Episode Details

In this episode of Business on the Run, I sit down with Jen Johnson, owner of Southern Spears Surf Shop in Galveston, Texas, for a refreshingly candid conversation about what it's REALLY like to own and operate a small business.

After 20 years as an elementary art teacher, Jen left education, eventually moved toward the Texas coast, and found herself staring at an opportunity she never expected: buying a surf shop.

One day of training later, she was running the business.

What followed was a five year crash course in entrepreneurship learning customers, managing inventory, hiring employees, navigating seasonality, marketing the business, protecting margins, and figuring things out when there wasn't anyone else to do it.

One of my favorite stories from the episode? Jen was determined to run a "core" surf shop and resisted selling things like sand toys because they didn't fit her idea of what the store should be.

Her customers disagreed.

She finally listened and sold more than $10,000 worth of sand toys in one summer.

That's small business in a nutshell.

Your customers don't care what you think they should buy. They'll tell you what they want. Your job is to listen.

In this conversation, we get into:

🏄 How a Nebraska-born former teacher ended up owning a Galveston surf shop
💰 Why knowing your margins matters when deciding what products to sell
📦 The challenges of managing and pre-ordering retail inventory
👥 Why finding and keeping good employees can be one of an owner's biggest headaches
📊 How Jen uses a "Turn Away Book" to track what customers are asking for
🏖️ Managing cash flow in a highly seasonal business
🛍️ Why 85% of her customers aren't surfers they're tourists
📈 Moving toward private-label products with better margins and differentiation
📱 What she's learned about marketing a local retail business
🤝 Why even competing surf shops can work together to bring in more customers
💡 And the business lessons she learned by being thrown into entrepreneurship with almost no experience

This isn't a conversation about surfing.

It's a conversation about learning to run a business when the textbook ends and reality takes over.

Whether you're thinking about buying a business, struggling with inventory, trying to understand your customers, dealing with employees, or just wondering whether you have what it takes to become an entrepreneur, there's something in Jen's story for you.