Virgin Entrepreneur

Wow, I fell off the wagon for a month!

2008-09-18T10:22:00.000-07:00

Wow- how time flies.

I had a great week of blogging then fell off the wagon. I guess it took me a month to catch up from vacation...

Its been a rocky month. August was less than stellar sales wise. September started off with a bang, but this past week has been ROUGH!!!! We usually slow down a little the middle 10 days of the month - cant say why exactly but I do have some ideas. Its been slower than expected this middle 10 days though. Excluding Sundays (our slowest day) we had our worst sales day of the year on 9/17/08!!! WOW!!! Unusual, we had some days similar back in winter/early spring but nothing like this!

Our pipeline of work is also at its lowest point since winter, although it is filling up (to an almost acceptable level) again after healthy lead flow for the past few days.

SIDE NOTE: Got a great referral a few weeks ago from a vendor that is part of a vendor network we are in. Funny how these things work. I always mildly question our participation in these types of networks but it never fails - at least once a year we get a fantastic referral from it. Basically one good solid referral (like the one we recently got) covers the entire cost of the program -so everything else is gravy!

Cold Calling/Commercial Sales

2008-08-15T08:51:00.000-07:00

Wow-

I suck! I hate this stuff. Thought I had gained some momentum yesterday but lost it today!

We are having a terrible run here this week, actually it started out good, but the second half of the week has been rough to say the least. Our weekend workload is light at best. We are 40% off of last August and it hurts!

Our phones are not ringing and its totally frustrating and distracting to me. It has caused me to focus on our sales calls numbers all day and I havent been able to get focused on anything.

The only positive things I have done all day is:

Re-initiated a relationship with a vendor that we havent used for a few years - had begun using an out of state vendor but with fuel costs being so high it eroded our savings.
Finally spoke to the administrator of the trade association that I want to join to find that they have a capped membership for my desired membership and that they are full this year and they will only open it up if one of their current members in that class does not re-join in 2009! Not the best news...

Have a good weekend!

Cold Calling/Commercial Sales Follow up

2008-08-14T12:13:00.000-07:00

I'm making progress!

I had a good "networking" meeting with someone this morning.
I spoke to a commercial client that had a great experience
I spoke to a great commercial referral source for whom we did some work (indirectly) for last month.
I found a way to contact an industry association that I really want to join that I hadn't had any luck with previously.

Lots to do on this front but baby steps is all I am trying to make here!

Cold Calls/Sales Calls

2008-08-14T06:04:00.000-07:00

I've got to get something going to further our penetration in the commercial space. Its the only thing that really keeps us going in the off season, which is rapidly approaching.

Thing is: I hate cold calling people, even warm calling. I cant stand it when people do it to me, so I dont want to be "that guy" doing it to them. I never know how to approach it in a non-threatening, friendly way but still ask for some business. I feel like if I ask for work then I am being too aggressive, but if I dont then I fail to close.

I need to do more networking in the space where my commercial work lies, but its tough to break in. It takes time and consistent effort and that is difficult to muster when you dont really enjoy it. I also have not found the right venue to work yet and since I dislike the concept so much I hesitate to do anything if it doesnt seem like the "perfect scenario". I know, I know, there is never a "perfect scenario".

Now the bottom line is, there are always excuses. If we lived by the excuses we would never get anything done, would we?

I need to make a committment here: I will contact at least 2 of my commercial contacts/leads by the end of the day tomorrow (Friday August 15) and report back my success or failure.

I am actually performing a networking task this morning, but I did not initiate it so I cannot count it towards my goal.

I'll let you know how it goes - VE

Business Ups and Downs and money tip

2008-08-13T07:42:00.000-07:00

Wow, what a crazy business this is!

I wish I could tell you exactly what I do, but it would become too transparent for many people. Anyway, we thought we were having a good week, Monday was strong, our best day in a few weeks, Tuesday looks solid too, the phone is ringing and we have work, then the bottom falls out (again) seems to be the story of 2008. Every time we get some traction we grind to a halt.

My business is 80% residential and 20% commercial. We need to increase our commercial business to do well in this economy. We just dont have the systems in place or the expertise in making it happen right now. I am working on it feverishly, although I could always do more of course.

I need to get more disciplined with trying to drive commercial business!!!

In leaner times like this, its important to have cash saved for emergencies. I have a line of credit that I havent used before but I keep it open for operational cash flow if need be (costs $100/year to keep it open) and I save extra profit that I dont need personally in an ING Business Savings Account (current APY 3.15% as of 8.13.2008) if you are interested in opening one of these use this link to get a $25 bonus and I will get a $10 bonus.

ING for Business Savings Account referral link.

Have a great day!

