Freedom Countdown

I’m headed on a new adventure with a new blog.

A Pretty Book

I’ve put this particular task off for months.  I knew I needed to determine whether I wanted to operate my business as a sole proprietorship, an S Corporation, a C Corporation, or an LLC.  Main main goal has been to minimize my AGI since so many things are means tested these days, along with minimizing my taxes.

I immediately threw out a sole proprietorship because it offers no protection from various unknown liabilities.  I also threw out an LLC, but frankly I don’t remember why.  Now I’m down to a Corporation of some type.  I know C Corps offer significant advantages on minimizing AGI and paying for health benefits and S Corps offer advantages on reduced withholding taxes.

I think I’m out of my league, there are too many variables and I’m just NOT a tax accountant.  So I’m going to take all of my questions to a local CPA and pay for an hour of their time to pick their brains.

In the mean time, I have hired a local high school student and must issue my first payroll check this week.  I don’t want to file multiple payroll tax reports for multiple companies so there has been pressure to get the structure set up and a bank account opened before the first check is written.

I’ve gone ahead and established a new corporation and have a little bit of time before I have to make the formal election for an S  Corp, if that’s the way I decide to go.  Setting it up was incredibly easy.  Everything with my state’s Secretary of State was online and done within 24 hours with a few simple questions.  The hardest part was picking a name.

Next, creating the corporate bylaws, holding the first Board of Director’s meeting (with myself), and issuing a resolution to use a local bank were all very simple due to a book I checked out from the library about forming a corporation in my state that included a CD with fill-in-the-blank forms for the official documents for all of this.

Finally, I visited www.irs.gov to get my Employer Identification Number (EIN) online in a matter of minutes for my newly formed Corporation.

Two days, $300 in filing fees later, and I have a real company and I should never have put it off so long.  It was painless.

I need to find the drumbeat for my new business.  What’s that you say? Well, in Six Sigma Lean, the goal is to operate a process, like a factory line, in a consistent, efficient, error free manner so that one item comes off the line every set increment of time.  Like 1 candle per second, that’s the drumbeat of the candle production line.  Every second of every minute 1 candle is made, boom, boom, boom, just like a steady drumbeat.

As a part time business owner, I find myself rushing to get orders placed, then waiting for the merchandise to come in, then rushing to process the merchandise.  Or letting the accounting pile up for weeks, then cramming for hours to get caught up.  Or blogging.   There’s nothing steady about any aspect of my business and it contributes to an overall feeling of being out of control.  Things that were manageable when I began the business are totally unmanageable as the business has grown.

My options all revolve around becoming more disciplined in my activities.  Perhaps, I do accounting every Saturday morning, or divide my orders into smaller orders and place them every Monday and Wednesday so that there is a steady drumbeat of merchandise arriving every week. This becomes especially important if I hire someone to work with me because I’ll need a predictable amount of work for them to do.

It’s weird, but it just might start looking a little more like a job and a little less like a dream.  Hmmmmm.

A friend mentioned that she set up a feed to my blog and I realized that I had no idea how she did that.  I didn’t remember setting anything up.  But sure enough at the very bottom of my blog is a little RSS.  Why in the world is it all the way down there?  Seems like it needs a more prominent position.  I’ll have to change that at some point.

I decided to learn more about setting up feeds and the first article I found, included feeds plus several other must have plugins.  I already had about half of them and am working on the other half.  It’s a great article for WordPress beginners so check it out.

Getting my inventory and workspace organized has finally risen to the top of my priority list.  I started about a month ago moving everything related to my business out to the barn, as we lovingly call outbuildings where I live.  That was the easy part.  The internet access was much harder.  I don’t have DSL in my rural area and rely on the  wireless internet provider from hell.  They are the only provider that works with my day job’s remote access requirements so I’m stuck with them until Obama brings me DSL or cell phone signals get stronger.

My first solution after hours of research on the internet, and a worthless conversation with a clerk in a Best Buy, was a range expander.  The theory is that it can pick up the wireless signal from my router at the edge of it’s range and extend it on into my barn.  The only problem was that the end of my router’s range appears to be in the road somewhere, hardly a spot to mount a range expander.

The next step was to find a stronger router.  I actually tried to make a homemade antenna based on an online video to boost the power of my existing router.  When this didn’t work, I bought the highest rated router I could find with two antennas.  After messing around with it for a week to no avail, I finally called the internet provider from hell and they came out, spent about three hours trying out a variety of things and decided we needed to hardwire the barn with an ethernet cable directly to the rooftop wireless antenna.

But…. they don’t bury cable or suspend it overhead between two buildings, they just lay it on the ground.  So we had to find someone willing to dig a trench in 105 degree weather.  A month later it’s all done and working great,  but it was every bit as troublesome as I had thought it would be.

Next step, hire a high school student to help me clean things up, get them organized, and do the shipping tasks I dislike so much.

Is it really a vacation if you have to work an extra 20 hours the week before you leave and an extra 20 hours the week you get back?  While the mental break of a vacation is wonderful, I wonder if the work to get there is worth it.  And that’s just the effort to leave my day job, not to mention my business.  Although I’ve been able to work some on my business, much of it has been put on the back burner to prepare for leaving the job that pays the bills.

One thing nice about a salaried job is that the paycheck keeps coming when you’re on vacation.  When you have a business, you have to shut down or hire someone to run it for you.  Either way, a vacation costs you more than just your trip expenses.  But I think it will be worth it.

