I've been knocked around too much by life and am too much of a realist to be that naive, but I am enjoying my honeymoon. I won't deprive myself of these feelings.
I'm going to workshops in New York City to learn the financial fundamentals of running a business. It's an informal fellowship with a diverse group of business owners – many are sole proprietors, some run pretty sizable firms with employees – and I'm learning a lot. I probably don't need to go all the way to Manhattan to find this information – there are some local options, I'm sure. But I like the energy of New York. It's only practical for me to go a couple times a month, but it's like getting a blood transfusion for my soul. There's no other way to describe it. The song says if you can make it there you'll make it anywhere, and I'm surrounding myself with people who are making it there. I have a suspicion there is no financial crisis my business could face that someone in that group has not already gone through and survived. There's a tremendous sense of safety being part of their numbers. Good thing – because what I'm attempting to do is not for the faint of heart. I have completely left the work force and struck out on my own. I'm going to let that sink in for a minute.
I've noticed that when I speak of my former career, 30 years as a radio personality, I've started referring to it as “when I was with the circus.” That seemed like a good Facebook status, so I posted it up and got the expected laughing emojis from my friends. Then Steve commented, “only now not only is there no net but there's a pool of fire down there!” Dude's been self-employed for eight years now, his honeymoon is over. But shut up and let me have my moment, geesh!
Systems will make or break your business.
So the process of building systems has begun. The biggest challenge I’ve run into in the past 3 weeks is finding enough time to stop doing the day-to-day work on the business to work on the systems.
When you’re a self-employed small business owner, you are doing just about everything yourself. Steve and I are a husband-and-wife partnership, so we have the advantage of dividing the work. I am financials – bills, credit, taxes, accounts payable and accounts receivable. My workshops in New York are all about building the back office that runs the business like a real business, not a disorganized ad-hoc jumble of whatever. It’s nice to know, working with these other entrepreneurs, that Steve and I are not the only ones who went into business ass-backwards. We were more concerned with the exciting real estate deal stuff and not at all concerned with structure and all that boring accounting stuff. Ready-fire-aim. The good news is it’s not too late to turn it around, and doing so will turbo-boost us to that next level. 9 years ago I thought I’d just be directing the renovation of apartment buildings, filling them with tenants and collecting rents. There is so much more, especially since our business is no longer just rentals. This used to confuse me and repulse me, but now it fascinates me. A solid structure and financial systems are the true keys to the freedom I seek as an entrepreneur.
Steve deals with buyers and sellers, investors, money partners and contractors. He was dealing with tenants, too – but now that I’m full-time I am transitioning that from him. I’m also going to start dispatching rental maintenance. In order to do that, I have to learn a new system, which Steve has been building with a web-based software called Podio. Check it out at www.podio.com. I don’t truly understand Podio – I just downloaded a book onto my Kindle called Use Podio To Manage A Small Company by Thomas Ecclestone. Steve has more of an innate understanding of technology like this, and for that I am grateful. We have an ambition to set up Podio to run a business like ours, and then sell the set-up to other investors like ourselves. Filling a need and adding another income stream! If you’re interested, check back in six months, we may have something for you.
Working with your spouse has its own unique challenges! (See my previous post: http://thisgingerjustsnapped.weebly.com/blog/when-your-husband-is-your-business-partner-keep-the-throw-pillows-handy)
Business issues come to a head pretty quickly, usually after supper when we’re supposed to be winding down after a hard work day. That isn’t healthy – unless we use it to solve the problems quickly. In that case, it becomes an advantage over business partners who only see each other during the workday. This week we realized we each had a problem: I felt he wasn’t keeping up with the numbers for our daily business record keeping. He felt he was out of the loop with what I was working on, and that was causing him to duplicate efforts – several times this week he found himself handling tenant issues that I had already begun to resolve.
We agreed the time to solve these problems wasn’t after dinner when we were supposed to be winding down and getting Savannah ready for bed. We need a daily morning meeting. So starting tomorrow that meeting will be twenty minutes, Monday through Friday,
beginning at 8:30am once Savannah is on the school bus. We will take 10 minutes to go over the previous day’s expenses and collections so I can log them. Then we will spend 10 minutes getting each other up to speed on our current projects. Then we will have a 10-minute quickie.
Too much information? Sorry.
Here are just some of the systems we will be building in the next several weeks:
-A system for recordkeeping, tracking income and expenses across all lines of business
-A system for ultra-efficient rental property management
-A system for consistently locating houses to buy and flip – in any given month we want to have two new deals under contract, two under construction, two finished an on the market for showings, and two scheduled for the closing table.
-A system for staffing the crews to work on our flips – we’d like to have multiple flips going on simultaneously, but dependable labor has been an issue. More on this in a future post!
There are more systems that will need to be built, I’m sure. So much work to do – but I am fired up and excited because I’m in the honeymoon phase of my self-employment and reality hasn’t hit me yet. I’m going to use that positive energy to get us off to a running start!