Miss Jessie's

by Miko Branch

  Titi’s lawyer’s letter was like a sucker punch to the gut. It categorically stated that Titi had sole control of the business, which was technically untrue. Years earlier, we had named Titi manager on the boilerplate partnership agreement we’d purchased from Staples. Though that did not mean I had less ownership, it gave Titi more power on paper, which neither of us understood when we signed the paperwork. A judge, reviewing the documents, agreed and ordered me to give up all the money in our joint business bank account. All I had worked for, everything I had built over the years, was taken away by court order.

  Adding to the insult, I was told I was to continue working at the salon for a salary of three hundred dollars a week. Of course I refused. There was nothing in the contract that required me to stay, although I was not allowed to provide hair services anywhere within a hundred miles of New York—a noncompete that Titi and her lawyer insisted upon enforcing.

  Tips for Family Businesses

  1. Try to compartmentalize; keep work and personal feelings separate. This is a tough one in a family business, where personal tensions can infect the day-to-day operations.

  2. Always put the interests of the business first, or family arguments could cost you in time, energy, and lost income.

  3. Remember, emotions can wreak havoc on your bottom line.

  I was deeply hurt by the blindside, and shocked that it was coming from my big sister. From fights in the schoolyard to raising my son, Titi had always been my staunchest protector and most dedicated helpmate. This was not supposed to happen.

  The circumstance prompted me to relocate my salon business to Washington, D.C., where I commuted weekly, leaving my son with a sitter every Thursday morning until I could return on Saturday night. Luckly, my salon staff came with me, commuting back and forth along I-95. We quickly built up a thriving salon business. In addition to my old clients, many of whom followed me to D.C. to maintain their hair, there was a sizeable untapped market of women in the area who were starving for our naturally-curly-hair services.

  In many ways, it was a learning opportunity. I had always left the operations side of the business to Titi. Anything that had to do with management or administration, I’d delegated to her. But in D.C., I had no choice. I had to do all my own paperwork. I had to put myself in charge of the scheduling, budgeting, incorporating, training, ordering supplies, and cracking down on product theft. I was a solo act, dealing directly with staff, suppliers, graphic and website designers, and clients. I was managing three assistants at a time, often remotely from New York. I had to be fully accountable to myself, with no room for excuses, blame, or guilt about my exacting standards and no-nonsense management style. All of this practical, hands-on experience made me a more well-rounded and confident businesswoman. More important, it made me fearless.

  However, running a business so far away from home was incredibly stressful, as was leaving behind my crying son each week. Driving back to New York one winter night along the Beltway, I was so fatigued that my car spun out of control. Thank God a huge truck was on the side of the road to block my car from going over the edge of the overpass.

  Always plan for success. Stay busy building something, no matter what is happening in your business. Time is valuable. Use it to learn, grow, and improve.

  On and on it went. After a year, we reconciled and planned to stop the lawsuit, until Titi pulled out at the last minute. Back to D.C. I went. This time, my salon staff members were done with the commuting, so I had to start hiring local assistants to help with the workload. The grind was relentless, but I needed the money to pay for my lawyer. Furious at my sister, I was determined to fight her with every fiber of my being. I knew it was going to be a rough battle, and the legal costs could bleed me dry, but I couldn’t live with myself if I allowed Titi to take my business from me like that. My blood and sweat was tied up with Miss Jessie’s. It was who I was; it was my son’s future. Giving in would devalue all that I had struggled to build. For the sake of my self-respect, I had to go to war with my own sister.

  SIDING WITH THE TRUTH

  It was one of the worst periods of our lives. My sister and I could have lost everything that we’d built together. I couldn’t help but think none of this would have happened if Miss Jessie had been alive. She always sided with the truth, and she would have wasted no time telling us we were family.

  Miss Jessie never would have allowed that lawsuit to take place. For her, it was always family first, ever since she saw the way her sister was mistreated by her stepfather all those years ago. So imagine her reaction to litigation between her two grandbabies. She’d have turned over in her grave.

  I never missed my grandmother more.

  Nine

  A SUDDEN TWIST

  A change is gonna come.

  —SAM COOKE

  It was a warm, early summer day in June 2008, and we were hoping for a thaw in our cold war. The feud had already lasted two years, and a judge finally ordered us to mediate. Titi and I decided to meet at my lawyer’s office in Lower Manhattan to talk about a settlement. After rarely spending a day apart in over thirty-six years of living, we’d become virtual strangers, and this would be the first time we’d met face-to-face in months. Despite the sunshine outside, the climate inside that conference room was freezing.

  I’d been dreading this moment. I was so angry that I couldn’t trust what I’d do to my sister when we got in a room together; I had visions of myself physically hurting her. As I took my seat, I grabbed the armrests so tightly that my knuckles were turning white; I feared that if I loosened my grip, my fists would start flying. But I kept thinking about what Miss Jessie always told me: “Miko, use your common sense!”

