David vs. Goliath

No, I'm not talking about the basement reorganization project though that definitely is a very very large Goliath. I'll be doning my slingshot for that battle - aka, the paintbrush - next week. Or at least I hope to because Lowe's is antsy to get the carpet installed.

Instead, I'm talking about me going up to these BIG companies and trying to walk the walk and talk the talk so that they think I can even compete in their arena. I just sent an email off to one BIG company who has expressed interest. For the record to send the email and associated attachment I
1. created the attachment at my dining room table with my husband's help
2. pestered my husband until he turned the attachment into a .pdf using his work software
3. wrote the email while sitting at my dining room table with one dog pawing at my lap
4. fretting about the email while petting the needy dog
5. sent it off with a silent prayer

I've worked in big and BIG companies before and I can tell you that in the course of my days there I never experienced such angst over one simple email. But the email is off and the samples go out tomorrow or Friday (at $50+ a package in order to get there no later then Monday as required). While on the one hand I'd appreciate if BIG company, upon looking at the attachment, just told me now that they can't use the product and save me the sample shipping cost. But in reality I hope not to hear from them for at least a week. It will let me believe, if for only a few days, that what I presented them with is not so totally off target and that they may actually be viably considering it.

Surrounded By Bad News

I sometimes imagine that bad news is like a tornado that moves through people's lives, missing some this time round while swirling violently around others. Somehow I find myself in the eye of that tornado right now. I've got bad news coming in from the home front, bad news from friends in the industry, and of course so much bad news on tv that I've just stopped watching the news altogether. And yet, wierdly enough, just like how experts say that at the eye of the tornado everything is calm, things with the business are going far better then anticipated. I honestly thought that I wouldn't have any sales for the first half of the year but sales are still coming in. Perhaps even more interesting is the serious inquiries from some BIG companies about private label which could add a ton to my bottom line. Now those aren't totally solidified yet but these are BIG companies who have reached out to me rather than the other way around so it at least shows they're genuinly interested in what we can deliver to them.

But yet being in the eye of the tornado makes it feel like I'm constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'm waiting for something to happen that will force this little company to struggle as much - or more - then others in the industry. And it's hard to have friends in the industry complain to me about how poor sales are while at the same time we're doing at least as well as we were this time last year. I almost feel guilty that we're doing OK.

Not to say the tornado won't hit us, it's near and I can feel it. But I'm hoping to keep it at bay with a combination of drastic cost cutting (I just cut down my workspace time for the month of February in addition to January to save money) and positive thinking. Or at the very least keep myself busy enough with a variety of projects that I don't feel the tornado hovering just behind my shouldar.

Crisis Communication Mode

Nothing gets a morning off to a start then a frantic early-morning phone call from an east coast retailer worrying that our products have been affected by the recent FDA recall. They haven't and I assured her of such. Then I got another phone call with the same question.

So here it is 9:15am and I'm still in my jammies having just sent out an email blast to my entire email marketing list, posted something on the company website, added a note to Twitter, and changed our voicemail to reflect the concerns and try to put people at ease that our products are safe. Oh - and email a reporter who recently contacted me to let her know that we're not impacted.

Sadly I also had to put a stop to a Valentine's Day ad I was running on FaceBook because despite the reassurances I know people are still going to be worried - I know I would be - and it seems like any money spent on advertising right at this moment is not likely to be well spent.

Anything else I should do? Other than go take a shower?

PayPal Offers Card Swipe Machine

Keeping this short today as I'm very very tired. Our older dog had a very rough night last night after getting some dental anethesia yesterday so none of us got a lot of sleep. One of the beauties of working for myself though is the luxury I have to basically take today off - for all intensive purposes - and keep an eye on her per the vet's instructions.

If you need or want a credit card swipe machine, PayPal finally has one available:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/Marketing/merchant/VTSwipe-outside&

It sounds like it's used with their PayPal Virtual Terminal which is their online merchant account system. I personally use PayPal for our credit card processing (though don't need a swipe machine). Not sure if it's the cheapest merchant account service out there, but after trying several others for the first year+ of the business, I just couldn't make heads or tails of all the various charges I was getting. At least with the service I used, it seemed like every month there were multiple random charges that made no sense to me. So while PayPal may not ultimately be the cheapest, it is the easiest I've found for helping me also keep my books in order and knowing exactly how much of every single transaction goes towards fees. At the end of the day, I figure that anything that can help me keep my Accounting forward is worth a few extra bucks.

Getting Organized - The Beginning

There's nothing like a long weekend to take advantage of those projects that manage to add up during the week. This weekend was the beginning of the basement reorganization project (known as BRP). To give you a sense of where we're starting from, here are a few current pictures of my future office.







Nice, huh! As you can tell, it's not quite ready to liveout it's full office potential. So we went to Lowe's, because Lowe's is the go-to store for helping basements become offices. Top on the list - carpeting to cover up the cold cement floor. The guys at Lowe's asked if we were thinking of installing it ourselves or wanted them to do it and I had to laugh. As much as I wish I were handy like that (not to mention that it would definitely help cut down my basement remodel costs), I'm just not and know that it will cost me less in the long run if I outsource the project to the experts. So Lowe's got us all set up with an appointment to come and measure the area to figure out how much carpeting we need. While we were there we also checked out some of their carpeting samples and found a nice selection of Eco-friendly options which are made from recycled plastic bottles. Plus they are already Stainmastered which is key in a household with pups. The carpeting seemed nice, they had a great selection of colors and styles, and it turns out the Eco stuff is cheaper then regular carpeting. If I were recarpeting my entire house I may do more inquiring into why that is the case, but this is a 200sqft basement I'm talking about so I'm not going to worry about it and just be happy that we're being Green.

