Working for yourself

Joe Woodworker over the weekend sent out an email that contained mostly a customer testimonial. I think its worth inserting here for those that care to read it and consider what it is actually saying..there was an intro paragraph and then this ,


Greetings Joe and Christine,

Two years ago my cabinet and furniture shop was going strong despite the signs of a severe ecomonic downturn that had plagued my competitors. I thought we were invincible and then sales completely dropped off. During the first slack month, one of my guys built your vacuum press and we started using it to apply walnut burl veneer to some displays in the showroom. The first customer who saw our burl veneered jewelry cabinet was blown away by the figure and she ordered a 4-piece solid cherry and walnut burl veneer vanity a week later. It wasn't long after that sales began to improve and each new project had some part made with a fancy veneer.

We continued converting several displays to burl and quilted veneers by removing raised panels from the frame and replacing them with veneered panels. Even the simple designs took on new life with a veneered panel installed. I can't get over how easy it is to incorporate veneer into a project. I can see possibilities in every one of our designs.

Here are some things you should tell your customers who are thinking about adding a vacuum press:

• The investment is small compared to the return. It is well worth it.
• Most customers have no idea what a real figured wood looks like. They are blown away when they see a genuine piece of walnut burl, tiger maple, curly koa, etc. This makes our company and our projects extra special since we can make it clear that such fine veneers can not and will not be found in factory-made furniture.
• I can sell the project and close the deal by showing our customers that the price with a fine veneer is no more expensive than that of a raised hardwood panel. We can completely change and improve the look without raising their price.

I can't thank you enough for the work you've put into your website. It is possible that we would have been out of business by now if it were not for what you do.

Richard W.


Says a ton to me. We should break up the salient points that can be seen from this excercise like they would at a business school.

WTG, Rob!

Weekends are busy for me and I have not been able to comment. But I have been reading.

Little has been said about knowing what your business is costing you. Chuck alluded to unfair SE's who in ignorance of all of the expenses of a business help set an expectation in the customer's eye with regard to the value of a product or service. This is not fair to anyone, including the customer who has purchased something for less than a fair price. A fair price covers all the bases, including a living wage for the SE. People on unemployment cost all of us. That money is coming out of our pockets, not someone else's. A healthy economy provides a person the dignity of earning their way, called having a job. Being SE is having a job. Just one tougher and requiring more hours and greater risks. It is easy for an employee to think their job is secure as long as they don't screw up. Nope! An employee is risking security in the decision making ability of the business owner. An employee's fate is handed over to another. A SE has no one to pass off that fate to!

I got a real handle on the true expenses after a year or so. I had nothing else to go to, so I had to figure this out, and darned quick. The IRS's Schedule C became a learning tool. Learning for myself what was deductible told me what records were essential to keep, BUT it also reminded me where the expenses were. Because a cost is deductible doesn't mean that money isn't necessary to pay that cost! You cannot deduct what you have not paid for. Once I got a handle on true costs, I was better able to seek contracts that paid the bills.

Remember there is a cost that cannot be avoided, cannot be saved, cannot be made up. It is time. Too often we overlook or undervalue that commodity and when we do we are doomed as SE persons.

Carol your points push my buttons each time. BUt in a good kind of way.


Dave H mentioned somewhere in a thread that his son has just switched their accounting in the business to Quickbooks. I said a silent hooray for Jarod takes a young un sometimes to shake thinks up.

Jim D mentioned keeping up with technology.

I would like to mix these two points and take from Carols post and say this issue of accounting is in my view one of the first downfalls of SE and Small Business.

Why? What do i mean by this?

Well to start with you dont open the doors of your business with no sense of direction or goal. There is only one goal in business, making money. To do so you need to make a profit. Not just tread water.

The question is how do you know if you treading water or making a profit.

Way too many SE or Small businesses set a budget and then monitor actual against budget. Or put another way planned versus actual.

If they do they do it on an annual basis when they hand over the shoebox full of expense slips and invoices to the accountant/bookeeper to do the books for tax purposes.