Before you take the big plunge and quit your day job, you need to take a very realistic look at how much after-expenses, after-tax money your passion will generate.  Then you need to prove that you can live on that amount.  The best way to do this is to set up a budget based on your passion’s income and live on it for 6 to 12 months as if it were your sole source of income.  Be brutally honest about your spending, don’t just make guesses as to how much you’re spending, or tell yourself you’ll start on this task next month when you don’t need new tires or some other unexpected expense.  You will still have financial surprises after you quit your job and you need to be prepared to handle them.

The easiest way to set up a budget is to utilize the online banking tools that many banks now offer.  Many will automatically group your transactions into categories like groceries and gas based on the vendor’s name.  Also, you can usually download your banking transactions to Quicken, QuickBooks, or the free Quicken Online service.  Once you have your transactions categorized, it’s time to set a budget amount within the online banking tool or Quicken/QuickBooks and begin monitoring your progress against your budget.

Another thing you should do before you quit your job is to begin building your six month cash reserve.  That’s your monthly expenses times 6 and yes, it will seem like a lot of money, so start now.   This is something everyone should do whether they are beginning a new business or not.  This isn’t your 401K, your child’s college fund, or your home equity;  it’s money sitting somewhere that’s easy to get to in case of an emergency like a layoff or illness.  Or in your case, a new business venture that doesn’t work out quite like you projected.

Finally, consider scaling back your lifestyle and getting out of debt.  It’s hard enough to start a new business as it is, without worrying about whether you’re going to lose your house or your life’s savings.  There are some businesses that are instant successes, but most need a year or two (or more) to grow into something that will support you consistently the way your career did.  If you’re lucky (or unlucky) enough to have investors you may be able to pay yourself a sizeable salary, but most small businesses don’t work that way.

I’ve been scaling back my lifestyle and getting out of debt for the last several years, but it’s time to get serious about the budget.

I love Artisteer.  I’ve tried about 5 different tools to make a blog or a website and they’ve all been a lot of work, even though they claimed to be simple.  Artisteer truly is point and click and I’ve been able to do everything that I’ve wanted to do.  Plus for a $50 price tag, I can make as many website or blog templates that I want and none of them look the same.

I received feedback that my site was too blue.  And I agreed.   Plus I didn’t like the stock photo from Artisteer.  So I used Picasa to crop a picture of my grandfather’s windmill in Oklahoma  and I changed up the colors a little.  I like the new, clean, less blue look.

I think about the family farm in Oklahoma a lot and to me it represents a simpler time.  Of course, I was young and carefree when I was there, so no wonder Grandma’s house was so great.  For years, and even now, when I think about escaping or running away, this is where my mind takes me.

I decided to try Twitter and see if I could use it in some way that went beyond “I’m going to eat sushi” or “Just got home”.  I’ve read in several places that if that’s all you do with Twitter that you’re missing out on the power of Twitter.  It may take more imagination than I have, we’ll see.

Sign up was easy, but I quickly ran into a stumbling block.  Should I use my real name or my blog’s name?    I Googled the concept and read opinions that included using your  real name and not using your real name.

I decided to use my business name but found that I was limited to fewer characters than my name contains.  Keep that in mind if you haven’t selected a name yet.  I shaved off the last few letters and was left with a Twitter username of FreedomCount.  Not ideal, but I’m not willing to change my blog name at this point.

I also found that I could post my tweets (twitter posts) on my blog and vice versa with a WordPress plugin called Twitter Tools.

At the end of the first day, I had six followers.  I have no idea who they are or why they would follow me.  I’d like to think that they are interested in what I have to say, but if not, thanks anyway.  I’m just excited to have followers.

Since this blog is supposed to chronicle the journey of building a business, I guess I should include the warts and all.  So here are some random thoughts about the last two weeks of this journey.  I’ve put off mentioning them because I don’t have any pithy answers or solutions for them yet.

1. My personal life, which is my main priority, keeps getting in the way of my day job and my new business.  It’s been a whirlwind of graduation and college enrollment.  All of which have been fantastic, but there’s been a hint of guilt festering in my subconscious that I should be working harder on the business.
2. I’m having a really hard time motivating myself to work at my day job.  Although I’ve disliked it for years, the feelings seem to be intensifying.  I’ve tried a variety of ways to reward myself if I will just buckle down and get it over with.  These techniques aren’t working.  The gnawing in my stomach as I sit down and review my daily To Do List is getting worse and I find myself wasting valuable time.
3. It’s increasingly difficult to shift between thinking about my business and thinking about my day job.  Just as I get into the groove of one, it’s time to think about the other.  Neither really get the attention they deserve.
4. There are parts of my new business that I really don’t like to do and I find myself putting them off, just like I put off unsavory tasks with my day job.  It’s easy to think that a new business will be perfect when you’re dreaming, but reality is that all things have a good side and a bad side.  I know one solution is to hire these tasks out and I’ll probably look into that at some point.
5. Writing in this blog has been uneven.  I’ve had several things I’ve wanted to write about but they didn’t seem substantial enough so I’ve left it idle.  I’ll need to decide whether every entry needs to be filled with advice or go more with the diary approach.  Without a doubt, leaving it idle is the worst blogging sin.

None of these issues is new for me, I’ve been dealing with them for a long time and when I get a little more organized, I’ll probably write about them in more detail.  But for today, I simply feel torn in lots of directions and am accomplishing very little.