Always been DMV for me
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Ministry checking in!
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I finalized the plans for my husband’s birthday: hotel downtown, candle pouring, steak dinner, massage.
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candle pouring? you can buy birthday candles
He wants to make his own candle, I guess!
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It’s been a wonderful week and a half off work. Back at it tomorrow for a day and a half, then a long weekend. And I won’t have a mountain of emails to come back to tomorrow, because everyone on my team has also been off! So I will finally have time to tackle that big file revamp I have had on my list for the last few weeks.
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Toured a waterfall park yesterday with Hip_tiger_wife,our youngest daughter, and her two children (4 & 8). Youngest son visited with his wife. It’s our 32nd anniversary. 
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My gf and I got the last unreserved table at one of our favourite restaurants last night!!! Schnitzel dinner - so gooooood!!! 
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how unreserved were you? loud, throwing plates?
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I found someone’s work badge / ID thing yesterday. I was able to find their address and returned it to them last night. She was so grateful I’m almost posting this in the insignificant signals thread!
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Nissan’s check has cleared the bank to pay off the loan on the Pathfinder.
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A good friend in the business called me today. He’s taking a pass on an opportunity he came across, to give it to me. I initially said I’d pass, for reasons. He’s an accountant by training so he went through the financials in detail. Tldr, it’s not a pass, it’s a holy cow, you’d offer this to me buddy? It’s an important milestone in the growth of my small biz, solves a fairly big risk I had. Very happy today.
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I dunno if anyone’s interested in this monologue, but I’m doing the ‘startup’ thing in insurance. It’s decidely different than a small business which is what I’ve always done before. I’m not particularly skilled at it, and it’s somewhat non-intuitive to me (where small business really isn’t).
We start with a product or service. We do all the development and then launch.
Then we start throwing money at advertising and testing sales. Test, tweak, test, tweak.
Eventually we hit the point where sales exceed ad costs. Then it’s full on scale time. If $10k in ad costs makes $15K in sales in a month, then next month it’s $100k in ads to make $150k. That’s where the scaling comes in. But getting to that $10k in costs for $15k in sales is a lot of test, tweak, test, repeat. so there’s a period where there’s a lot of $10k in ad costs for $3k in sales.
Once you turn over like that, there’s two considerations. One, you need a ton of money to start throwing as much money into advertising as you can. Secondly, you have to have everything in place so you can scale immediately - most businesses can’t go from $10k in sales in one month to $100k the next - it’s a big problem.
We’re past the development and launch period; that was 1-2 years where I paid for everything out of pocket. Then we made a few sales. We’ve been testing and changing processes for months and sales started to move up. We’re pretty much crossed the line where a $1 in ad spend brings in more than $1 in sales. Not a wide enough gap for me to start scaling, but, that’s looking like its coming as we optimise everything.
Also I spent quite a bit of time and money on systems and processes so we can scale. That’s going well, I can handle a lot of sales very quickly, without really any pain. Everything’s either automated, or I can scale quickly (i.e. I have people available who can step into sales or admin here they’re just waiting for me to say go). I think I’m pretty good at the automating using processes or systems, and I like doing it, so I’m confident we’ve got this piece well handled.
What my buddy did that i mentioned in the previous post, well the result was, that I may be able to get through this without needing to bring on external investors. It’ll be a bit slower than getting a bunch of cash in, but it means I should have enough sales to fund the operation, until we’ve optimized completely and are ready to open the floodgates. And at that point, I’ll just open the floodgates a bit slower, but out of revenue/sales instead of external money.
Then it’s scale, make sales, optimise, scale some more, repeat. And then in 3-5 years, someone writes me a cheque to send me off into the sunset.
One of the problems I had/have, was scaling salespeople. I’ve hired salespeople in the past, and it’s been beyond a failure. Like, I have stories. So I met with my sales mentor and asked him how to do that - what if I need 3 more salespeople next month? His response was that insteaad of hiring experience in the task, instead hire for experience with success - no matter what the success was. He said people with a string of being successful in different things are likely to walk into sales and be successful.
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Friend called me last night, clutch problem with his Subaru. I asked him to walk me through what all was going on and I told him where I’d look first. Nailed it. I don’t turn a lot of wrenches on cars these days so that felt nice.
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Good luck!
[aside] he’s gonna need it.[/aside]
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Thanks. Thankfully, things are going well, and looking like they’re going to do even better. I don’t see much standing between me and success right now. Couple hurdles ahead, but I already have a plan to get through them. I don’t think there’s any more substantial risks in the next year or two.
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I’m sitting here laughing to myself, recalling a trip I did some years ago.
Me and my buddies were up north in Canada ATV’ing in the bush for the weekend. We come out of the bush, pretty nasty and hungry after 3 days, and stop for supper. Four trucks pulling trailer with atvs, we all unload in the parking lot of a Swiss Chalet, everyone wanted that.
I complained. Told them that it’s nasty. They process the chickens at six weeks, which is disgusting, they don’t even have feathers at that age, I don’t want to eat that. So after much discussion, we load back into the trucks and go down the road to a Kelseys.
The waitress comes over, and I ordered a quarter chicken dinner lol.
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Costco was really busy today but I picked the right gas line (other cars at the pumps were just pulling away so I pulled right up) and I waited less than a minute in the returns line.
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You forgot the most important part. Did you get a hot dog?
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