This week I (and my husband, Kevin) have learned some very important lessons on this Entrepreneurial Journey. Some of these lessons have been from actual things that have happened and some have been because of what I have read for class. Let's just say it has been a very busy week and a whole lot of lessons have been learned.
The first lesson we learned is, no matter how much you trust someone that is doing work for you, it is best if you do a quick check to make sure it is completed and done correctly. This past week the duplex we own had bees. We thought they were building a hive in the insulation, but when the bee removal guy came he couldn't find any hive activity only scouting activity and there were a lot less bees than there were when we were there last Saturday. Long story short, when we went to take care of this problem, we ended up finding out that a whole lot of other problems that we thought had been taken care of by our handyman were not. I was extremely hurt as our handyman is also our friend. He did not finish the first job he was supposed to be doing. The second job he did was done the lazy man's way, to put it nicely. I was very embarrassed, as I had been told things were done. However, the tenants thought that he was coming back to finish, so they hadn't said anything to us and it has been two months since it was supposed to be completed. I apologized to the tenants and told them I would work on getting things resolved. So for my first lesson learned, just take a quick check to make sure everything is completed and done correctly. This could have been resolved sooner and we possibly could have avoided the bee problem, as not having the job done correctly is what allowed them access to the house.
The second and third lessons I learned were brewing after the incident occurred at the rental property. I half-jokingly told Kevin, as we were leaving the property with the knowledge of the bee issue and the work not being completed, "this wouldn't have happened if you knew how to do any kind of handyman work." He said he knew. My husband has zero handyman skills...I have more than he does and that isn't saying much. A few days later, after watching the bee man fix a small portion of the insulation that was supposed to have been handled by the handyman, I thought, "I can do that". I began thinking, "I wonder how much it would cost to buy the supplies (including the staple gun and staples) and putting it up myself." It would become a business expense so that would take care of offsetting some of the cost and we would have the staple gun to use for other projects around our house that we have needed one for but ended up doing something different. It didn't look too hard and I thought, I really think if Kevin was helping me we could do this. So I said something to Kevin about it and as we looked up the prices for the supplies we needed, we were pleasantly surprised by the price for the staple gun and staples, even the insulation cost less than we thought just based on the price the guy was charging us to do the project that he never finished (thankfully we have not completely paid him yet, so we still have to deal with that portion of it). Obviously any type of repairs cost money and are somewhat pricey, but it was less than we expected. We began talking about how we could start attending the classes that Home Depot and Lowe's offer for free to learn some of these more basic skills. He also mentioned that maybe we could then use those skills to also start fixing up and flipping other houses. I would like to do that, but am pretty sure we are not there yet! However, based on this incident, the second lesson we learned, was maybe we can do more than we realize. Maybe we can learn skills that will help save us money in the long run and push us into other areas we didn't think we could go before.
Which leads into the third lesson I learned. As I read one of our assigned textbooks for class, "The Ministry of Business", by Steven A Hitz with James W Ritchie, he told a story of something that happened to him and his wife and their business. They were sued by a previous employer and were told they could not do their business in the area until the lawsuit was over. This caused them to go outside of their area and into several other states and eventually the whole US in the same time period they had planned to just be in all of California. He says, "Had it not been for this unexpected lawsuit, we would have remained perfectly content." He went on to say that, "the lawsuit was both a curse and a blessing." I have felt that way this week, the bees were a curse, however, I believe in the end they will be a blessing. Had we not had the bee problem, we would not have known about the issues at the rental property and would have continued to use someone that apparently doesn't finish jobs and doesn't do them very well. This would have had a bad impact on us as landlords that we don't know what we are doing, that we don't care about our properties and when we try to rent it out, it will not show very well and will be hard to get it rented to new people. Luckily our current tenants know we have tried and just got worked over a little and are sympathetic. They know we are going to do what we need to so we can make it right. I have learned that sometimes God gives us things that sometimes we feel we can't handle, but that as we step back, take the emotion out of it, and look at the bigger picture we realize it is for our good and ultimately the result will be fabulous. Maybe my husband is right, maybe if we take some of these classes and ask people to learn from them, maybe we really can fix up and flip homes, which will help expand our rental properties and our income. But if not, at the very least it will allow us to save money by fixing some of the minor repairs ourselves and only hire out the bigger jobs.
The final lesson came from the other assignment we had for class this week to read through and watch an excerpt from Randy Pausch's Last Lecture. Maybe many of you know who he is, but I didn't. He was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He created a new degree program with the help of another professor that changed the world of digital graphics and virtual reality. His programs were a huge success and many students outside of the digital graphics college took his classes. He also worked on a virtual reality project at Disney for the Aladdin ride they were creating. Anyway, his last lecture was on following your childhood dreams and making them a reality. He was a dreamer in a good way, he thought of something and then found a way to make it happen. He felt there were times when he was pushed along by others at certain times to get him to where he needed to go to make his dreams a reality. He also mentioned that his parents allowed him some freedoms (such has painting the walls in his bedroom anyway he wanted) that gave him the courage to go after his dreams and feel like he could succeed. Having dreams is important. It gives us direction. It also goes back to the saying, "shoot for the moon, if you miss you'll land among the stars." We need to dream big and go for it, but if we don't quite make it, that doesn't mean we failed, it means we got closer than we would have if we didn't dream at all. We all have dreams inside of us, some from when we were a kid and some we come to as adults. How many of us wanted to do and be certain things when we grew up, but how many of us actually have done it? As a young child, I wanted to be a lawyer, not sure why other than probably because I thought they made a lot of money. When I was in 8th grade, I specifically remember in my English class we had to do an assignment on the career we wanted in the future. We had to contact and interview someone in that field and ask them questions. At that time, I was pretty good at math and enjoyed it, so I thought maybe I would like to be an accountant like my uncle (who I interviewed). I also thought it would give me the flexibility to do it at home after I had children. Fast forward almost 25 years later and today, while I am not an accountant, I do have an accounting degree, I do accounting functions at work, I assist with major general ledger out of balances and research. The girls at work even say, "If Michele can't find it, there is no finding it." So while maybe I didn't become an actual accountant, maybe my dreams just needed a little tweaking. A dream I have had as an adult, since my husband and I got married, is to own rental properties. We felt that it would allow us to have the financial and time flexibility to accomplish some of our other dreams of going on a mission and helping people around us. While, it hasn't been smooth sailing and certainly has not looked anything like we thought it would, we have been able to slowly get into that business and are looking forward to moving it forward. It is important that we dream big. We have to have courage and the fortitude to keep pushing towards that goal even if it doesn't happen as quickly or exactly how we had envisioned.
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