An Unexpected Offer
If you remember my post from last week, I was stressed out! So stressed out, that I was developing a sty in my left eye and my right eye was twitching constantly. If you were worried, I’m much better now. Just like in life, there are ups and downs in running a small business.
As I said last week, I had an interview lined up for the last week of January. I was hoping to find someone to lighten my load and allow me to focus more of my time behind my desk. Sadly, it wasn’t a fit for either the applicant or for the company. However, when running your own business, it’s important that you have a plan B, C, & D. You’ve got to be flexible. Now we are working on trying to promote our part-time supervisor into a full-time employee. By making her full-time, I will be able to work more hours directing my business. The concern is, this employee already has a full-time day job that she would have to quit to join our team full time. We already pay her more per hour than her day job, but we’re concerned about the possibility of losing a couple of accounts and needing to cut back her hours. So concerned, that this thought has occupied quite a bit of our mental space the last few days. We don’t see this happening, as we have grown month over month since we started in June of 2018. Either way you look at it, it’s a huge responsibility to hire someone full time and ask them to quit their steady full-time job to do so.
That is the latest news for now. On a side note, my wife helps me out most days, but especially on Fridays. Fridays for us are 18-20 hour days. She steps away from her contracting job to help me get through the long day. Another great benefit of running your own business, you can have your spouse help you. I love working with my wife! Back to the story. On Fridays we clean an industrial scale company. They design large scales and install them all over the Southwestern United States. My wife helps me during this account by vacuuming and changing trash for me. She is naturally curious about the engineering side of the business, and so started talking with the owner of the business while cleaning his office. This would happen week after week. Until one day I found myself having to pick up some of her chores. I had to change almost all the trash in the building. I was wondering what was taking her so long with the vacuuming. As we got in the car to leave, she told me that she was pulled aside into the conference room by the owner of the business. He said that they (the leadership team) felt that she had something special about her. An “X-Factor” to quote him directly. He asked her to apply to be the head of manufacturing for the company, a position that he was looking to fill over the next month.
There we were, in the infancy of growing our new business and we get an unsolicited job offer. I just had to brag about my wife. I can’t blame them for wanting her. When my wife responded to the offer, she asked...
“was it my vacuuming skills?”
When you have a goal in mind, there seems to be so many different roads and options available to you. We declined the offer. We are continuing to move forward in building our business and developing my wife’s consulting business. The freedom that self-employment brings is hard to give up. We are working on our 9th month of revenue growth. Opportunities are everywhere! We are staying the course and trying to build our dream of financial independence through self-employment and business ownership.