Back from Vacation

2008-08-12T06:09:00.000-07:00

Hey- I took a little family vacation last week. Spent some time with the family having fun. It was great to get away from it all! Yesterday was a clean up day, cleaning up mail, email, voicemail, minor operational issues, a 2 hour managers meeting - so no time for a post.

I've got a couple of updates for you.

New manager seems to be getting on well so far, pretty much a flawless week although he did have plenty of oversight from our current senior manager and only had to run the show one day while I was gone - but did well nonetheless!
Biz is basically flat, we had a little bit rougher of a month in July than I was expecting/hoping for - profit was down because certain expenses are loaded into the summer months because that is usually when cash flow is best, however this year, cashflow has been somewhat flat of course, so it is pinching profitability even further.
August has historically been better than July but the jury is definitely still out on that one. Our first week is flat over July's numbers so we will have to wait and see.
The world of high finance seems to think things are moving in the right direction, market had a good week last week and oil prices are falling, back to reality that is! In that department there was a great article from Ben Stein about the oil market.

I'll try to post later with some more updates but thats all for this morning.

New manager in position!

2008-08-01T06:10:00.000-07:00

This is exciting, we have a new manager in place. My usual philosophy is to promote from within and we have done that again, it doesnt always work but I do feel like the people that work here and have proved themselves to the management team deserve first crack at any new higher level positions that open up.

It boils down to a couple of key things:

We know them;
We like them (or else they would not be here);
We know what they are good at;
We know what they are not so good at;
We know how to communicate and work with them.

The toughest part though is taking someone off of the team and placing them in a management role. In this case I think it will go smoothly because this person has been looked up to by the team for some time and has had other leadership roles from time to time within our organization. I look forward to the challenge of helping the new manager fill this role. Its going to be interesting!

2008 Re-Cap: The Perfect Storm

2008-07-31T05:47:00.000-07:00

Wow, what a year! Gas prices are up, real estate transactions are down - its almost a perfect storm...

Budgeted for little to negative growth this year, boy was I wrong! Well the year started out pretty good. Q1 was profitable and we had decent numbers, experienced some small growth over the previous year (even when factoring in the aquired business). This lead me to believe my projections were going to be close.

Q2 was when reality set in though! We have been off by as much as 30% in a month over the same month previous year. Its been a tough pill to swallow. Bonuses to staff were cut. Our daily bonus program (commission) has taken a beating hence so have the paychecks of the field staff.

What the Hell are we going to do now?

Well, first get out the P and L. Fuel is up 33% over last year, not a huge cost for us but its still shaving something off the bottom line, which has to be protected now! So where can we save some $$ now? Well, Labor is our number one cost, this is managed pretty carefully and we do well here, plus the staff are already seeing less $ in their paychecks and we dont want to rock the boat too hard going into summer, they might start leaving and if things pick up we will need them to capture some profit quickly. so we go to the next line item (franchise royalties, well those are fixed on Gross Revenue) so short of defrauding the franchisor, we cant change these! Next... Our third largest cost is somewhere we can shave, so lets get our staff religious about saving as much as we can here.

Long story short, it has worked and worked well. We have pretty much counteracted the increase in fuel prices here.

I really will start again!

2008-07-30T05:59:00.000-07:00

I will start blogging again for real now, its been too long!

I will spend 15 minutes a day posting updates here.

Re-cap on 2007:

The year started off great! We were pretty much right on target (45% top-line growth) right up through May 2007.
June 2007 - thought we encountered a hiccup, which sometimes happens in this biz (very unpredictable demand curve and a short sales cycle. (almost 10% drop in revenue from May- unusual but not too crazy)
July 2007 - OK something is not right here! Further drop in revenue (a further 15% drop month over month, now we dropped 23% comparing May to July)
August 2007 - we rose back up to May 2007 revenue level, which is what was projected for this month. Very reassuring.
September 2007 - (here is where we go off the cliff!) 38% drop in revenue from August to September! Wow, this is bad.
October through December 2007 - OK, we stay pretty flat for the rest of the year, cuases us to miss our goals and budgets pretty badly. We do manage to eek out some small improvements month over month until December, which is normal.

Summary of 2007: Q1 Good, Q2 Solid, but shaky last month, Q3 August is misleading but September is worrying!, Q4 Back to the drawing board

It looks like the sudden burst of the housing bubble has caused some serious problems in our business. We are tied to real estate somewhat, especially during our peak months (Summer - since some of our work is related).

Big New Happening: Did buy out another business that serviced a neighboring area. Closed in late March 2007, began operating April 1, 2007.

