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Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Time For a Shift in Focus

For the past several months, Steph and I have had a fairly set working routine:


  • On Mondays we usually fill the orders that came in on Friday and the weekend and I spend the rest of the day updating the blogs, while Steph lists stamps or writes the posts for the "Stamps Damn It" blog, which is her baby.
  • I usually fill orders from Monday and spend the rest of Tuesday is scanning, while Steph lists modern material. 
  • I usually fill orders from Tuesday and then list what I scanned on Wednesday while Steph scans her material.
  • I usually fill orders from Wednesday and spend Thursday scanning again, while Steph lists her material.
  • On Friday, I fill orders that came in on Thursday and spend the rest of the day listing. 
In this time, there are several things that have fallen by the wayside:

  • Our corporate records are in need of organizing.
  • The minute books have pages that need to be completed.
  • Share certificates need to be issued.
  • Legal agreements need to be properly documented.
  • The Bonanza store is a mess as none of our items are matched to store categories. 
  • We haven't done anything to move Auctiva Commerce and our own website forward.
  • We haven't done anything with Google Adwords.
  • I have a couple of former clients that need bookkeeping help and are willing to pay me for that help. 
  • We haven't got a full grasp of the government programs and incentives available to us when we relocate to New Brunswick.
  • We need to secure the rest of our investor money before our cash reserves run out completely. 
  • We need to acquire a property in New Brunswick and get ready for the move. We have now received word that at least one lender is willing to work with us. 
So with the fact that Steph and I are getting married in just under 3 weeks and all the above, it has become fairly clear that my focus needs to shift away from listing new material and toward dealing with all the above, at least for a while. I have been reluctant to do this because I have noticed that sales tend to suffer unless material is continually listed. However, Steph will continue to list the modern material, so it is not as though nothing will be going up. 

We are now all ready for the wedding now, with the only thing remaining being the rehearsal dinner on the 21st. 

Where we have been the most busy is with the move. We have managed to find one lender who is willing to work with us, and one of my other investors is willing to advance another $50,000, which will be sufficient to cover our down payment on the house. We are still finalizing talks with another investor for an additional $50,000, which should cover our living expenses for the next two years, while we get the rest of our inventory listed. The missing piece to the puzzle is finding a way to secure cost-effective labour, as it is becoming clear that we are going to have a difficult time doing this on our own once we decide to expand beyond Canada and British West Africa. So we have been in discussions with two people at Opportunities New Brunswick, the government agency charged with providing incentives to businesses relocating in New Brunswick. We are waiting to hear back from them as to the next steps and are hopeful that there are incentives available to us. We would expect that there should be, given that we will eventually be creating good jobs for people living there. 

So over the next several weeks we have our work cut out for us. 


3 comments:

  1. Are you essentially buying the NB property with none of your own money? Downpayment of $50K from 'an investor', and the rest via mortgage?

    ReplyDelete
  2. No, not exactly. My company owe me over $100,000 which I advanced to it over the past 5 years. My investor money will be used to pay back that loan that I made to the company, so I will essentially be putting 30% down on the property.

    ReplyDelete
  3. My investors know all about this by the way and are fully supportive of it because they know that reducing our cash demands on the business makes the most sense from the perspective of maximizing our growth.

    ReplyDelete