I figured the dynasty thread was as good as any place to start a thread to track my progress in opening our own business. If you have paid attention to me over the last few months, you probably already know that I have my own online business and have been contemplating starting a B&M (brick and mortar) store. At some point, when we are official I'll put out what we sell, but until then.. we just sell widgets.
The LLC was setup in January of this year and should have been done sooner in order to take advantage of a lot of our business expenses rather than just reporting income, but for whatever reason, we never took the time to fully make it official. Probably was more procrastination on my part and fear on my wife's part as she really didn't have the foggiest idea and she wants to know everything about everything before committing to something. Don't get me wrong, that is a good thing, but at some point you need to proceed forward and just realize that you aren't going to know about everything, but you just need to know where to find the answer.
So, January 09 came and we setup the business at the beginning of the year. (To this date, no one in my family or my wife's family know that we 'own' a business. There are a lot of reasons for this, but that is a whole long topic right now. The main reason is my wife's mother who is very money driven and thinks that my wife should be providing money to her and her sister).
Anyhow, the first few months were spent flushing out some of the items for the business side - tracking expenses better, estimated taxes, how to write off loses (They just write it off Jerry!) and inventory tracking. It was business as normal from what we had been doing for the last few years. And then March came. In March, we branched off in a different direction that was related to our widgets, but was a different line, we also became more aggressive in what we were doing. Our shipments and sales raised dramatically from March to June from around 100 mailings a month to around 350.
My typical day right now consists of 10 hours day job, 3 hours family time, 6 hours sleep, 3 hours business and 1 hour whatever else. So, my time is stretched thin.
We hit a point in June where we just had to make a decision. Tone down what we were doing and ratchet back some or go full force forward. But, to go forward, we needed to open up a brick and mortar store which would allow us to carry some different products lines that are closed off to us because we are online only. At that point, I started to do some research and tried to formulate a plan on what we needed to do from a business standpoint , but also from a personal standpoint.
My wife has tried to stay out of the planning for now, she is just overloaded with information and was just wanting me to do the research, explain things to her and proceed. Last week I gave her a brief overview of what I saw us accomplishing with this business and had another discussion with her this morning and she sounds way more excited now than see was 30 days ago.
So, sounds as though I'm pressing forward. Our goal at this time is October 15th. Lots to do between now and then so, I'll throw down some updates in this thread from time to time. Some of the items will be new stuff that I'm currently working through and some will be items I've addressed in the last 30 days so, any comments, feel free.
Wish me luck. Hopefully this thread will be interesting for people in a similar situation to me. If not, at least I'll have a place to just list my thoughts.