Now if you happen to be one of those people or have this habit .....kick it now because the only person you are working for is Uncle Sam and the IRS.

To run a business you need to have goals of what you going to sell each month and you need to break that down into projects and products. You should be setting a target for your headline earnings or income level.

What follows in the budget is the costs to achieve this and at the bottom should if the math works be the profit.

Now you will have made estimates on overheads and of your direct costs.

Its at the budget stage that you can test whether or not your business idea will work and what the costs need to be to have it work.


Part of the extra work you now have on your hands will be to enter the costs as they occur into your budget spreadsheet and tally them up to compare them to what you had planned.


Its vital that you do this each month.

Now the tech part. If you use a software package like Quickbooks, it has a budgeting feature in it. It will allow you to generate the reports required at the push of a button. It will show you a real time status of your progress on a daily basis if you keep it up to date.

This is where leadership comes in. You are the captain of your own ship. You now see the course you set is not going to get you to your destination. If you only set the course once per year, then are you suprised when you dont get where you want to be. Are you suprised when you need to hand over a bunch of your thought you had it hard earned cash to the IRS. Dont be its all your own fault this is where the only person to blame is YOU>

If you do the budgeting correctly and you see that what you thought the cost for something would be is out of whack you know you had better cut in other areas to stay on track. The trick here is making the call. Some costs you will have to grin and bear because if you cut them they may cut into the fundamental fabric that is keeping your business going.

THis is where when you do a budget you errr on the side of being the most conservative person around. You put in "fat" into your expenses. My financial guys have always had a place where they tucked away fat on the balance sheet. But it was not easy to get them to thin it out when i needed.

So for the love of Mike I ask how do these guys that dont do their books hope to run their business like a business.


I can see the question but how do i know what i am going to sell in the first year when i am only starting out. Surprise you dont. The trick is to be conservative in sales revenue and pad the expenses and make sure your business model will work under those conditions.

The cost that most businesses cut when times get tough are the costs that they think they can do without. For small business that often means marketing and sales. Well i always ask so how do you expect the phone to ring then.?

This is actually a cost that you should be increasing when the sales are down assuming that is your problem.


So Dave H if you read this your son Jarod has done a fine job in making you guys switch to using the QB package. Its a very affordable package and does a huge amount for you. Today you can even use quickbooks to take credit card sales.

Remember credit card sales might cost you in the percentage you pay a bank but they get the cashflow going and in many cases make it possible for the customer (consumer) to buy given they are probably buying something without having the cash themselves.


I think its time for anyone who wants more on this topic to chime in otherwise we basically on a soapbox for no reason. I hope someone has gotten something out of these posts and its not just a few preaching to the converted.

Ok Rob You talk a lot about you have to have a budget well now it's time to put the proof in the pudding and tells us just how one makes a budget when you have no idea of how much money you are going to bring in at any time. Yes we can get a job and budget that *(now we know how much money is coming from said job) But we do not know what or if the next job will be or is going to happen.
So if I sit down and say well I'm going to make 100k this year and spend this on x and this on y and never get even one job I have spent a whole lot of time spinning my wheels for not. Even after all of the years doing this SE stuff I have no idea from year to year what I am going to make. One year like 01 we did 1.5M gross and in 09 I might have grossed 50K. So back to my question how does one make a budget for that in the beginning.
And on another note someone says to have 6 months worth of money to pay bills in the bank. If you just became suddenly unemployed the chances are you don't, so don't stress it just start finding the decks to redo or the door that needs changing.

rob-good point on taking credit cards.,
you can use a company like costco who has services to process your credit cards.
I held out longer than any retail business, but when I took in credit cards, my business skyrocketed.
I realized what a dummy I was worrying about the 2% fees.

