Authentically Barefoot Entrepreneurship
A Conversation with Heather Bartle
Originally posted on October 25, 2024 at SteveBargdill.com
Heather Bartle stepped out of her white U.S. Postal truck to drop off a package on the front stoop, only to turn back around and find a goat sitting in the passenger seat staring back at her. She drove around Nottingham, New Hampshire the rest of the day, delivering packages on the U.S. Postal Service’s Sunday Amazon route, with a goat right beside her the whole way.
“Yeah, Nottingham was a trip, man,” she said. She then recounted the story about the old man down the long driveway who greeted her with a shotgun.
Owner of the Printing Press in Dover, she never expected she’d be her own boss. She walks around the shop in bare feet. Construction paper bats adorn the window. Last year, for Christmas, the bats wore little red Santa Claus hats. A copy of Keith O’Brien’s Fly Girls sits on a shelf, underneath a small pile of other books she hasn’t read either. Fly Girls was a gift because Heather used to have her pilot’s license. She also has a degree in special education. If it wasn’t for the big huge massive printer along the wall, this machine that can spit out an entire book, you’d have never known you were in a printing shop.
Before delivering for the post office, volunteered at various area schools: Woodman, Garrison, Horne Street. She was volunteering for her own kids who had special needs. Heather discovered other kiddos needed help, other classrooms needed the support, so she began helping everyone, not just her own kids. Michael McKinney was principal at the time took her aside and talked her into substitute teaching. She then earned her degree in special education. Then, in a kindergarten classroom, she had what she described as a complete breakdown. “And I’m like, I don’t like being here anymore. I’m not happy here.”
“I’ve always wanted a blue-collar job. Like, work on roads, or driving truck. So I started working at the post office. They gave me a truck. They let me out into Nottingham. And that was the best. I wound up with my own route within a year. I loved doing that.”
But her dad had an aortic aneurysm. She’d been working for seventeen hours straight that night. She, at one point, was sleeping in the truck. She told the postmaster she had to go, that the hospital didn’t think her dad was going to make it. When she arrived at the hospital, the post office called her asking for actual proof that she wasn’t lying about her father. She took a picture of her father lying in the bed and sent the photo off to her boss.
She held it together for her family though, and she continued delivering for the post office. Then, one night, she pulled up to a road off Dover Point, the same road she had pulled up to every day. She pulled up to the house. Stopped the truck and started manically screaming. Craig, her husband, brought her to the ER, and the post office threatened to send the cops for abandoning her truck.
“And I don’t remember any of this,” Heather said. “My mental health is a train wreck.”
That’s when she got into drawing. “I used to draw this old abandoned Chinese restaurant that we used to go to when I was a kid. So I was like, I’m going to make prints, and then send them to my grandmother, and she’ll love them.” She started sending prints to her aunt, and friends. Everyone wanted her art. She started hanging in Adele’s when Adele’s was still Adele’s. On Fridays, Heather marched into Adele’s, picked up her print order, tramped over to Staples with the order, and picked up the finished prints on Monday. That’s how she got the job at Staples.
But then, she began to have problems at Staples just like she had problems at the post office. “With the way my personality is, with the way I dress and stuff. It got so bad. This one manager let me wear earrings. But this other manager wouldn’t let me wear earrings. One sent me into the bathroom to comb out my hair. One encouraged me to wear more makeup. You never knew from one day to the next when you went in if what you had done the day before was what you were still allowed to do.”
“I had to go through three managers and a district request to wear a skirt. And in the end, it had to be a jean skirt. That seems so arbitrary.”
Eventually she quit. Went to work for Goodwill, and just priced items all day.
“I missed my customers at Staples,” Heather said. The money she made at Goodwill, approximately $11,000, went into opening the Printing Press, and she paid for everything with cash and an Amazon Credit Card because she could roll the points.
“This shop gives me a sense of accomplishment, like I’ve done something.”
The Printing Press has been open for two years and four months, and in that time, Heather has not once taken a paycheck. “I’ve been paying what I call paying my own way since I opened.” She’s never paid rent on debt, and never paid supplies on debt.
Even without a paycheck, Heather says, “It’s nice to feel like I took something and finished it. Like, I didn’t really finish teaching. And I didn’t really finish Staples.”
Except, at the end of this month in October, she’ll write her first paycheck to herself, a whole whopping six hundred dollars.
“My husband Craig was like, why don’t we try to find somewhere where it can be yours? He said I needed to be around people, but if I went back to having another boss, I’d be on the same trajectory” as the school, the post office, and Staples. “The Printing Press was my chance to take a break, to not have to have to fight for some accommodation.”
And how’s business been? “The last three months have been incredible.” A lot of bigger accounts have come in. She has a guillotine cutter now. The entire backroom is complete paper surplus. She can print anything she likes, including printing on glass and doing large signage. “You know Might Dog Roofing? Yeah, I designed and printed their vinyl banners. And they are billboard size! Full billboard! I think one is like 10 feet tall by 8 feet.”
As she prepares to write her first paycheck to herself, Heather Bartle, in a world that often values conformity, has chosen the messy, unpredictable path of entrepreneurship. Bare feet, unread books, bats, and all.