‘There’s some really interesting customers here. I ship rocks, 70-pound rocks.’

Andy Thompson never runs out of postage stamps. He never has to hunt for a note pad or an envelope. Thompson and his wife, Debbie, own a Mail Boxes Etc. franchise in Lakeside . Besides such services as shipping, telefaxing, copying and word processing, the store is a veritable one-stop shop for business paraphernalia. But the 44-year-old Santee resident hasn’t always been surrounded by mail boxes and bubble wrap. Two years ago, Thompson was a management consultant for several community-services programs in the East County that included substance-abuse counseling and mediation. He quit to pursue his dream of launching his own business. Times staff writer Caroline Lemke interviewed Thompson at his Lakeside store, and Vince Compagnone photographed him.

I worked for Professional Community Services, a program in El Cajon that provides different social services. I was involved with the Santee Counseling Center, the El Cajon Counseling Center, the Mediation Center, a substance abuse project and peer counseling programs at Santana and El Capitan high schools.

Once a need was identified in the community, I would raise the money, design the program, set everything up, then hire the staff to manage it. The first program I was involved in was training bartenders and cosmetologists to provide therapy, on the assumption that they often act as counselors at work. We got a grant from the state Department of Mental Health.

I recruited about 20 bartenders and 60-some cosmetologists, designed the training and implemented it. I watched them for about a year and followed up to find out to what extent they were providing therapy and how the skills that we taught them worked. It was very successful.

There were a couple of reasons why I left. One is that it took an incredible lot of my time. And, I wanted to start a business of my own. I was terrified. I thought that, in owning a business, there would be some similarities to social services and some differences, but I didn’t know what they are.

One of the reasons I chose Mail Boxes Etc. is the support they give you and don’t give you. As an entrepreneur you want some assistance, but you don’t want somebody telling you what to do every step of the way. MBE allows for that.

This is fun. Everything is kind of like a problem-solving sort of thing, especially the customers who come in here who are just setting up their own businesses. What I do is find out a little bit about their business and what they want, and I help them set up the whole thing.

That’s different from community services in the sense that normally, with community services, you get a lot of people involved in decision-making and get a lot of people working on a project. Here, the idea is customer satisfaction, and a decision has to be made right away.

The whole object of relating to people is different too. In community services, you get involved with people to help them get involved in a project to accomplish something. Here at MBE, you’re providing services to people directly across the board. My contact with people is different because they’re paying customers. I’ve got to develop relationships and give them what they want, and, if I mess it up, it costs me money.

There’s some really interesting customers here. I ship rocks, 70-pound rocks. There’s this guy who has a rock pile in his yard, and he cuts them out and brings them in, and I wrap them in the bubble wrap, and we ship them all over the country.

And we have a customer who comes in here, an 80-year-old man, and he gets mad at me because I’m here and not my assistant, Mary. He comes to see her all the time.

Owning your own business doesn’t mean you don’t get frustrated, but it’s a frustration that you know there’s an end to, and it’s a frustration that provides the energy to do something to get things going. It’s not a negative thing where you just give up and quit. It’s an energy--you get going and just do it.