well i have very little experience in making money, and to much in either losing it or paying for the product the consumer got.. so you could say i am a "Alcoholic" and i am setting in the meeting taking the first step.. i have been reading this post every day since it started and have thought of this SE thing for the last 3 yrs. i even made a point to talk business with many pros or semi pros last year while on tour. the first thing that came out was they all had a spouse covering the bases they couldnt or they had a nest egg to fall back on.. it doesnt matter how good your work has been in the past if no one knows you or your work.. i had a brand made up some time back and used it on the projects i have made.. it says: "Built with Pride by Larry Merlau" and they year below it.. i thought that was a good thing but that doesnt have any value what so ever to anyone but me.. and my pride is worthless.. now if it said handcrafted then possibly it has some merit or if it was also stated made in the U.S.A then again possibly more value.. but a sticker wont cut it in my opinion, i can put a sticker on anything. and unfortunately we have all see where they say made in america but its just assembled here and the parts were made in other countries.. as for the cost checks that was another thing that i knew to little about earlier, but come tax time found out the hard way.. and someone mentioned that having the spouse in on the business venture so your a team rather than a one man band ,,well in my case the spouse is now going to be the main bread winner and even before didnt have time to support me in my possible new venture. so a one man show is not the way to go from the previous discussions.. so that puts me looking for a partner.

@Chuck regarding budgets. In the beginning, we said you have to know what it will take to keep food on the table and a roof over your head. This is how much you MUST make. You have to know what your monthly nut is and each week work toward that nut. The idea is to be proactive in getting work, not reactive in paying expenses. It is a mind thing. If you sit down at the beginning of each week and say to yourself, "This week I have to bring in $XXX. Where is it coming from?" First, you should know the answer to the question, because you need to ask it for each time frame. Some months have insurance payments. Some months have tax payment. Some months have some other kind of a non-recurring expense. Some weeks you will have to rely on your cushion.

This way you will know when you have a little extra to sock away toward that six month cushion, or savings or a new piece of equipment, etc. You will also know much, much sooner when your business is failing. When I started giving my tax preparer totals instead of a shoebox full of receipts, I had control of my business. I also had records to determine how much I needed to charge to stay in business. I knew what my real costs were. And then find the client that could and would pay it. Time waits for no one. If you spend it working on a project that can't pay a profit, even a small one, you have lost the time to work on one that is more lucrative.

There is something synergistic about keeping all these plates in the air. People like dealing with people who are confident they know what they are doing. I have had people ask me to drop my price. I simply smiled and asked what about their project did they want me to change so I could. As an example, I offered to leaving the finish up to them, or fewer drawers, or smaller size. They countered with cheaper wood. I pointed out that cheaper wood made for more labor to make the project look good and typically, cheaper wood only amounted to a few dollars less, while the extra labor cost much much more. I also learned that a customer that wants to quibble like this is not one I want to work with. Nothing will make them happy, and their word of mouth will kill me. I learned to walk away and always found work as I needed it.

Yes, sometimes you will be reactive to the marketplace, but you need to know ASAP and have a plan to deal with it. It is better to not work on something that costs you money out of your pocket (and sets the public perception of the worth of your work) and set your sights on things that will pay you. There is always shop maintenance and bookwork to do. But first there is marketing to do. #1 priority. No marketing, no jobs, no money coming in, no expenses being met, no food on the table or roof over the head.

I know that sounds scary. It is one of the reasons why I marketed exclusivity. To get a piece from me meant more than the piece. Arrogant? Perhaps, but I am but one person and only can do one thing at a time and do it well. When we are young and strong we think we can do it all. Trust me, that physical exuberance is a temporary thing. One has to learn to get smarter about work, rather than try to work harder and faster.

SE is a mindset, first of all. Not all folks are cut out to be that disciplined, that anal about details, that charismatic to deal with customers, that tenacious to stay at it when all the statistics say you will fail. I did not start this post to discourage you. I started it to help bring to light some of the things I learned along the way, and thirty years later I find myself still taking jobs, and making a profit on them. It just is no longer my main business. I am getting older and physically needed to make some adjustments. But my knowledge didn't need to be put out to pasture with me. Thanks to Rob for his insights as well. There are some real nuggets here. If you decide on SE, then study this stuff hard and ask questions. As we have seen, there are many here to help.

