More Than Just An Update - Getting Our Lives Back And A Lovely Surprise From Across The Pond

One of the reasons why I wanted to write this blog is that while the content of the posts themselves will illustrate what starting a business and becoming an entrepreneur entails, just as important is the pattern of posts themselves and what they don't say.

When I started writing this blog, most of my posts had a lot of content related to enjoying your new found freedom as an entrepreneur and recipes from all the new meals I was making in a relaxed manner. All of this was happening because I was at the beginning of the journey, when our bank accounts were still flush with our savings and so on. However, gradually as our expenses started to mount and the money began to disappear for living expenses, I began to feel stressed. My natural instinctive response to this stress was, you guessed it, to work harder and cut out all the little things that I wrote about before. Pretty soon, the experimental cooking dropped off, KD (Kraft Dinner) consumption went up and I stopped taking breaks in a frantic attempt to get as much material listed as possible so that we could get sales to a level that could eventually sustain us.

Our sales have always been pretty good, even since July last year and especially when we consider:

• How specialized we are.
• How little of our total inventory is listed now.

But for the last several months, no matter how good sales were, I would always assume that they were a one-off, and that they would not be repeated. 

However, in this past week, we have had over $1,300 in sales, $650 of which is for the first five days of this month, which is fantastic. We are basically making sales every day now, more than half of which are coming from new customers and the other half for repeat customers. I am slowly realizing that as long as we continue what we are doing that we will reach our goal. So I am trying to take more breaks now and to avoid checking my phone too much on weekends or after work. It's very hard to let go, but this last weekend Steph and I had a whole day together walking in the Beaches area of our neighbourhood and it was really nice. The weather was fantastic and it felt really good to re-connect and appreciate each other after basically just existing for the business. 

My point I guess is that it is really easy to lose perspective when you are trying to build a business because you have very few feedback mechanisms to let you know how you are doing. You want to succeed so badly that I think is is natural to assume that every win is a one-off and that failure is still a very real possibility. 

I received a really amazing surprise last week. An old friend from when I was living in Australia sent me a friend request on Facebook. As soon as I saw his name, I knew it was him. I eagerly accepted and he suggested that we Skype. Simon was my best friend while I lived in Australia between the ages of 11 and 14. We fell out of touch largely because there was no easy way to stay in touch back in 1985: there was no e-mail, long-distance cost hundreds of dollars and we lived continents apart after I moved to Hong Kong. I had tried to find him several times over the past 30 years without success. So I was naturally quite excited at the prospect of re-connecting with him after all these years. We scheduled a Skype call after work last week and it was amazing! We talked for over an hour and I'm sure if I didn't have to go out that night, we could have talked for several more hours. I am looking forward to more conversations with him. It is amazing the pleasant surprises that life can occasionally throw our way. 

So with June off to a good start, I am going to start my next batch of lot scans.