  We were trying to decide whether to dissolve the company or have Titi buy out my shares and take over completely. While it made no sense to close down a business that was clearly in the black, Miss Jessie’s was my vision, my heart, and my soul, and I couldn’t see the business moving forward without me. As far as I was concerned, I could not live with myself if I did not fight to win back what I had built for my son.

  We went at it for two hours, haggling about who brought what to our business and exactly what each contribution was worth. I couldn’t see how it was even possible to parse any of it out, because until the lawsuit happened, we’d been completely intertwined, each giving 100 percent of ourselves. We had been a tight little unit, and I’d have trusted her with my life. Titi and I had been together on everything; she was even coparent to my son.

  As everyone was talking, I thought, This is bullshit! It was clear that my sister was just spouting whatever she was being fed by that lawyer of hers. She was barely able to make eye contact with me as she sat motionless in her seat. When she accidentally caught my glance, she had no light in her eyes, as if the girl I knew had retreated inside herself, with no real connection to anything she was saying. I was suddenly sad for her—something was wrong with this picture. But my fury was greater than any observation I’d made. She was in the middle of telling her story in a way that supported her claim when I lost it: “Titi, why the fuck are you lying? You can’t even hold a straight face, talking that bullshit!”

  “Don’t talk to my client,” Titi’s lawyer said. As far as he was concerned, the case was airtight. As long as Titi stuck to her story, he was about to make a nice chunk of change on his fees, in addition to all the money he had already made off of our company. But I wasn’t having it.

  Someone called for a time-out, and Titi and I took a bathroom break, away from the lawyers. Behind the closed doors of the ladies’ room, we had a long talk and finally reconciled.

  For two years, Titi had been clinically depressed, isolated from our family, and barely functioning at work. She was tired and had lost the will to fight anymore. My rage melted into compassion, and we hugged it out.

  Just like that, the war was over. Titi made the decision to end the lawsuit then and there. In the stipulation, we agreed that Titi would drop 1 percent of her share in
the company to 49 percent, giving me ultimate control. It offered us some much-needed clarity.

  PARTNERS IN CRIME

  If anything good had come out of this lawsuit, it was the fact that our estrangement forced us to see ourselves as individuals, independent of each other. Before this, we didn’t know where one of us ended and the other began. It was necessary to do an honest self-evaluation and carve out our separate identities.

  A clearer understanding of our individual strengths could help us become better partners, which is crucial when two people are running a business together. Miss Jessie had always understood the importance of being part of a duo, from the time she took in her baby stepsister, Aunt Sis. The two lived together, raising my grandmother’s four children and Aunt Sis’s two kids in the same apartment, pooling their scant resources to survive without any husbands and fathers on the scene. They managed their household like a small business, buying groceries and paying for heat, shelter, and clothing for their family. They even played the numbers together, sharing in the winnings.

  Most of all, they had each other’s back. They got physical if they felt someone in the family was being threatened. Once, when Miss Jessie’s number hit and the numbers man came to the door to try to stiff her out of the money owed to her, Aunt Sis went to Miss Jessie’s aid and they gave him a beating he never forgot, throwing him down the stairs of their walk-up apartment. They told him there’d be more of the same if he didn’t bring them their money that day.

  That was the nature of my partnership with Titi before the lawsuit. Even when we weren’t getting along, no one could say anything to us about the other. The problems we may have had were between us, and we wouldn’t tolerate a third party tearing the other down. Together, we were always a united front.

  Put it in black and white. Getting things in writing takes out the guesswork, assumptions, and false expectations, allowing each party to play his or her position.

  We’d been naive when we entered into our official business partnership years before. We should have handled paperwork through an attorney and meticulously spelled out each person’s role in the organization. Instead, we took a costly shortcut with a boilerplate agreement that didn’t reflect the true nature of our partnership. The document was rudimentary, and it left a wide gap for misinterpretation, which, along with our personal communication breakdown, led to disaster. But we’d learned our lesson: Partnerships are tricky unless everyone understands who does what, and that’s especially true when you’re in business with family.

  TOGETHER AGAIN

  Nobody had won; we’d just made our lawyers richer. Attorneys add value to a business when it comes to making deals and drawing up contracts, but they have no business in relationships. We learned that lesson the hard way. But as we walked out of that office, we felt like a huge weight had lifted. Finally, the ordeal was over, and we had each other back in our lives. Being apart like that never felt right. We went back to Titi’s apartment in Brooklyn.

  “Miko, will you please stay with me tonight?”

  “Of course, Titi. I’m here for you!”

  Your business is bigger than you. Set aside personal grievances for the greater good of the enterprise.