JOBS ARE COMING BACK TO THE USA .....watch the video.....

@ Chuck

I am so so happy to read your post this morning Chuck. I finally managed to push your button and find an point that you would benefit from enormously. I will reply in a different post.


I have to say i am now becoming as convinced as Carol that we could do with a blog or some structure re this topic.


Its all good and well to have all the threads and even the tags etc but here is the problem.

If i put myself in the shoes of someone starting out or even with the desire to start out then this thread as a whole gets way to confusing and overwhelming. Its not just a matter of following along. Chucks point about budget brings up the whole place of how and where to start.

It means a great deal to me to be able to impart what i know to you guys. I think by now you know my feelings on the topic of unemployment. This whole lot need not be as scarry as its made out. Heck English literature was scarrier for me.

Shakespear was scarry nonsense for me. Why the heck we had to learn that stuff at school i will never ever work out. And they still teach it today. Go figure.


But before we get into any more i think this video of a snippet of morning news on CBS is very worthwhile to all of you in USA to know of.

I get very disillusioned when i hear and see the woe is me American message. I am not trying to beat the drums of patriotism or nationalism but what is needed is to take a look at facts. Trouble we have is popular media is not putting these facts out there well enough, heck they got their own agenda.

So this is one of those rare new snippets in my opinion that gives you a load of facts in one go that i can atest to being pretty accurate and very much what i view is going to happen in the future. This is not so much for all of us to digest but we all have kids and grandkids and friends. Many are going through tough times. Kids are feeling disillusioned by the fear of future jobs and pressure of study and loan debt.

Leadership as adults requires in my view that we dont just propagate our fears but offer some hope to those that are in need of it and i think this news snippet does just that.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7407530n&tag=pop.videos

Here are some facts to go with it



1) I have clients that can attest to the fact that goods from China are becoming more and more expensive to the point where they have sent out missions to find other countries to manufacture goods in.

2) For China to prosper their people have to become fully fledge consumers. Consumers need money to spend. This means higher wages. Its inevitable.

3) The USA is one of the most productive nations on this planet. Period. Just take a look at the corporate profits that are visible and accounted for on Wallstreet. But make sure you understand exactly what productivity means.

By the way for all the sins of Wallstreet just consider that the visibility and tranparency public corporations have in the USA is not a global phenomenon, it still makes for the best place to invest ones money.

Just consider that in Japan were it not for a outsider English CEO that was appointed and then dismissed from the mighty Olympus the Olympus Scandal would probably never have been discovered.


Where i think things have gone wrong is in the US marketing itself outside of the USA. There you guys are not the best. You end up with people prefering to buy from someone else even if they are more expensive. The evidence is there to prove that as the global economy has grown the US share of this international market has remained the same. This is what has hurt you guys when your economy takes a beating for some reason such as the housing value collapse.

Where you have lost out others have stepped in to take up the slack. You need to see the inroads the German and Spanish companies have made in China and understand how they did it. As a nation you guys are not used to adapting to the ways of a different market you want that market to behave in an American way. In my most humble opinion that is going to have to change sorry.

Question for those with sales experience,, i am going to go see a possible retailer that may have desire to sell some of what i can provide in the woodworking aspect ,,, i had a flyer that i used to be able to print off at the day job.. now that avenue is closed.. i can take the old file to a Quick Print and have some more made up, which i may well do. but i have gathered up some pics of my previous work which i thought i could share with her threw a laptop and will have a few small products to actually show this person. to those in the know, am i going about this correctly or am i shooting myslef in the foot?

Larry,
a portfolio via power point or similar program can be a very power full sales tool. Take a little time and organize it and use it for talking points. Also if you have any drawing in sketchup along with a finished piece you can use it to show how you can design a piece then built it.

