The Plot Thickens...

While manning the Farmer's Market yesterday my cell phone rang but, since I was chatting with customers, I let it go to voicemail. Turns out it was the zoo calling to see if I was still interested in that position I interviewed for last month. Apparently whoever they hired didn't work out for one reason or another and the position is now open again.

Since the phone call came out of left field I had to buy myself a little time to think and called back last night telling a little white lie that I was out of town for the holiday weekend and would get back to them on Tuesday. I just didn't expect something like this to happen so it wasn't something I even contemplated and I need a little bit to think this all through.

So what would you do? Would you take the part-time position because the money would be nice (although certainly wouldn't make or break the family finances) and it can't hurt to get some non-entrepreneur employment back on the old resume? Or would you figure that trying to balance two jobs - your own company and a 20hr week part-time position along with quality family time (which is the thing that probably brings me the most joy in this world) would just make you crazy? Or would you simply fill to meet the new time challenges and thrive? What would you do?

Found Afternoon & Book Review

A found afternoon is a rarity in these parts as, being a relatively Type A personality, I typically have things scheduled in pretty tight during the week. The fact that I was scheduled to volunteer at the zoo this afternoon was why I was on the phone at 7:30am with an east coast customer for an hour. Then it turns out the weather has been crappy all day (crappy is giving it far too much credit...summer, oh summer, where art thou?) and I was told I didn't need to come into the zoo. So all of the sudden I found myself with four hours I hadn't accounted for and.not.a.single.thing.planned. What's a girl to do?

I figured I should do what any self-respecting English Lit major would do on a rainy, overcast, generally icky day, and opened up my latest library book for a few hours of reading. While I'm not yet done with it, Shop Class as Soulcraft is worthy of a mid-way-through-it review.

In case you haven't heard of this piece of nonfiction, let me set the background for you. The author, Matthew Crawford, is a PhD in philosophy who worked for a DC think tank before realizing that what truly made him happy in life was fixing motorcycles so he chucked it all and opened up a motorcycle repair shop. You think your family complains you waste your degree? Imagine what Thanksgiving dinners around this guy's house must be like.

But the arguement he makes in this book is that here in America - and much of the Western world - there is an idealized seperation between blue collar and white collar labor. Blue collar are the types of jobs that leave you with grit under your fingernails at the end of the day and white collar are "thinking" jobs. And while this may have been true at one point, Crawford argues that many white collar jobs have become so routinized that there is very little "thinking" left in them. For example, who ever would have dreamed that accounting could be just as easily outsourced to India or China as manufacturing has been? Yet it's true and it's happening because accounting - among other professions - is no longer really about exploring and understanding but more about checking boxes and making sure that all the i's are dotted. Think about it this way, if anyone had really been paying attention would Bernie Maddoff been able to get away with what he did for such a long period of time?

There are few thoughts that Crawford has brought up already that I'd like to touch on. The first is that manual labor has become seen as being an "unthinking" job. Perhaps that's true in the cases of some assembly lines where the entire job is to fit Part A onto Part B, but like Crawford himself, to a certain group of people there is something about being able to create a tangible object with your own hands that makes your very soul sing. Or at least it does that for mine.

For those who don't know, I spent several years working as a pastry chef for a hotel chain and then several years in the marketing department of a software company. The salary in the software company was better, the hours were MUCH better, the benefits were better, and I could wear nice clothes and act like a grownup. And yet if given a choice between the two I'd head back to that pastry chef job well before I'd go back to the cubicle. Being able to, at the end of a very long day with back aching and feet throbbing, to be able to point to something tangible and say "I made that" was more fulfilling than any marketing campaign I ever developed. Part of the problem came from the fact that I wasn't given the latitude in the software job to actually "develop" anything from scratch. I was given a very definite parameter and set of rules as to how said company did their marketing campaigns and one was not to stray from that regardless of the circumstances. It was essentially a glorified Search & Replace function for key words and then out it'd go. As Crawford says on page 143, "Despite the beautiful ties I wore (in his stint in the corporate world), it turned out to be a more proletarian existence then I had known as a manual worker."

To be brutally honest, there are times when I'm embarrassed that I've taken my two bachelor degrees and my MBA and parlayed it into a career path that is premised on manual labor. Yes, I own my own company and there is much in the administrative and marketing side of things that gets my brain humming and I really enjoy, but I don't ever really see myself handing off all the manual labor to underlings. I simply enjoy that work too much (most of the time). This book is helping me remember that working with my hands shouldn't be something I'm ashamed of even while my fancy degrees sit on the wall. I am becoming an expert in an area and literally "create" something every day I'm in my workspace. This is different, yes, from a management consultant (one of the career paths that is glorified in MBA programs) but the truth is that the only thing management consultants are experts at is being generalists and while they may swoop in and suggest changes, they rarely actually enact the changes themselves. This isn't to say they don't deserve credit (my hubby being a former consultant himself) but that they have to live in an abstract world based on management principles that may or may not differ from the reality of said specific business. And while abstract ideas are good, I personally would derive no pleasure if I weren't able to produce something that I can hold in my hands at the end of the day. That doesn't make me any better, but that shouldn't make me any less either.

Modest Summer Goals

You wouldn't know that summer was on it's way by the weather we're having in the Pacific Northwest lately. However, since the upcoming Memorial Day holiday is the unofficial start of summer (even if I do have to wear a sweatshirt the entire weekend) I figured I might as well make some summer goals.

