Its a bit early for this but....

A friend of my father-in-law works for a company that sells flavors and equipment for Hawaiian Shave Ice. The two of them were talking and Dad thought of Amy and me as potential distributors. I've been working for the last three days on developing a business plan for a single sales location that would service between 150 to 200 customers per day with these yummy frozen confectionaries.

Developing business plans is a wonderful experience. It is amazing what you learn as you ask questions about how to make a business work. For example, in order to do the proforma financials, I had to ask myself what a reasonable customer volume would be. According to Dad's friend, we should expect about 200 customers per day; if we get only 100 were doing something wrong; and if we get 300 we'd be hopping. Using those numbers, I ran projections on costs and revenues. At 100 customers, we'd end up losing about $5000/year. At 200, we'd make about $5000, and at 300 we'd make about $17,000.

So the next question I had to ask was "How do we ensure we get at least 200 customers/day?" Opens up a whole series of questions about marketing and location.

What about the 300 customers per day? Well, that works out to one customer every 2 minutes. Is is possible to serve more customers than that with a single employee in a 5 x 8 portable building?

I will be going back to the drawing board tomorrow and running numbers on a different plan. we'll see how it all works out.

Friday the 13th. In spades.

Amy and I are in the really strange real estate deal. We have leased a home that we own about five miles from here to a couple of investors. They have an option to purchase it, and their intention was to find a tenant buyer and do a lease option until the prepayment penalty expired.

Meanwhile, we are leasing the house we live in from the same investors. The whole idea was to move my family closer to the our community theatre. We tried selling the other house, but with the prepayment penalty, we couldn't find a buyer at a workable price.

The investors took out a second mortgage on their home (the one they live in) to facilitate the deal, and set it up as a line of credit. They used this line of credit to cover the down payment on the house we now live in, to make some repairs and upgrades to our old house, and to carry the mortgage, taxes, and insurance on the other house.

They didn't do their due dilligence on the first set of tenant buyers, and the family that moved in couldn't keep up the payments on the option. To make matters worse, the investors allowed the tenants to finance the option premium. First the tenants reneged on the purchase option, but stayed in the lease. Then they decided to divorce and walked out on the whole enchilada.

House has been vacant since.

Investors are in about $50,000 total so far.

With real-estate values falling, the investors debt to income ratio fell, and the bank stopped their line of credit. It looks like they managed to make the March payment, but we're watching to see if it reverses. (Crossing fingers that it doesn't.) Got and email from one of the investors today, asking if she could lower the asking price to make a sale more attractive. She is hoping for a quick sale to unload it.

Which leaves Amy and me with a dilemma. Both of the investors are friends, and one is a really close friend (though there is another strain on our friendship at the moment). If they can't come up with the cash to carry the vacant house or sell it quickly, we have to choose between carrying it ourselves and defaulting on the lease on the house we live in to save our credit, or letting that other house go into foreclosure and destroying my credit.

To make it more complicated, we like the house we're in and don't want to move back to the old house.

Oh, and since it's been on the market and it's a rental, the lender won't even talk to us about a refi.

Are we having fun yet? Blech.

What we need is an income increase of about $1500 per month so we can carry that house too.

Employee or Self-employed? or just some radom ramblings from Amy

As you know Tad and I have been looking at several different ways to bring in income. I recently took a position with Great American Senior Benefits offering various insurance products to seniors. It is a self-employed position. I was told that the greatest benefit and the hardest thing about the job would be time freedom. I am finding this to be very true. It takes a great deal of self discipline to do the things that are required to actually make money. I can go to work every day and be busy as a beaver and still not make one cent. I have been toying with the idea of getting a "job" where as long as I show up I get a paycheck.

I am most definitely a product of the public school system I have been programmed to be an employee, and trying to do something that doesn't fit that mold is requiring a paradigm shift that is making me very uncomfortable. I was also raised to believe that momma should stay home with the kids and that is difficult to overcome too.

I've been told "you'll never get rich being an employee." Do I want to be rich? Am I willing to do what it takes? or should I go where I will be comfortable?

So here's my plan. I am going to stay where I am for the time being and see if I really have what it takes. (Tad already thinks I do so that's a help)

I do know that I don't want my kids to have to overcome these same obstacles. That's just one of the reasons we homeschool.

I am betting that one of the reasons that so many people fail at having their own businesses is because they have been trained by our wonderful public schools to be worker bees and nothing else.