For almost three years my children had a fabric store to run through. It sat in a shopping plaza on West Market Street in Harrisonburg, Virginia, with bolts of bright cotton down the aisles, a wall of ribbons, a wall of buttons, and a classroom along one side with big tables for cutting cloth.
I bought it in the spring of 2022. I was 27 and ran an advertising company, and I'm no fabric artist. Before I found Ragtime I'd reached out to more than 150 businesses and sat down with more than 50 owners between the Shenandoah Valley and Richmond, and a fabric store was the one that spoke to me.
Ragtime Fabrics had been open for about 20 years, and it was getting ready to close. Some of the staff had already left. The store had been well cared for, but it was tired, and many of its customers thought it was already gone.
My buy box didn't name an industry. I wanted a business with more than $500,000 in sales and a team that could mostly run it without me, because my plan was to work on the business and add technology and advertising to speed it up. Ragtime fit. The people there were a kind, hardworking group from very different backgrounds, and I admired how well they worked together. I used to say the classroom was the heartbeat of that store, and that first summer we ran weeks of kids' camps in it.
There was a little old lady named Margaret who was always incredibly sweet to me and my kids, and those warm exchanges were sweet for me too.
In the camps I watched kids struggle for weeks and then put together something beautiful. The satisfaction that work brought them was precious to me.
The assumption
I'd started my own company from nothing, so I knew how much work it takes to get a business moving when it has no momentum. I assumed, the way you do when you're young and foolish, that a store with 20 years behind it would need far less from me.
It didn't take long to be disillusioned. A business that old takes just as much energy as a new one if you don't manage it well, and I hadn't planned to give it that energy.
I also paid more than I should have. I could have found that out before I signed, and I didn't check enough. Jesus asks which of us would start building a tower without first sitting down to count the cost (Luke 14:28). In 2022 I didn't sit down long enough.
The newspaper
Since many customers thought we'd closed, we spent heavily in the first 90 days to tell them we were open. Most of that money went to Meta, because Meta was what I knew. I also tested radio and the newspaper.
The newspaper worked best. Meta was underwhelming, because a large share of our customers weren't online. Sales grew, but slowly, and I hadn't expected slow.
I buy digital advertising for a living, and the newspaper beat my Meta ads. I'd picked the channel I was good at before I'd learned where our customers were. I learned quickly that the medium and the placement have to match the customer.
The team
The people at Ragtime were good people, and they didn't trust me yet. I hadn't earned it. I was a young owner they hadn't chosen, and they'd spent years working a certain way under someone else.
When I built my own team, I could craft the vision from the beginning. Adopting someone else's vision was harder than I expected. It asked for more of my time than I'd planned to give, and we never got aligned on a long-term vision for the store. Leading that was my job.
Ultimately it was a good business. A business can be good and still not be the best fit for me.
The math
I joke that Ragtime was an MBA that paid me about $60,000 a year for the first two years instead of costing me $60,000. The second half of the joke is that I lost about that much when I sold. In January 2025 I sold the store at a loss to get out from under it.
The store made money in those first two years. The third year was different, and selling was how I cut my losses. Everyone the store owed was paid in full, some from the proceeds of the sale and the rest by me afterward.
I kept the education, and an education was what I was really after when I bought the store.
The young entrepreneur
I'm writing this for the young entrepreneur who's afraid to bite off more than they can chew.
I understand the fear, and some of it is wisdom. I should have counted the cost more carefully than I did. But Ecclesiastes says the man who watches the wind won't sow, and the man who studies the clouds won't reap (Ecclesiastes 11:4). There's no reason to wait for a deal with no risk in it. I don't think that deal exists.
I learned more in less than three years at Ragtime than I would have learned by staying comfortable. Sometimes you learn a lot faster because you take on bigger problems than others are willing to.
If you're weighing something that scares you, sit down this week and write out what you're assuming about it. Then go check the two assumptions that would hurt most if they're wrong. I skipped that step.
I would buy the store again. In this MBA the stakes were people's pay. I'm a hands-on, practical learner, and for me any education can only be furthered by real experience. I'm thankful for the people I worked with there.
Ragtime is still running today. I consider it a great win of my career that I was able to keep it from closing when its owner was preparing to retire.
When I think of Ragtime now, I think of my kids in those aisles and of the children in that classroom, who struggled for weeks and then made something beautiful. I was learning the same way they were.