You are on the right track. Your flyer needs to represent what you want her to buy and plenty of contact information, along with the reasons for buying from you and for buying what you make. If you take small objects so she can do touchy-feely (a very good thing), make them represent what you hope to sell her. Make a pint size version or a cutaway so the quality of material is seen. Consider allowing her to keep the miniature version if she will display it so her customer can see it. Don't make it so useful that she will use it and her customers can't benefit from seeing it. Go back to check to see how it is being displayed. Good luck with your presentation. Pictures are good, but much better with with complete descriptions.

well carol i am not up to making a miniature sewing cabinet..this week but i will make sure i tell her about what the materials are and where they came from and i also felt it may help to show her my shop so she doesnt think i am just a hole in the wall working out of a lunch box. i have made a serious commitment to doing this prior just not completely in line with normal practices.. kinda like the cart before the horse but i do have a good cart now and need to learn to ride it well..

When I mentioned miniatures, I meant something simple like a book case. Make a 12" high book case and then cut it in half vertically down the center. The wood and joinery can easily be seen. More importantly, the final finish can be felt.

Pictures of your shop are not necessary. Your shop is of no interest to anyone but you and a bunch of friends on this site. What is important to her is your work. It is part of what the customer is buying. Now go check your email.

BUdgets Budgets, Accounting, Finance and more

@Chuck but this applies to anyone with a business where they have a desire to see it succeed in the longer run.

Been busy the past few days so i have been slow to get back to this thread. I had thought of leaving this thread and letting it fade into history given we are a bunch of woodworking warriors and thats our focus here, but, like Allen saving that little dog from getting killed i could not in good conscience leave Chucks question unanswered.

There is so so so much more to the issue of budgets than simply the question of how to do a budget for a start up or a going concern does not simply start with a spreadsheet and numbers.


But before we start with the how, i need to ask a few hows.


So Chuck try answer these questions is you can.


How do you know how much money you going to make this year?

When do you know that?

What is your gross margin that you operate on and how do you know this is sufficient to make a profit?

What is your breakeven point and when do you reach it within the year?

If you got offered a project (because as a builder you are not selling products you are a project company) say in September of the year, and it was a deal you had to take because you had no other and wanted to keep the doors open and the lights on and some food on the table until the next job comes along, how do you know what cost it can be done at without you loosing money.

How have you determined that your hourly rate is $40 and not $45 or $42 or that it should be $ 75.

How much do you plan to spend on marketing this year and what has your return been on that marketing? By that i mean how many dollars of order value do you get for each dollar of marketing spend. Do you even know? Do you even spend any money on marketing/advertising?

How do you decide when the money paid to you for jobs is actually yours? By example .......IF say you get a project for 200 000 dollars and the customer agrees to a payment cycle of 4 payments of $50 000 when is the profit in this able to be recognised and how do you determine it?



Now take note those of you that are starting out or selling a product. These questions relate specifically to Chucks kind of business where you are selling a project not a service.


This brings up a whole host of points that one needs to be pretty clear on in starting out a business.


What business are you in?

a) A service business where you offer to do a service at a fee and do this service on a regular basis?

b) A manufacturer of anything where you make goods and then sell them direct to the consumer?

c) A manufacturer of anything where you make goods and then sell them via a distributor?

c) A project business where you bid or quote on projects with each job having a start and an end and involving payments made over time for work completed against a contractual obligation.?


You need to be clear about what you setting out to do in the first place. Even back in the days of the old west a undertaker knew he was in the retail business. The gunslinger was a hired gun providing a service or working on a contract basis.


The fundamental accounting and cost structure changes for each type and each has their pro and con but they are different. The only common thing is they all set out to make money.



This is the whole point. The fundamental problem that i see in any of the discussions after considering the words you guys use is SELF EMPLOYMENT.


When you start out in a business it may be because you need to earn an income to put food on the table so you in a mindset saying i am going to create my own job. Well thats where the whole thing goes wrong from the get go.