  Titi didn’t want to spend another day alone, and honestly, I was worried about her. The guilt and pain had taken their toll on my big sister, and it was time for me to be her rock. We still had a lot of healing to do, but Titi and I recognized that there was something much bigger at stake: our love for each other. We were always better together than we were apart. Miss Jessie’s was a sister act. That was how we’d shaped every aspect of our business from day one. We were in this together because we chose to be, and not just because we were related. Separately, each of us had the wherewithal to succeed. But together, we could continue to build something much greater than its parts.

  TAKING STOCK

  Titi asked me to come back to Miss Jessie’s. I agreed to shut down my salon in D.C. to work with the product company at the warehouse on Hall Street five days a week, continuing my work in the Bed-Stuy salon on weekends. We needed to do everything we could to build our business back up.

  After two years, we’d lost some market share, and our business was stagnant. By 2007, competitors were surfacing. The good news was that the business was still profitable, with revenues growing from $1.7 million in 2006 to $3.2 million in 2008, subsisting off existing clientele and reorders.

  Always pay your bills on time. Suppliers will remember being well treated and will stick by you when times are tough.

  Our own tight fiscal management also saved us. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” Miss Jessie used to say, quoting Shakespeare, and we took it to heart. We had no debt and always paid our bills on time. I know it goes against everything people say you should do when managing your payables—you’re supposed to send out that check as late as possible to hang on to the interest—but as soon as an invoice came through our door, we paid it. As a service-oriented business, we wanted to treat others the way we liked to be treated, never making others wait for their money. The result was a rock-solid relationship with our vendors and suppliers, who were willing to give us deeper pricing discounts because they knew they’d always get paid on time.

  Growing up in a home where money was always tight, and watching our father make it only to spend it all again and then some, was arguably one of the most enduring lessons we learned about business. For all his independence, Daddy really didn’t have his own, and seeing him cycle in and out of debt made Titi and me extremely careful with our pennies. We never wanted to overextend ourselves. We weren’t cheap, and we took care of the people we loved, but we never wanted to be in a situation where we didn’t have complete control and freedom to take the business to the next level without being beholden to the bank.

  Cut costs with surgical precision so that you can afford to invest in the employees, equipment, marketing, or capacity necessary to grow your business.

  That salon move on Bond Street was another lesson learned. By moving into the house in Bed-Stuy, we’d gotten rid of the overhead of a fifteen-hundred-dollar monthly rental and given ourselves a nice big tax write-off. Every dollar we made went toward paying down the mortgage and covering our bills. Our partnership had been 50/50, but it all went into the same pool of money, which we put in a savings account at the bank. Even when we had built enough of a cushion, we gave ourselves modest salaries and kept the bulk of what we made in a savings account. We didn’t go out and party, like many successful single women in their early thirties. We shared a car, shoes, bags, beauty products, you name it. And that was how we lived, even when we were bringing in high six figures in net profits.

  Being frugal just came naturally to us—something we learned from Miss Jessie. But she also taught us the difference between “penny wise and pound foolish.” Our grandmother didn’t have much in the way of resources, but she never skimped. She negotiated, she cut corners, and she stretched a dollar, but she would never be cheap for its own sake. What she did have, she knew how to spend. She’d go to the supermarket and buy that big box of Tide detergent, because she knew she had a lot of children’s clothes to wash, and in her experience, that brand was the best for getting the job done. She invested in the economy size because it saved her time in the form of an extra trip to the store, and money, because bulk is always better if it’s something you know you are going to use a lot. She taught us that while it’s necessary to economize, you must always invest in your priorities.

  We must have absorbed that lesson well because, at every level, our lifestyle was self-contained and carefully managed. It revolved around the salon and the business, which was our hearth, our home, our security, our livelihood, and our family. That house on Hancock Street was like a fortress, and we guarded what we had and ran things with military precision.

  This enabled us to reinvest in our product business on an as-needed basis. The year Curly Pudding came on the market, 2004, was the same year we paid off our Ha
ncock Street mortgage in full. We hadn’t ever taken out business loans, financing the product company entirely through the proceeds from the salon, and keeping overheads low in a high-margin business. I was also adamant about never paying full price for anything.

  Throughout the building of Miss Jessie’s, this approach allowed us to take some risks. Cash flow, or lack of it, stops many small enterprises from making their next best move. But not having to live hand to mouth and knowing the bills would be paid gave us the courage to follow our instincts about pricing and business expansion. Cash kept piling up because, after all of our operating and living expenses, there was a net profit at the end of each month that was continually rising.

  Although we were careful about spending, we were in tune with the business and knew precisely the right time to grow. That was why we bought new equipment and insisted on hiring people to handle customer orders, pack boxes, and send out shipments. We could physically feel when it was becoming too much. Although we still operated with a tight budget, we kept finding little ways to make it easier and accommodate our rapid growth.

  That laser focus on our bottom line protected us. Not only did it keep us from going under during our litigation, it gave us a cushion when the recession hit in 2008, and it bought us the time we needed to get our operations flowing efficiently again.