Adventures with lyrical - buying a business

Etoille said:

know its not the topic but its where the discussion headed - on grass is greener.

follow on to before - the VP went and talked to the COO and I found out last thursday that when decisions are being made in the next few months that the COO is going to essentially try to intervene with the CFO to get the 30% raise in place.

nothing has been promised but at this point its pretty much the strongest hand I"ll ever have. If the VP and the COO cant make this happen now, then it never will.

in the interim I have gone on a couple of practice interviews here and there - nothing I was really serious about and applied for one or two jobs to that end. weren"t great fits but I figured there was nothing wrong with a conversation. the interviews happened after I found the thing out about the COO so that definitely shaped the interviews since I was upfront about the situation and how it was likely to impact willingness to make a change.

so I actually in the interim also decided to respond to a message I got via linked in from a company that i noticed had been viewing my profile in the last month or so.

the job is my dream job. literally.

have an interview Friday with the president, and expect it to go as well as the screen did.

only questions are what the environment is, who the personalities are etc.

I"ve already made the decision that if they put the money down on paper I"ll stay with my current employer. it would actually mean less professional growth but I just feel its 100% the right thing to do since I had people go to bat for me.

The question is really how much of a squeeze play do I put on them if timing becomes an issue. I already laid out to this other company that the earliest I"d come over is mid - jan.

I guess shit happens all at once. The second I get a break through that would make things perfect here (with known intangibles), the even more perfect (with unknown intangibles) opportunity comes along.

I just don"t want to get fucked by grass is greener because what I have is truly awesome in terms of personal relationships and that shit matters a lot to me.

FML. (Yes, poor Etoille has two amazing opportunities in the middle of the great recession and cant decide which color unicorn she wants to ride on the path to her money tree. I get it, its not a shitty problem to have - but contrary to the well earned rep I have for being a colossal bitch around here I"m actually the worlds biggest softie so this shit will keep me up nights).

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None of this is bad. Its actually good. I wouldn"t lose sleep over it, no one"s made an offer yet. But once you get that offer, you can use it as leverage (in a respectful manner) to get the raise on your current job. Just be prepared to have to accept the consequences and have to switch jobs.

Who cares if it its a recession? I try to not let the current economic environment hinder me, I change strategies to let it help me. I"ve always done better in recession. When the layoffs come, it creates opportunity, and heck, the stock market"s been great to us when no else is buying.

I"m thinking increasing my ad budget from $600 a month, to almost $5,000 a month is having an impact. We are in five yellow page books at the #1 spot (except for one book), #1 spot in google, six radio spots a week during drive time, and two billboards in the most affluent areas.

That sounds like a lot of money, but we are almost booked out until December right now. Even at my worse projections, given how much work we"ll pick up, we should be blowing and going until mid-January. Last year at this time, our backlog was measured on less than a handful of days.

Evelys said:

One thing I plan to do with the kids we plan on adopting is setting aside money for 80% of a college education (both the hubby and I feel that the kid should be responsible for at least part of their education), but if the kid doesn"t go to college, learns a trade, has a good business plan, and I feel that they"re responsible enough to make their plans happen, we"ll make it available for seed money for a business as well.

Having that cash available to help kids/other family just seems to give such a ridiculous advantage over needing to get bank loans/lines of credit to get the business of the ground. Once it"s off the ground, finance as needed to keep capital flowing for operations, but the business owners I know that are successful either had family to provide seed money, or had earned enough on their own to cover most of the first and second year costs.

I"m guessing that this is due to the ability to focus on the long term "establishing" plan rather than the short term "how the fuck am I gonna buy supplies/make payroll/service debt" worries. Could one of you business heads either confirm that, or let me know how that advantage really works? I know it"s an obvious advantage, but I don"t have the knowledge to quantify/qualify the exact advantage other than "less cash worries".

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Not sure if this is true anymore, but I took a high school business management course where they said that the #1 reason businesses go under is from not having adequate working capital. The reason I can do jobs in the order of 100k is that I have the working cap for it. And we deal with some companies that are notorious for paying 90 days late. My competitors can"t afford to wait, so they don"t even qualify for these bids.

Working capital is the lifeblood of any business. When the human body loses to much blood, it dies. The same holds true for any business.

Kais said:

With this increase to your advertising, have you found a way yet to quantify which sources are generating your calls?

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There"s no way to get it down to a science. People see/hear about us on radio and billboard everyday in the city. I think between the traffic count and radio count, its something like 200,000 people a day. They see us so much, but with brand advertising, they only call when they need us. Then they go to the phone book/internet/refrigerator magnets.