2008 Outlook: Predicting little to no growth, even budgeting with the possibility of 5 - 10% negative growth over 2007. Building budget in a more flexible manner so things can be turned on and off as we see where we are headed with our revenues.

I am back

2007-01-16T05:57:00.000-08:00

I am going to start blogging again regularly. This is one of the things I want to do in 2007 so that I can take regular time to reflect on what has been happening to my business and professional life as well as my personal financial situation.

Here are some key year end happenings:

In mid-November 2006 my business broke through the $1 Million in sales mark for the first time (in 3.5 years of operation).
We posted 44% revenue growth over 2005 (short of what I had projected but still solid).
Personally, I bought a new car in November - spent alot more than I would have liked but my wife deserves it.

Here are some key challenges for 2007:

projecting 45% growth this year.
have definitely identified the need to hire an administrative assistant or secretary.
have determined that my current organizational structure is not where it needs to be to hit my medium and long term goals.
also determined that I currently cannot change my org structure without seriously disrupting operations and my own work and personal life.
crafted an intermediate plan to get me through the first half of 2006 and then re-consider management changes.
an opportunity to buy a similar business close by has arisen and I am considering it seriously - I will discuss this further later.

Thats all for now, let me know if there is anything specific you want to hear about in the near term.

Is this boring?

2006-04-12T14:21:00.000-07:00

If anyone is actually reading this blog, make a comment to let me know...

I want to do something interesting, but I am not sure how, yet.

I want to talk background and current business as well.

Maybe I should start categorizing my posts - that would require me figuring out how to do it.

Lets talk some current business. End of the first quarter and revenue wise we are at about 74% growth over last year. Pretty damn good. Profit wise, not so good. Revenue growth has been great ( as you can see) but profit is pretty dismal right now. At the end of the quarter it stood at $+13K. Well, business ramps up as the year gets going and Jan and Feb are really break Even months. So we are doing well from the standpoint of where are we according to plan. My budget for the year has me at -$11K so from that perspective things are OK. Partly this is due to timing though (my budget has some expenses evenly distributed across the board but in reality they are paid in lump sums).

I am going to add some stuff to this Blog too. I want to keep track of my YTD Profit on here to make it interesting. I will also try to post every day as much as possible.

Back from the Corp Spy's Visit - Background Part 3

2006-04-06T14:50:00.000-07:00

I am back in action from the Corporate SPy's visit.

Its also very busy at the end of the month and the beginning of the next. Lots of measuring and planning going on. End of the quarter too. So we have Quarterly financials to prepare and look at.

We did well, got a B+ on our review. I am not sure how many A's they give out but I am sure it isnt many. This is a growing company and we are at the top of the leaderboard. It isnt because we are slackers!

OK - so back to my history. I start my new job, based in Baltimore, but working for national and international clients - could be anywhere depending on where certain skillsets are needed. First week of this turns out pretty rough. I am working for a client in Bethesda and Gaithersburg - a horrible commute from my home. Good news is that I am partly working at the client's office and partly at my own office so I am often commuting at odd times. It is tough though because the people that had started this project had left halfway through and left sort of a mess.

I end up working about 90 hours my first week. I had no idea it would be like this. I had been told that it would be tough but this is crazy. I ended my first week by having a meeting with my 2 bosses (one a partner in the firm) at 4 AM on saturday morning. The sun was coming up as we were going over a presentation. I was allowed to have the rest of the day off and was back in at 9 AM on Sunday morning to finish it up.

I got another short term gig working in downtown washington for a few weeks. It was also a nightmare because of the people and politics involved. The guy who was in charge of the project would not speak to the person that I was working with so I had to act as the intermediary and have phone conversations with the Boss about the guy with me giving one word answers to questions like "wash that a$$hole doing this today?" and such.

Whats happening in my business now?

2006-03-27T06:13:00.000-08:00

I am going to interrupt my background series of posts for a minute to fill you in on what is going in my business now.

I feel like I can be more specific in alot of areas if I remain anonymous and that this information will be more beneficial to readers of this blog. What I actually do is not as important in the grand scheme of things, because every business operates using essentially the same resources - and has basically the same issues.

Well its almost the end of the month, and the end of the first quarter. My company has been in business for almost 3 full years. We are budgeted to do about 70% growth over last year. As you can imagine this is a challenge from many aspects. We are slightly behind on our first quarter goal right now but we are hanging in there and moving in the right direction - we actually have a great shot at hitting it.

Another interesting thing is that we currently (today and tomorrow) have someone visiting from our corporate office - the corporate spy- as some of our employees call him. He is doing an inspection of our operation plus helping me plan and get focused on some things. Its usually a pretty valuable exercise. It is part of the franchise agreement that this happens at least once a year and we usually have a more focused 1 day visit with him at least one other time during the year. We run a pretty tight operation so I am not worried about any negative results- we probably have a few minor issues but all in all our team is top notch by design. We have pretty stringent recruiting and hiring practices.

