Opening Week

Well, I open for business officially tomorrow, in keeping with my desire to wait until after the baby arrived, and in keeping with my guerilla marketing tactic of adding an e-mail sig saying as much to selected audiences when I announced the baby’s arrival last week.

Mainly that means finally taking the phone to a quiet spot, recording a voicemail greeting, trying to keep the phone in earshot, posting the actual number on the site, and oh right, finally posting at least some plans/offers and prices on the site.  Not to mention tweaking the site further, making sponsorship of the CotC site official, giving out cards aggressively, signing up for potential sources of work at whatever prices, finishing organizing the office, which I made great strides on this weekend, and so forth.

Unless things goes absolutely crazy in the first couple weeks, I expect to look for side or temporary contract work to supplement, with the business more of a side thing.  All while taking care of recovering the van to usability, cleaning out the old office, dueling over money and such, and going to a final spate of extra doctor appointments before things settle down.  The baby has a one week, two week and one month.  Valerie has an 18 month.  Presumably Sadie will have an annual visit around the same time I have my next checkup the beginning of October.  I suppose we ought to schedule that if it’s not already done.  Once we’re out of early to mid October, I think we’re on a much reduced doctoring schedule.  Yay!  Circa October we also need to look into changing insurance.  We have to be able to do it for less than $800 a month plus a few grand a year out of pocket.  That shouldn’t rival or exceed things like rent and groceries.  But I digress.

Okay, back to working on the office.  Or going to bed, but it’s hot out there.  In here I have the AC keeping it bearable.

Speaking of weather, it’ll be thirty years this fall since I bought a snowblower to make money clearing driveways more efficiently.  Then we got a blizzard, followed no time later by the Blizzard of ‘78, followed by essentially no snow the rest of the winter.  Talk about business disasters.  A series of ordinary snows would have been lucrative and made the equipment an excellent investment.  People would pay, say, $5 to shovel snow that could be done in, say, half an hour or less.  People would pay, say, $10 to shovel snow that required as many as three man hours, and that was too deep for the snowblower to handle any more effectively than a teenager with a shovel.  I had signed up a large number of customers and couldn’t handle them all because of the sheer time required.  Things were made worse by the guys working for me, in one case doing the wrong driveway (either someone got a freebie, or they went rogue and hired out on their own while also getting paid by me), and in another case doing such a bad job I had to stand and take a nasty lecture and walk away empty handed when I went to collect.  Heh.  Before I ever learned to distrust employers, I learned to distrust employees.

Still, that’s a great example of something that was in fact not a stupid idea.  I should probably have stuck to shoveling, but in a relatively normal winter, equipment would have made me so much more productive it would have at least covered itself and made the work more fun.  I think I knew there was a risk of a snowless winter, but nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition Blizzard of ‘78.

Posted by on 08/26 at 09:00 PM

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