I ran into a North Country Trail Association volunteer at the Harvest Moon Festival here in Ely last weekend, standing under a tent with a map of eight states pinned across the back wall.
Ely is a trail town for the North Country Trail, the longest National Scenic Trail in the country, and the local chapter had a booth set up right on the festival grounds.
We got talking about the Kekekabic Trail, the stretch that runs closest to town. It put me right back at that same trailhead a few weeks earlier, where I’d driven twenty miles out of Ely to pick up a young man I taught fifteen years ago on a wilderness expedition. He’d just walked roughly thirty-nine hundred miles from Vermont, something like eight million steps, to reach that exact spot. At the time he had one trail left to finish, this one.
He’s since finished it. He is now the ninth person ever to complete all eleven National Scenic Trails in this country, every mile on foot.
That stopped me for a second, standing under that tent. Eight million steps is not a plan. It is not a campaign. It is not a launch. It is eight million individual decisions to take one more step, most of them made somewhere nobody was watching, most of them not feeling like progress at all.
That is the part owner-operators get backwards. We aim at the big result directly, the finished trail, the thriving business, the sold-out season. It is never reachable directly. It only shows up as the sum of deposits nobody saw you make.
An old friend of mine used to put it plainer than any business book ever has: no deposit, no return. He was talking about a bottle, the five-cent kind you used to get back at the counter. The wisdom never stayed on the bottle. You don’t get a return on anything, a full pipeline, a business that runs without you standing over it every day, that you didn’t first put a deposit toward. And the deposit, almost always, looks too small to matter in the moment you make it.
I see this in real numbers with the businesses I work with. A law firm here in town sits at fifty-six Google reviews now, five stars, because the owner started asking every satisfied client for one, consistently, for months, long after it stopped feeling like it was doing anything. No single ask built that number. The fifty-sixth review didn’t either. The deposits did, made on weeks nobody was checking.
A cabin-linen client of mine added one thing to the order form two summers ago, a premium towel set offered at the exact moment a guest was already deciding to book. It still sells at full price today, no discount required, because the value was legible right when the decision got made. One deposit, made once, still returning.
The most striking example of this I know isn’t even a business story. Oseola McCarty spent her working life as a washerwoman in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, taking in other people’s laundry for whatever they could pay. She’d quit school in the sixth grade to care for a sick aunt and never went back. Nobody would have called any single week of that work remarkable. But she set something aside out of nearly every one of those weeks, for decades, in savings accounts scattered around town. In 1995, at eighty-seven years old, she used it to set up an irrevocable trust worth an estimated $150,000, most of it endowing scholarships at the University of Southern Mississippi for students who couldn’t otherwise afford to go.
Harvard gave her an honorary doctorate the following year. Not one of those weekly deposits looked, on its own, like it would ever pay for anyone’s education. It was never one deposit. It was thousands of them, made by someone nobody was watching, for longer than most people stick with anything.
If you are waiting for the one big move before you start compounding, you are standing at the trailhead waiting for the whole trail to appear at once. It won’t. Take the step you can see. Then the next one.
If you recognize your own business somewhere in that, waiting on the big move instead of banking the small ones, the honest audit is a free twenty-minute working call at yourwebguy.org/become-a-client. No pitch.
Richard D. Stuart
The Weekly Prescription