You see your self as a worker. PERIOD. As long as you keep wearing this hat seeing yourself as the be all and end all of being the best worker, you are destined to stay SELF EMPLOYED and struggle. SORRY.


When you start a business the aim is to make money not work. You are starting out as an INVESTOR. This is fundamental mental stuff you need to get your mind around for it is the only way you are going to alter your bad behavior and see the behavior needed to run a business.

Sure in the beginning you have little to invest other than hours of your labor. Thats where the term SWEAT EQUITY comes from. You are prepared to labor to raise the capital to get to the point where you no longer need to be the labor to make money.

Making money is creating wealth and getting a return on that SWEAT EQUITY.


If you simply stay content to be a worker that is self employed well you setting yourself up for one heck of a struggle for your entire working life and dont be surprised if this is what you have been doing no one did it to you other than yourself.


So why budgets why accounting....heck all the accountants i have worked with in my life some of whom are 6 ft under will be delighted to hear me a non accountant singing their professions praise. But if you wish to stay poor and continue to struggle take my advice dont bother doing budgets or accounting within your business venture. Just collect the shoe box and hand it over to the accountant end of year to work out how much Uncle Sam needs to be paid and keep dipping into your reserves to pay Uncle Sam. You on the right course.


If we approach a business ( and please dont anyone give me feedback that says it matters what size the business is. it dont) and look at it as an investor you see it in a very different light.


Just consider this point. If you have any money invested in a company either private shareholding (not your business) or a listed entity on the stock exchange, how do you assess the performance of this stock. Are you one of the gamblers that says hey look the price is rising lets buy or CNN or MSNBC said xyz is a good buy or have you once again handed your life and your destiny over to some stock broker/ financial adviser to determine where you put your money and you "trust" them like you trusted your last boss to keep you in a job?

Sure you need a financial adviser, but if you going to create anykind of wealth and not just leave your life in someone elses hands you need to get to grips with at least some of the basics such that you can determine if they giving you a fair shake.

To do so you need to be able to see things like whether the sales or revenue for the company is growing. If it is how is the company doing in the profitability line. If profits are not there dont mean the company is a bad investment. It may well be that the company is investing the profits to fund growth rather than borrowing the money. You need to be able to asses if the company is performing within its industry to benchmarks related to other peers in the industry.
How much does the company spend on marketing relative to its peers how much does it spend on admin relative to its peers what is the key to that company that makes it special. How much is the company worth and why.

But most important of all you need to be able to know how it performed. On wall street they have to as you will well know tell you out in public for all to see and hear, how well they did against expectations. WHAAT? Yeah expectations.

How the heck did they determine the expectations? Simple they had to do budgets and the expectation of a good share or a good investment is not that they just meet those expectations in terms of returns per share. Its that they exceed them. But if they exceed them too much they also get penalised. Why ? you would ask? Well it demonstrates that they did not know what they were doing. Because if they did they would have been able to up the estimates and that could have affected the share price and hence management that played it safe did so to the disadvantage of the shareholders.

Now you may say this is all good and well but i am a far cry from being a listed entity on wall stree.

Well lets consider......Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Henry Ford all started somewhere and you need to ask what the difference is between you and them. They were nothing special. They did not go to Harvard or Mit or any other fancy school, they might have started at one but they dropped out.

The whole success issue in business starts with how you see yourself and how you run your business.


Even the most early Captains of a ship used something to navigate by. If you going to make money ........NOTE i said make money not get paid a wage. Then you need to approach your business like an investor.


The fact that you might start out working in the business having the business employ you is only academic. Your aim should be to replace yourself as soon as the business is viable.

Even lawyers understand this which is why they end up taking on partners. Even real estate people understand this which is why they end on taking on other real estate brokers under their name or franchise.


Certain business models cap how much money you going to make if you only selling hours. There are only so many hours in a day and there are elements of inefficiency in evey business that you dont get paid for which you need to recover in your overheads.

So Chuck you answer my questions and i will happily help you work out how to do the budget in your type of business operation.