It's looking like the carpeting will likely cost us about $500 after you include installation. However, it turns out we have a full can of paint leftover from the previous owners and since I was just going to repaint the basement the same color I'm hoping I have enough to get the job done to save a little money on that end.

Course I can't get the walls painted or the carpeting in until the basement gets cleaned up. So hubby and I spent the morning cleaning it out and reorganizing everything. It's amazing how much crap can accumulate in such a small space! Most of said crap is now looking for a new home thanks to Craigslist.

So we're getting there. Small steps but steps nonetheless. I'm leaving for a girls weekend in Austin next weekend so I likely won't get started on repainting until after I get back. Hopefully by then all the Craigslist stuff will have been sold/given away. On another note, those cubes I ordered from the DWR liquidator did arrive without a problem. I haven't set it up yet but here's a sample photo:


I've actually decided that rather than keeping all four units in storage for 9 months out of the year, I'm going to open up two of them and use them in the new basement rather than purchasing additional new shelves for that (see, saving more $$$). Realistically the cubes are only 'traveling' to shows 2 months a year so during that time anything in them will just get temporarily moved out.

Accounting 101

Once, while I was taking an accounting course via a community college in New York, someone told me about the field of forensic accounting which - from my understanding - is made up of folks who go in 'after the fact' and try to make sense of the books. Usually it's for litigious purposes but the way it was described to me made it sound like they were mystery solvers. In my mind I pictured a CSI team made up of a bunch of MBAs. And, truthfully, it sounded pretty interesting. That is until I dropped out of said accounting course because I realized I just don't have the type of brain that works well with numbers.

Eventually Accounting (notice the capital 'A') came back and got me in its clutches, this time at business school where I was studying for my MBA. Apparently you needed an accounting course to graduate. All I can say is that I'm thankful to my teammates who pulled me through. Despite my better judgement, I even ended up taking a second accounting course even though it wasn't required - Cost Accounting - because my husband (an accounting major and MBA in his own right, though he has a huge finance brain that more than makes up for the lack of any financial skills on my end. I'm secretly hoping any future children inherit his finance and strategy skills) basically said he'd never talk to me again if I didn't. It was actually a really interesting course and the professor was fascinating, but once again it was by the skin of my teeth and, I believe, the fact that the professor liked that I - like him - was a triathlete, that I made it through that class with any semblance of a respectable grade.

I thought when I graduated I was done with Accounting. I was a marketing major for god's sake - we don't run numbers, we let the people who are paid far more then us do that. Course then I came up with the brilliant plan to run my own business and, since I don't have millions in startup capital, I'm stuck doing my own books. Which is the long-winded way of explaining what I've spent the last two days doing. Business taxes are due on January 31st, I have a meeting with my accountant on Friday (I'm smart enough to pay someone else to take the liability of incorrectly filling out the tax forms off my plate), and I have a backlog of several months worth of accounting. Not a good combination.

If you were bored enough to troll past posts, I'm pretty sure you'll come upon one or more posts about me complaining about QuickBooks and about keeping my books up to date. I think there's even a post where I promise to be more on top of QuickBooks. And I was, for a while. Then I broke my leg and it all went to hell in a handbasket. A rather large handbasket. It was actually somewhat amusing today while doing my own version of forensic accounting as there is a very clear line between 'before I broke my leg' and 'after I broke my leg' with regards to how well my books were kept up to date. Unfortunately, 80% of my business occurded 'after' so I've been drowing in QuickBooks for two days now.


For your amusement and prove my point here's a picture of the notes I made while trying to reconcile my merchant account. That's just one month's worth...now imagine I also have to do the same for all months of credit card and bank account statements.

Fun times - let me tell you!

Survivivng the Recession Like a Dog

This is not so much a business-related post as it is a random thought post. It is also a procrastination post as I'm supposed to be finishing my year-end QuickBooks prior to my tax meeting with the accountant on Friday. But who really wants to work on that before 10am. Or really, at all?

So the random thinking I was doing last night while not being able to fall asleep was about how crazed we all seem to get about the economy. Not that we shouldn't, but in reality, do any one of us have the power to change the way the economy is headed? If the Fed is predicting that the jobless rate is going to hit 10%, there's really not a heck of a lot I can do to prevent that now is there. And it's not like I can really personally offer to bail out Wall Street. Sure, there are the obvious things my husband and I can do but, in truth, those actually revolve around hoarding our own stash of money which keeps that money from circulating in the marketplace and does, in its own very small way,contribute to the financial crises.

To make matters worse, when you work from home you have the ability to catch all the latest news and angst about the economy. Just in case you missed the 7am update on how bad the economy is it'll get replayed for you at 9am, 12noon, 5pm, 10pm, and 11pm. Not to mention all the news "promos" that promise to tell you at one of those news hours how bad the economy is. There's also all the so-called experts on talk shows coming on to tell us about the Armageddon we're heading into and, of course, if you really want to lose your mind, CNBC.

Since working myself into a tizzy about the economy isn't doing anybody a whole lot of good, I've decided that I need to change my approach and work towards surviving this recession with the same attitude my dogs have. Just a few examples:

1. They opt to nap rather than watch CNBC
2. They are content to simply spend the day looking out the window (ie - enjoy the small things)
3. When things get stressful all they need is a good run around the lake to make them feel better
4. They don't follow the day-to-day ups and downs of the market but take a longterm approach to investing
5. At the end of the day, if you're really stressed, bark at some squirrels

That's my new approach to emotionally dealing with the economy. Do you have any other suggestions?