For me summer is usually really really quiet from a sales standpoint. More importantly, it's also typically the time of year I start dipping into the business savings because sales are quiet. So the goal for me this year is to try and make sure that my monthly sales exceed my monthly costs. Even if it's only by $1 I'll be overjoyed.

Now here are the caveats - there are a few things that happen in the summer which my summer sales simply won't cover. Things like final payment for my tradeshow booths even though the shows won't happen until the Fall, getting new packaging made up in advance of the busy fall season, etc. Things like that are exempt (for now) from this goal. The goal is to simply have my 'normal' monthly costs - like my workspace rent, raw materials cost, etc - all be covered by what I sell each month.

And there are two ways I hope to meet this goal. First is by increasing sales - even if only slightly - via the Farmers Markets (pray for good weather this Thursday - pray for good weather this Thursday!). Secondly is that I want to continue to reign in spending whereever possible because the lower my costs are each month the easier it will be for my monthly sales to cover them.
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So far May is off to a good start with an order going out today that will cover about 60% of May's costs. That just means I need to try and get another 40% at the Farmer's Market this Thursday (pray for good weather, pray for good weather) and then I need to start thinking about how best to tackle June.

Payback

I know that I'm really tired at the end of shows and want nothing more then to stuff everything into a box and just get on my way. But if I could pause for one second this year after shows and remember that payback is a B$*(&. By payback I mean times like this where I cannot for the life of me find that "thing" I'm looking for that I need to bring with me to the farmers market this Thursday. Which means tomorrow I'm going to have to pull every box out of storage and rummage through it to find this one silly little thing. Grrrr.....

Spinning Wheels

I'm refering to the wheels in my head. They're spinning today with ideas that are 75% of the way developed but not "quite" there. Today was a big production day in my workspace but the production I was doing was elementary at best. It's the type of production that you'd pay the lowest level line employee to do because it's completely unskilled. Unfortunately the lowest paid employee right now - and also the only employee - is me. So I spent 8+ hours doing very very brainless work.

It's not nearly as bad as it sounds. Sometimes I enjoy the fact that I'm able to get work done but give my brain a break. Sometimes I'd rather be doing this type of work then QuickBooks :). And sometimes, like today, this type of work enables me to tune out and think about other areas of the business.

So this is what got me thinking (amongst other things). Pros and cons of trying to work with an established company to do private label for them. They're not in my industry but there are some similarities between our company's with regards to mission, quality, etc that I could see it making sense. Plus, given who their audience is, I could see this audience being interested in said new product. But....I just don't know. Anyone have any thoughts or experience with private label?

Still Here...

Just busy lately. It seems like everything collided last week what with numerous doctor's visits (just routine stuff), dog vet visits (not so routine but it's all looking good), and work. Busy busy busy. Truthfully it makes me very glad I didn't get that job at the zoo or I'd have been pulling my hair out by now.

The biggest focus of last week was getting the professional photos picked up and then working on them to get them in the formats I needed to send them over to some catalogues. A couple catalogues the pictures are being looked at and then if they like what they see they'll ask for samples. One of the other catalogues is one that I'm currently working with and they needed the pictures ASAP to start working with as they are already working on their holiday catalogues. So I've been busy trying to get all the right pieces going to the right contacts, keeping everyone happy, and trying to lure a couple catalogue companies further down the road of realizing that my products are something they just simply can't do without.

I'm also trying to get ready for my first Farmers Market next week. I'm working on a list of all the pieces I need and the list is growing expodentially every day. Thankfully I've managed to secure most stuff from friends if I didn't already have it so I'm holding down costs on this which is key because I just don't know how well my stuff is going to do in a venue like this. I could also use some stellar weather because that always helps farmer's market sales so if you could send some my way a week from Thursday from about 1-7pm it would be greatly appreciated.

Cash Flow is King

There were several things I took away from my entrepreneurship courses at bschool that have rung more true then I could ever have imagined. The #1 being that no matter how great a proforma spreadsheet you make - calculating all your sales, fixed costs, variable costs, etc - in the end for a small business what it really comes down to is cash flow. It doesn't matter that you make $1M annually if you don't have enough money in the bank to pay tomorrow's bills. I've talked about this a few times - specifically in the Fall when I'm more often then not waiting for payment from Peter to be able to pay Paul. It's a stressful stressful game to play.

Which is why I've really enjoyed this series of articles from the NYTimes small business section: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/my-week-in-cash-flow/
You'll want to scroll down to the bottom of the page and start with Monday's entry and read backwards, but it's a great example of the cash flow issues small businesses face. Personally, while reading it I felt a mix of "thank goodness someone else also goes through the same thing" and "thank goodness the numbers I'm faced with aren't nearly as large as his!" Regardless, it's a great small business read if you have the time and I think it hits home more strongly then many of us small business owners would like to admit.

The week here is ending up well. My photoshoot went really well yesterday. The majority of the shoot was strictly for product photos (product centered on white background) but there were a handful of more artsy shots and one in particular that when I saw it I said "that's my ad." Too bad I don't plan on doing a lot of advertising this Fall. This photo is almost good enough to make me want to do more!

Photoshoot on Thursday

Photoshoot on Thursday...photoshoot on Thursday....photoshoot on Thursday. Tons to do between now and then with the major one being jerry-rig some mocked up labels that I haven't yet paid to be professionally printed so they look professionally printed in the photoshoot. I need things to look perfect!

I've also been checking out this site for photography inspiration: http://foodgawker.com/

My photographer is an incredible professional photographer and I oftentimes just leave it to his creative direction but panning through that site helps give me ideas on different angles or ways of approaching a product that are eye-catching.