From A Seed To A Forest

April 18, 2016

First off, I am loving this wonderfully warm weather that we are having. It feels like the tail end of June, definitely not feeling like it’s still April. If this is a taste of our summer to come, I can’t wait to hit the lake. Baby is coming along, I was suppose to do my glucose test this morning, and I completely forgot I wasn’t suppose to eat so I had to reschedule. Really not looking forward to it as they will be pricking my finger for blood afterwards. I detest needles. My severe distaste for them is 80% of the reason I birth my babies with no pain medication whatsoever. 

I’m still overwhelmed with the amount of things I have going on; my house, my garden, our family and business. With all that going on, we just stepped up on the diving board and are ready to jump right into the world of real estate, but from a completely different angle. The angle that we are planning on using is a new concept to us and until I fully understand how it works, I can’t talk about it. But to most, it would be considered unconventional. Risky. Dangerous. But in order to be successful on the level that we want, we must step way outside of our comfort zone.  This wont be easy, and involves a ton of work and as long as we avoid a few things along the way, I see no limit to the empire we want to build and leave for our girls. 

Things to avoid along the way:

1. Nay sayers. These are the people that think that what we are doing is just a “venture”. The ones that would never understand what we are doing and how we are going about it. These are also the people that would call the conventions that we are going to a “scam”. Well, when you go with a closed mind, you don’t stand to gain anything from it so in a way they’re right. With an open mind and the time and ability to learn new things, things that are very real and very possible, it’s far from a scam, and I would even go as far as to call it the best “college education anyone could ever receive”.

2. Negative people. Simply the ones that never have anything good to say about anything or anyone, let alone what we are trying to do. 

3. People that tell us to just “get a job”. JOB = “just over broke”. As long as your answering to others, you will never reach your goal of complete financial freedom and success. 

We went to a quick convention this past weekend, and although it was nothing compared to the 3 day convention in Las Vegas, it was very motivational for us and right up our ally. We have a 3 day convention coming up in June and that can’t come fast enough. It’s been interesting to see our current business evolve and grow successfully, and how these new ideas are tying into the business. It’s all about learning to run a business of systems, and not break our backs doing the work ourselves.  Some would consider us “self employed”. Self employment allows you no days off, no getting sick, no vacation time etc; If your self employed, and get sick - you lose money. Nobody is doing anything for you because your whole business depends on YOU. 

Hiring our first employee, and setting up meetings with sub contractors is quickly getting us out of the “self employed” category. We are running an LLC business, we want to pay others to make money for us. We want to be able to go to Thailand for 3 weeks, while our business(s) are still running at full capacity and with money still coming in. Can’t do that if your self employed can you? No, you can’t. 

On top of all this, it’s important to teach our kids everything that we are learning. Not only do we (and we definitely will) want to leave our kids an empire, we want nothing more than for them to have the financial literacy and education to be able to build their own empire. They sure as shit aren’t going to learn this in traditional school. It’s all up to us. 

I wrote today’s blog with the noise of my girls playing in the sprinkler, giggling, laughing, teaching each other how to write in cursive, and taking a phone call about getting two home inspectors for a client. I call today a success. Now, if only dinner would make itself, that would be blissfully perfect. 

Yikes!

First off, my house right now is a disaster. There’s kids toys everywhere, baby stuff everywhere, random pieces of bedroom furniture everywhere, and my dining room and laundry room are the worst parts. I feel like I’m making progress, and have even thrown some color samples up the girls’ wall. I have to remind myself that once I’m done with Mia’s room, I have to do it all over again with Isabel’s, although that will be a bit easier as I already did a pre-purge of her stuff. It should go much smoother.

On the other hand, business is good. I’m getting the hang of all the paperwork and understand certain systems a bit more each day. Having the freedom to work from home and still be completely available for my girls is priceless. I have nothing stopping me and the possibilities are endless. My challenge has been marketing. It’s always marketing for me, so NOT my thing. But, if I’m going to learn to run a business of systems I guess it’s time for me to learn. We are looking forward to our real estate convention this weekend, if anything we can at least network with other like minded people.

