2017 is half over.
A lot of business articles talk about taking stock and setting goals for the second half of the year, plotting a course correction if necessary. Many businesses do this quarterly. June 30th closes out the 2nd Quarter of the year, July 1st opens the 3rd. When you get fired or laid off, it's usually at the end of a quarter – the final weeks of March, June, September or December. It's why companies cut jobs at Christmastime. Cold world we live in, isn't it?
At the start of the 2nd quarter of 2017, I quit my day job and became a full-time self-employed entrepreneur:
http://thisgingerjustsnapped.weebly.com/blog/full-time-entrepreneur-when-its-time-to-quit-the-day-job
During these last three months, I have been very busy adjusting to this new life and the anxious insomnia that came with it. Melatonin is my friend:
http://thisgingerjustsnapped.weebly.com/blog/what-the-business-books-dont-tell-you
While I've experienced some sleep-robbing anxiety having taken this leap, mostly what I've experienced has been exhilaration. I absolutely love being self-employed. Working from home. Making my own schedule. Creating a work/life balance that actually works for me and my little family – no easy task with the changing needs of a quickly growing 7-year-old! There's a lot of trial and error, and it's been taking up all of my time. But in a good way.
The other day I realized I have been largely absent from Facebook, aside from a few scattered posts. Social Media can be a dangerous time-sucker, so I've been staying away from it. I don't have a Twitter or an Instagram, although I may soon strictly for business purposes. But I've been on Facebook since 2009, mostly to keep in touch with my family and friends back in New England, and my former co-workers in the radio industry scattered across the country. I made the big announcement in April that I'd retired from broadcasting entirely to focus on this real estate venture. I cut my hair super short. And then I basically disappeared.
There's a very good chance that no one really noticed – everybody's caught up in their own journey, after all. But I felt like I needed to let everyone know what's up three months after quitting my 30-plus year career and cutting my hair off. So I started crafting a Facebook post for July 1st – my own little personal quarterly report. As I wrote it out, I realized it sounded like a blog post. And here it is!
The First Quarter of Full-Time Self-Employment
Well, I'm still here. Neither my husband nor myself derive a paycheck from an employer anymore. The only income flowing into our family's coffers is from our own efforts at running and growing our little real estate operation. This is why I need melatonin to sleep some nights.
But it's ok! There's enough money coming in to keep our bills paid. We're living carefully within our means, but we're not living in austerity. We still order out for pizza a couple two, three times a month. We've been to a movie or two. Savannah still goes to her YMCA summer camp and we paid to sign her up for soccer in the fall. We have clothes on our back, shoes on our feet, food in our fridge and gas in the cars. The mortgage is paid on time. All this without incurring any new debt on the credit cards. That was one stipulation I made – if I'm going to do this, we are not going to live off plastic. So far, so good.
Relying solely on the business for our family's personal income has made me a better business person. I've become very focused on income and how dollars spent should be generating revenue. I came up with a system for rent collections that produced great results in June: http://thisgingerjustsnapped.weebly.com/blog/rent-collections-a-system
I'm going to have to come up with another system – this one for showing and renting the units as they become available. Check out this blog space next week for that one!
Entrepreneurial Overwhelm
There are so, so many things that need to be done. So many new Systems to create! Not just for rentals, either – that's just one part of our business. We found out over the past nine years that to be successful, we must have multiple streams of income. Aside from rentals, we flip houses for retail sale. We renovate other investors' properties with our construction company. That company just got a contract with a local municipality to maintain the yards at abandoned properties in the city. Steve is talking with a joint venture partner about getting us into the self-storage business. And he's still helping other investors find and buy properties, for a consultation fee. As for me – I have to keep track of the income and expenses for every one of these little ventures, and make sure they're actually making us money. In the past, we could spend a long time on a project that wasn't making money - or that was even losing money – because my paycheck from my job would cover the family expenses. That is no longer the case, so we can no longer fuck around. And that is good thing!
It's going to take time to come up with all these required Systems, put them in place, tweak them, perfect them. It isn't going to happen over night. It's going to happen one day at a time as I keep showing up for work.
“Overwhelm is just a three-syllable word for Fear”
That pearl of wisdom came from a woman in one of my workshops. I find workshops extremely helpful – all that support from other entrepreneurs dealing with the same issues as me. This isn't something I can talk to my radio industry friends about, or even my extended family, or the other Moms on the soccer field. They just don't have a clue. I highly recommend hooking up with other self-employed go-getters. Steve co-hosts the Investors Network NEPA meeting on the second Wednesday of the month. The next one is July 12th, 7pm, at Perkins in Pittston, PA. You can find other meetings and workshops on meetup.com, or even in the local paper. I'd be happy to tell you about the workshops I've been attending – you can e-mail me privately at [email protected].
The way my workshop friend overcomes overwhelm is with baby steps – very small, incremental goals leading up to the Grand Vision. My Grand Vision is a successful business with many profitable streams of income. To get there, I'm going to need Systems. How do I build so many Systems? One at a time. The next one I'm going to build is one for renting empty apartments. And I'm going to build it by writing a blog post about it next week. I committed to that action a few paragraphs ago, so it's going to happen during a pleasant two hours at the Wilkes-Barre Township Marketplace Starbucks. Then I will test that system, renting an apartment that will be available August 1st. There may be a few others coming up as leases end, so I'd better get to tweaking this new system. Nothing sucks cash flow out of a rental business like carrying an empty!
I don't have time for fear.