talking generational establishments handed down for over a century.
But it was heartbreaking to see the other restaurants that didn’t make it.
This hits home for me. My family comes from small business owners.
My grandfather had a small upholstery business after serving in WWII. My other grandfather had an auto body shop after serving in the Korean War. And my dad built his auto repair business out of my grandparents’ garage at his childhood home.
I own our family’s multigenerational business today, which is run by my wife and our business partner.
I’ll be honest: The past several years have been some of the hardest I’ve ever experienced as a small business owner.
Those businesses that did survive are a testament to the discipline, sacrifice and consistency needed to weather all types of unpredictable storms.
The ability to live beneath your means and have some cash reserves while staying under-leveraged have all meant more in the past 2 years than they have in the past 2 decades.
Even through the 2008 great recession, business was not nearly as altered as what this pandemic has done to today’s small businesses. Rampant inflation and shortages have caused broad devastation.
These are the businesses that employ your neighbors, sponsor your kids’ little league, and support local town functions. These small businesses are the backbone of your community.
I encourage you to shop local, eat local, and support local. These businesses have families, their employees have families and they all count on you like you count on them.
The menu price of our DelMonico steaks have risen 23% since our last visit there before covid hit. I don’t care.
I’m just happy to see them still in business… their phones ringing, people enjoying their meals and Arthur living on to fight another day.
Whomever you do business with, on whatever level you do business: Remember there are people behind products and services. The people are the true value. So if you benefit from the product or service, treat the people providing it well.