The bookshop that runs on pots: Layla's second year

Layla's bookshop occupies eleven square metres and, by her accounting, exactly forty shelves. Each shelf, she'll tell you cheerfully, has its own pot.

The shelf system

Slight exaggeration — there are six pots, not forty:

• Restock — a fixed cut of every day's takings, so bestsellers never sell out for long;

• Rent — untouchable, funded first;

• The slow months — summer is quiet for bookshops; July is paid for by February;

• Events — author evenings run on their own budget or not at all;

• Zakat — calculated on inventory too, which surprises people;

• The dream shelf — a children's corner, funded at 1% a day.

A credit line would have opened the children's corner a year earlier. It also would have made the quiet months terrifying instead of boring. I chose boring.

The children's corner opened in March. Debt-free, like every shelf before it.