My husband started his business last year. After a year of hanging on the fence about whether or not to try his own thing, we decided to bite the bullet in early '04. We spent five months researching, finalizing plans and gathering materials/business paperwork. I quit my job to kick start the process and devote more time to research. Started scheduling jobs under the business name in May, working out of our garage. Over the summer, this side job of window tinting started to conflict with Mike's full-time job. Mike knew early on that if he was to tint full-time, he didn't want to do it out of the house. We lucked out on an awesome shop location in September. I started work again so we can have health insurance and guaranteed income. It was a gamble, it was terribly early to add shop rent to our overhead... but the location and opportunity might never arise again. We went ahead with it. We decided... we're young, we own our home & have no car payments. We'll scrimp and save and try to make this work. And thus, Mike left his job in October to run the shop.
Winter goes by and we're hanging on by our fingernails. Tax season comes and we discover just how much dough we've poured into our little enterprise. Since we'd both spent part of the year without an employer, we discovered we'd picked the year we'd brought in the least amount of income to start a business.
It built up slowly, the phone started ringing more and more often. A pair of fleet graphics accounts panned out for us and repeat customers appeared from the woodwork. In addition, a local dealer account is looking to be worth our time. Suprise! It's the third week of march and we're full! It's monday and our next available appt is next week!
Now the trick is to keep the momentum, keep getting new customers, keep our service level high, and squirrel away some
for next winter...
