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!