A Chat on the "Positive Enterprise Value" Podcast
I recently had a wide-ranging conversation about Juniper Books with author and Bigelow LLC CEO Pete Worrell for his podcast, Positive Enterprise Value. Every month, Pete interviews an entrepreneur owner-manager about their business, focusing on the company’s origin story, how it developed over time, and what the entrepreneur learned along the way.
As Pete notes, I started Juniper Books in 2001 after my Internet startup fizzled. I talked to Pete about getting burnt out on the tech industry and wanting to “turn back to basics.” As I tell him in the podcast, “I really needed to do something tangible and physical and concrete, and that’s essentially what led me to books.”
The idea of venturing out into a new market and starting a business has never been foreign to me, as my parents were entrepreneurs. Growing up, we lived above the Quilted Giraffe, the legendary New York restaurant they owned and operated. Pete and I spoke about the early, formative experiences I had working for the restaurant — I cooked, waited tables, and did just about every job there was to do — and how watching my parents run their business informed my own ideas about growing Juniper Books.
When the conversation turned to what Juniper Books does — designing custom book jackets, book collections, and libraries — Pete really pinpointed the reason why the company has been successful. “To me, the content of the book is really important,” Pete says. “But the [books] that I resonate with I so love sometimes that I think of them as objects — I pick them up and hold them and think about them. It’s very interesting how books can become almost a piece of art in your home and tell a little bit of a narrative about who you are.”
Our interview also got personal; I spoke about how, two years ago, I went from being a “hard-charging entrepreneur” to being diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I had to force myself to slow down and delegate my responsibilities to other members of our team, and Pete and I discussed how that experience has given me newfound energy, focus, and creativity now that I’m recovered and back at work.
Pete and I talk about a number of other things: parenting while running a business, being printed book lovers in a world of Kindles, making an effort to read when life and work get busy, the importance of listening to customers and the market, self-care routines, and the books that have influenced me (The Never-Ending Story, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Catcher in the Rye, and A World Lit Only by Fire, for those wondering!). I’m grateful that Pete’s podcast provides a platform for entrepreneurs like myself to dig deep on personal and professional topics.
For those of you who are interested in learning more about my career trajectory and Juniper Books, you can also check out this recent New York magazine profile of me and the company, which covers some of the same things as my interview with Pete.
Happy listening/reading!
Thatcher