After a decade of teaching, Adah Fitzgerald bought a small-town bookstore in Davidson, North Carolina. Her top business book recommendation is Michael Gerber’s “The E-Myth.” It’s a nuts-and-bolts business book that helped her take her small business from break-even to profitable. Adah Fitzgerald grew up in a family of readers and surrounded by books, so when the opportunity to buy a small-town bookstore presented itself in 2015, she seized it.
Main Street Books sits, appropriately, on Main Street in Davidson, North Carolina, where Fitzgerald has lived since 1997 when she started her freshman year at Davidson College.
She didn’t have any experience running a business — she taught middle- and high-school biology for a decade — but managed to grow the shop from break-even to profitable. Insider verified these details by looking at the business’ profit and loss statements.
Fitzgerald receives anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 books a week to place on store shelves. She is quite literally surrounded by books — and reads nearly one a week.
When asked about her top choice in the business book category, she cited “The E-Myth,” written by small-business consultant Michael E. Gerber.
“There are a million business books and ‘The E-Myth’ is brilliantly simple,” said Fitzgerald. “It’s not rocket science: There’s a specific set of things that have to get done in order to run your business.”
Fitzgerald taught middle- and high-school biology at Woodlawn School before buying Main Street Books. Courtesy of Adah Fitzgerald One of those things is hiring the right people, she noted: “If you bake pies and you love pies and you want to have a pie shop, the reality is that you can make pies — or, you can make pies and run your entire business.” While you might be doing almost everything on your own at first to keep costs down, “at some point other people need to start doing other things in order for the business to go on, especially if you’re going to be the one that makes the pies. Embracing that structure is really important.”
Fitzgerald invested in staff immediately, and she did it as economically as she could.
“At first, we were just hiring teenagers for barely above minimum wage, but they really liked working,” she said. “And, especially coming from education, I have a lot to offer — I can offer a lot of soft skills beyond that paycheck — and I’m happy to be a really great employer.”
Today, she’s able to spend more on payroll, and having a well-read staff that can help customers with book selections is something that sets Main Street Books apart from other bookstores — even the behemoths like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
“What we seriously bring to the table is a staff that reads a huge number of books and has expert, intuitive opinions about books and are very good at talking about books and matching people with books that are way beyond the algorithm,” she said. Some of her staff members read more than 100 books a year.
Hiring is essential but not always easy, she noted: “You might get burned, but it’s probably not going to break you. Learn from it because you have to have people. A lot of business owners wait too long to hire someone.”
That’s a lesson she learned from Gerber’s book, which she describes as “the super nerdy, not cool, not flashy but so solid recommendation of a book. It’s a nuts-and-bolts business book.”
However, you won’t find it at Main Street Books, where shelf space is precious. Just because she enjoys the book doesn’t mean her customers necessarily will.
“We have 1,400 square feet and very specific taste,” said Fitzgerald.