To give you a clue what we all fail to pick up on is the conversation that has been had about Sam Maloof. Go read over the comments and discussuion pertaining to him and his business. After all you gotta do some work to learn this point.

Rob obviously has a passion for businesses to succeed! While at first blush his post seems harsh, he is also right. To keep things in perspective here, I started this post because a number of guys lost their jobs and some were wondering if they might transition into self employment. Some will need to for the simple reason that regardless of the law, age discrimination exists and is rampant. No wishing is changing that.

Whether you are considering SE or find that you have little choice, there is a lot of very good and very important information in this thread. Most of it has to do with the mind set change that is essential for success. SE is for making money, not working a job. The simple reason is that you can work a job and lose money. You can work a job and if your employer loses money, you lose your job.

Being a company, large or small, offers no guarantee of solvency or success. For those who are more comfortable trusting your company to make the right choices resulting in you remaining employed, no other issues considered, good! Good employees are essential for a well-run business. If you can no longer remain an employEE, for whatever reason, also good. But your perspective and mind-set must change, and you will need to learn to do things that in the beginning you have trouble recognizing the value of spending time doing. But do them you must if you want to mske money. Again, the goal of SE is to make money, not to work a job.

If you are SE and you lose money you are out of business, often with a debt load you certainly didn't need. That comes from not knowing, KNOWING what the numbers are and what they mean. Which means you need to keep records and record numbers. Be diligent about that and in time you will learn what you must watch closely.

And, yeah, Rob was tough on Chuck, and some will want to censure him for it. And Chuck may take great exception and want to respond in an equally tough manner. But hold on here. Rob simply cares deeply. Remember he said he couldn't let this thread die without making his points, for they need to be made in an indelible way. They are essential.

The spirit of this thread will continue to offer information SE persons NEED to consider. It is because we are family and because we care. Some of us hit some serious bumps in life. This is simply an attempt to help you make good decisions. Because we care. Don't forget that part!

Thanks Carol for pointing out my purpose. Thats why i like having a lady in the house

I never thought of my post being harsh....this is the mild side of me. My gunny in the army (we did not call them that but thats what you guys would understand) always told me he was not there to be my friend but to teach me the things that would keep me alive when the bullets started flying.

I have never come across a demographic of people like the category of "Self Employed or Small Business" where the human being has so perfected the art of rationalizing their actions and convincing themselves that they are right when deep down they know they wrong but simply dont want to take the action neccessary.

I have no problem with this kind of behavior they have their right to be that way. Why not just acknowledge that they dont wish to do x or y or dont care to know how either. Its easier.



For example we know by now that smoking is not good for us. We have had govs and all sorts of groups tell us, pass laws, show us evidence even try shock and awe of adverts with people having lost this or that. Yet talk to a smoker that wishes to defend this behavior and you get something like.......my (enter family relative long since deceased) smokes 2 packs a day till they were 99 and drank half a bottle of rye with it and look how old they lived to. Who can argue intelligently with that kind of evidence. If it was good for (repeat the same persons name) then its good for the person using their name. C est la vie.

Rob, Harsh..... Not even close He's just telling it like it is mam
I asked that question just to get that response. An answer on how now you both talked about doing it but never got to the meat and tatters of how till now. These guys that are just starting out have no clue what most of this stuff is or means and do what everyone else does and just wing it. Quite honestly as do I most of the time. the difference is I have been winging it for quite some time where others are just starting out. If we can get them started in the right direction even just one of them than this whole thread has been wroth it for all.
While I maybe just winging it my account never sees the shoe box he just gets the end numbers.
and no I would not recommend anyone to try and run a business the way I do.
Thus they need to heed the words above and learn and slowly but surly Rob is getting it beat into my head.

Well Chuck i am very happy to start the meat and taters if its gonna do some good.

But to be fair to all the guys here i would rather get somewhere setup where its not invasive to those that prefer this to be a place of woodworking and relaxation.

I think before we go on i will set up a poll.

later

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