So I am going to be somewhat pre-occupied with that until Wednesday morning.

Background - Part 2

2006-03-24T17:50:00.000-08:00

So, here I am, 22 years old, just finished college and a world of possibilities...

Well, I am beginning to realize that my new salary is going to be eaten up quick! Rent (which I had already been paying on my own - but now there are less people in the same house) is going up, car payment, insurance, work clothes (suits and ties) and all the fun I am now supposed to have that I am out of school and actually have some money to my name.

Oh yeah and I forgot about student loan payments. Now you do get a bit of a break (6 months) but that doesn't seem like much. I think the payments started out in the $200 range.

Well work is pretty easy, too easy in fact. I pretty much have the technical work that I am doing mastered. I find a system to make it go much quicker than it was planned to go and used my spare time to look for a new job and plan a strategy to get one or make a move within the company I already work for.

Couple of meetings with my immediate boss, who worked for a Big 6 firm for many years and left when, according to him, it was either join the partnership or here is the door. Looks promising, I think he knows where I am coming from and truly wants to help me get where I want to go.

Couple of meetings with the big boss and he is basically evading and trying to stall the works. OK its time to put the external job search into high gear.

2 interviews at 2 different Big 5 firms ( there was a merger shortly after I finished school). One is a referral from a person that used to work at my current company and basically wanted the same things I did (and to move to NYC) and the other is one I started working on while still in school. One would require me working in mostly Northern VA - which I thought would be OK because I would also be travelling alot. The other was based in Baltimore.

Long story short I get an offer from both but the one in Baltimore is for a partner that I met and liked. The other firm the partner was pretty harsh with me and only discussed things with me from a very suspsicious and combative stance.

I take the new job and quit my first job. No one is too upset or surprised!

One funny part is that of all the people that had resigned and left my project since I had been working there (a little over 1 year) all were allowed (asked) to leave immediately but were paid for their notice period. I was asked to stay until the last day.

Background - Part 1

2006-03-22T06:13:00.000-08:00

I am going to try to get this blog going by starting with some background and then re-capping events on a more detailed basis from 1 January 2006.

A little about me: I graduated from college in 1997 with a BBA in Accounting and (MIS) Management Information Systems. I started out in a science but really did not have the aptitude for it and had tested well in math and accounting. I switched to accounting and then at the end of my third year in college realized that the highest compensation in the acccounting field as a graduate would be as an auditor for a Big 6 accounting firm (yes there were 6 then). I also did not have the best grades in the class - although I probably did get the concepts better than most of my fellow students - I missed alot of classes and did not do much in the way of homework. I was working 30 - 40 hours/week during that time. I added the MIS major as a way to differentiate myself from the competition (my fellow students). The year ahead of me there was one student who went the same route and was getting better job offers than anyone else in the class. I was the only student in my year that did it.

During my final year in college I worked at an internship for a technology consulting firm and received a job offer from them about 6 months before graduation. I was shopping around with accounting firms and other consulting firms for jobs as well. I had several job offers from both industries. At that time the average graduate with an accounting degree was getting offers from $30K to about $35K. The average MIS graduate was getting offers from about $32K to $36K. There were a couple of exceptions to this but most were in these ranges.

I ended up taking a job with the company I interned with for $36K my first year. It was more of a wait and see strategy. I was able to start working sooner (and earning my full salary and benefits) before graduation and it was local. I did not want to move but the higher paying jobs were mostly in Washington DC suburbs and Northern VA. I kept looking at other jobs and was working on a transfer within that company to a more "management consulting" oriented job. The reasons were 1. Higher Pay 2. Higher Profile work (that interested me more than technical work) and 3. Opportunities to travel 80 - 100% of the time.

Let me address the travel aspect of what I wanted in a job - and if you are about to get out of university and this even remotely appeals to you or you have the opportunity, read it - I will publish it in another post.

My First Post

2006-03-21T04:58:00.000-08:00

Hi. Let me introduce myself.

I am a 30 year old (pseudo) entrepreneur from Baltimore, MD. I use the caveat "pseudo" because I own a franchise which is sort of like being an entrepreneur only cheating a bit.

I am writing this blog for 2 reasons:
1. To share my experiences in business with other people that may be in a similar position or considering getting into a similar position.
2. As a form of a journal which is a tool I will use to reflect on what things are happening in my business and to me personally as it relates to my business.

I have never written a blog before and at this point am unfamiliar with this tool so bear with me. Its going to take me a few weeks to get used to using it.