All I know is our competitors have no work, the phone is ringing off the hook from out of work laborers, and more importantly, our backlog is growing. Last year at this time, we had like three days work, right now, we picked up 20k in work this morning, which puts us booked out until December 1. Our backlog is now approaching Summertime levels, and this is really weird.

I asked my crews this morning what I should do, $5k a month is alot considering business usually slows this time of year. But if anything, business is picking up. If it ain"t broke, don"t fix it. Its my third year owning the company, just once, I"d like to be sipping my eggnog and not crying in it. The only time we ever lose money is in the Winter, we"d be golden if we broke even in Dec/Jan/Feb.

Since I started out in accounting/finance, I want to measure every dollar I spend and its impact, but the only thing I"ve been able to measure is that we can"t keep up with demand. Everyone in the company thinks I"d be wrong to cut it, and I"m thinking the same.

I laid off a couple of workers this week who weren"t cutting it, and normally, I"d keep a lower staff until March, but people are not going to put up with a six week backlog, they"ll go elsewhere. I"m hiring a guy on Monday to help, probably will need another.

Gonna continued to put pm"s out there in anon form, I get asked the same questions over and over again, plus I feel this one is important.

Anon said:

I started reading the 2 books you suggested, The Millionaire Next Door and The Millionaire Mind.

The more I read the more I started evaluating my gf and how she lives and thinking about how it would work if we end up together. Suffice to say I wasn"t thrilled with the things I was seeing as far as how my gf spends money.

Does your wife work? Does she fall in line perfectly with the ideas in the book about living below your means, saving, etc?

I just ended up with more questions and more stress trying to figure out what to do with my future relative to my gf. I really want to be financially independent one day. When I discuss these things with my gf she agrees but when it comes to her daughter it"s spend, spend spend...

I"ve considered if we got married just having separate finances and I could just save with my salary and let her do what she wants with hers. We make about the same so if I saved 30% of my earnings that would roughly provide for both of us...

What do you think?

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My wife wasn"t ready when we were dating, but I told her about my goals. I"m not going to say my goal was to be a business owner at that point, but my goal was to be a multi-millionaire through investing at the time. We had long talks about it, and other expectations while we were dating. I was already making 65-70k at that point, and I had no desire to see that money wasted. Anyone making that much can eventually be a millionaire with careful planning. She said she was OK with sacrificing now for the future, but she came from a poor family, and had no idea how to budget or invest.

When we first got married, I was given her bills, and was shocked. I ended up paying out about 4k in the first week just to get her bills paid up to date. And then I pulled her credit score, and I was like 538!

Needless to say, her coming from a poor family meant she needed to be trained. I had to put my foot down, at first, I was such a Nazi I didn"t allow her to buy a soda without calling me for permission. I definitely played the man-card, told her I was the man of the house, and if she wanted to do better, do what I told her to do. Eventually, I got her to the point that she budgets for both the house and the business. Her life is definitely different now, as she grew up in a 1,200 sq. ft. house with 6 people in it (and holes in the floor), and now lives in a 5k sq. ft. house in the highest end neighborhood in the city and drives a Mercedes with money in the bank. I was harsh on her at first, but ask her now if it was worth a little more discipline.

A wealthy businessman once told me that you better pick your spouse right, because that spouse will determine your level of happiness and success in life (or your sadness and level of fail). Its a little bit different, in that I didn"t live with her beforehand, so there were no expectations we"d get hitched. Screw expectations of people around you, those other people expecting you to get married don"t have to live with her for the rest of their lives. Its your life. I"d try further talks with her to see how she does, if she can"t/won"t change, you"ll need to make a decision. What are your goals in life? You trying to accomplish something in life, or do you want to live a lesser life but be in love? I say that like its mutually exclusive, because they are.

We definitely had to come together on some things. Like I was unemployed during grad school, and she supported the house entirely. I had all this money sitting in investments that we could have lived off of, but that would have meant I couldn"t have afforded a down payment on the business. She had to step it up a lot at work to cover all the bills, and she didn"t waste a penny. We were united when we said we didn"t want our nest egg to be touched. If you pick a spouse that spends everything, and you go unemployed, some spouses with no budgeting skills will use up the nest egg pretty quick.

Evelys said:

Do you offer a referral bonus to your employees if they refer a person and they last 90 days/a season/a year/whatever the norm in your industry is? Hell, are such referrals worth a damn in your industry? It works pretty well in IT.

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We don"t pay a referral bonus, they guys need to make $2,250 per crew per day or they lose their job, so they are going to find the best guys to help them hit that quota.