   

We drove down to Portland this past weekend to drop off our old truck. It was a bitter sweet moment, my husband has had that truck for 16 years. The first conversation I had with him was in the parking lot of the casino after work while he was in his truck. For a little truck, this beast packed a punch and never let us down. I always felt comfortable that if I had to I could easily run someone or something over and come out on top. Beast! It was fun to drive, hard to clean, and only left us somewhere when the battery died. It went to a good home and know it will continue to serve well, it’s a Toyota, if you take care of it, it will take care of you. 

Today I wrote to the background noise of some ghost show, and listened to my oven click as it slowly roasted my garlic herb chicken. 

Business & Personal As Usual

April 6, 2016

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to sit and write, at least for myself. Everything seems to be moving along nicely. As for personal, I got the girls’ new beds delivered but haven’t put them together yet. I’m now in the process of going through portions of their bedrooms and we are making piles. Keep pile, good for baby pile (but there are serious requirements here), and donate pile. Naturally I’m inclined to sell some of the donate pile. Yesterday alone, we went through all of their books. So many books! I was pretty proud of the piles they made with my instruction and I made very few changes and we even had a toss pile. I’m not normally one to toss a book in the garbage, but Miss Bell went through a terrible drawing and tearing faze when she was a toddler. It was time to retire some things. 

Anyways the girls have been home all week for Spring break, and it’s really slowed down any potential for good progress. Work has been hard to get done, phone calls have been hard to make because it almost never fails - as soon as mom is on the phone for business reasons, someone gets hungry, hurt, cries, argues with the other sister or has some sort of melt down. I find it very frustrating, and I love my kids more than anything, but I cannot wait for school to start Monday!  

Business is good, and I’m in the process of making job hazard analysis sheets, accident prevention sheets, and emergency plans so that I can be compliant with what L&I wants.  I have to make these for every kind of job we do. So one for roofing, one for remodeling, landscaping, demolition, etc;  Since I went to their workshop last week, I’ve decided that I want L&I to be my new best friend. I’m not going to become a total kiss ass, but they can destroy your entire business in 5 minutes if they want, and over my dead body I’m going to let that happen to our business. So if they say “make these types of files”, I’m going to do it. 

Did you know that if your company takes down a tree, which is obviously considered “logging”, you pay L&I $20.01 per hour for each hour your employee(s) worked taking that tree down? So your paying an employee $15/hour, your really paying $35.01 just to have your employee help you, even if he’s on the ground the entire time. Not to mention all the other employee expenses on top of that. I also find it a bit irritating that you can’t categorize an employee into 2 different categories in one shift. 

Example: your employee spend 4 hours laying a floor, but then 3 hours cleaning the gutters and roof. You have to categorize into 1 single category, and guess what, it’s in a business owners best interest to use the more expensive category. So instead of the $1.47/hour for simple remodel work, you pay nearly $5/hour because of the roof cleaning. By not following that, if my employee gets hurt on the roof, but I classified that he was laying floors all day, my business is in deep shit and will face tens of thousands in fines and we could even lose our license. 

In our specific industry, I have to be on my toes with compliance 24/7. We take comfort that we are set up with a legal firm that we have on speed dial and can call 24 hours a day for anything. Knowing that I can call them and have my lawyer on the other line within’ minutes, is amazing, comforting, and empowering.  As we start making contracts for various things, I can fax them anything and have it reviewed and analyzed almost immediately to ensure that we are protected.  

On a side note, I got us into a real estate convention in Seattle in a couple weeks and I’m thrilled to be able to go.  I expect good things from this and plan to continue seeking out any kind of business convention, especially pertaining to real estate and entrepreneurship. It’s the only way to go!  My long term goal is to start buying houses at auction prices and make them assets. I’m already set up to get all the notifications about local real estate auctions, and have seen 3,000 SF houses start at $40K. That’s a piece of pie that I want. I’m trying to coordinate with their schedules so I can start going to these onsite auctions just to observe the cutthroat behavior exhibited at these things, something I’m confident I can navigate efficiently once I understand it. 

I had a difficult time with music this morning, and have changed the Pandora channel about 15 times and somehow ended up listening to DJ Quik. Brought me back to my teenage years. I had 2 cookies with my breakfast and have no guilt. Have a wonderful day!