So far at 7 months...
It is such a change of pace, even commuting roughly 3 hours a day, I am still enjoying the journey. Here’s how it’s going so far at 7 months in:
One part-time employee, who had only been working at the business for 2 months before I bought it, left for full-time employment elsewhere
The longest tenured employee is slowly retiring, and is now working as an independent contractor
Each of the team has earned a raise
I raised the vacation time to 3 weeks, giving most of the team an additional week
Top-line revenue is down slightly (although it is lumpy, so not sure if it will be by the time I look back on the year) This is probably an artifact of the work in progress split I did with the former owner
Bottom-line revenue is way down as I am paying the loan, but if I don’t consider the loan, the margins are similar
The interest rate increases have effected the loan payments significantly, raising the monthly payment by almost $5K per month
Initiatives to bring in new work are slowly taking shape
Initiatives toward systematizing are very slowly taking shape, finding the right combo of technology, methodology, and documenting effectively are all tough things to accomplish
Many days are fire drills with things needing attention immediately, some of them are easy to solve, and some are not
Having trouble working on the business instead of in the business is a real problem that I knew I would have to confront, but it’s harder than I anticipated
Realizing that if I am not working on the business and growing as the economy slows, not only will my family be in a tough spot, but so will my team’s families; thus I should be working more on the business and less in it
We have lost at least one customer, and more than likely two of them.
For both, the customer’s buyers that we had been working with left, and the new buyers have other shops that they favor
Neither constituted a significant portion of the revenue
We brought on one major new customer, and already received a second large order from them
These two orders more than make up for the lost customers
We are working on and are getting close to a third order
We expanded the work we are doing for one of our top customers by adding 2 new products that we are delivering in significant quantities very soon
In short, not only did we manage to keep the vast majority of the customers, but we expanded the amount of work we did for some of them
In large part, this was due to buying a good business with a good reputation
In small part, it was because I met with them to see how we could help solve their problems
The outlook looks good to have a record year, but at the same time I am cautious that we need to keep trying to expand to keep everyone busy. One possibility is to start another company using any idol time from the team to produce consumer products for a specific niche industry. More on this in the future.