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Busy husband and father...

SethChild

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Hello Seth, Welcome to this forum.

First all congrats that you have the will power to continue with your businesses after five years. It’s easier said than done.

If find your questions a bit interesting because I think that only you and your wife have the answers. Nobody knows your businesses and how they are doing better than you. In theory both businesses can become fast lane. Of course you need to analyze in which one there’s market demand for it. After 5 years you can get some insights based on your sales and profit. Is there a business that is under performing? The fact that you are asking which one to sell might imply that both are not doing well.

¿Does the majority of your income come from your couple businesses?

If you are in a weak financial situation why not sell both pay some debt and try to get a job. IMO a more reliable source of income might good for you in terms of mental tranquility. You need to secure the financial part for your family. You can always start a new business latter.

I f you still want to continue in the entrepreneurial path you should analyze which of your small businesses is the one performing poorly. You might sell that one and invest what you got into the one that’s performing better. Per example you sell the backyard chicken rental and use that to expand your sharpening business. Perhaps trying to sell your own knifes, succors or other products via private labeling. Those are some ideas.

It might be more helpful to you and us to give us a bit more of information to try to help you the best we can. Remember at the end of the day this is only a forum. You are the one that’s going to make the decisions.

Thanks great input. Yes, we're considering all of the above. I went into detail today with regard to the chicken business in other posts on this thread. Jansen Sharpening is definitely a simpler business. However, our net income this year will be $10,000 (last year, $7000), and I don't see a way to grow this significantly locally without opening a store front and hiring people. Even then, a store front sharpening shop that serves an exclusively local market is definitely not fastlane, because it fails the commandment of scale. We could do a mail order service. We currently offer that on our website, but shipping makes it a bit challenging, with slim margins per item. And we haven't had the time or money to market this nationally, and we don't really have a great shop at our residence. We just pull out the sharpening equipment and set it up on the dining room table, sometimes just to sharpen a couple knives. Most of our income with this comes form sharpening onsite at the busiest farmers market in the city every Saturday during spring, summer and fall. The other farmers markets have had very small sales numbers, and aren't worth our while.

We are thinking of my wife accepting a job to do web content navigation for friends of ours who own a thriving web development company and have contracted with her in the past to do content navigation, and then perhaps using this to springboard into a web-based business in the future.

I don't even know if our businesses would be worth much for a few different reasons. I'll bet there's a thread somewhere on this forum that discusses the valuation of small mom and pop type businesses (that's kind of where we're at right now).
 
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SethChild

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@SethChild

Welcome to the FLF, you've arrived at a great place where there are many other parents moving towards the Fastlane as well.

There are a lot of great resources on this forum including the Gold and Notable Threads that are worth checking out.

Going back through the Millionaire Fastlane , I would really recommend absorbing as much of the CENTS philosophy as possible.

Are the current businesses that you are running violating any of those principles?


It seems to me that you two are putting in a lot of work and time into these two businesses and the payoff is not meeting your needs.

How can you turn this situation around to start becoming a WIN for you and your family?

Jansen Sharpening
Control: We're good there
Entry: A little too easy, relatively low equipment costs to start out, and have to have good fine motor skills
Need: It is awesome to use sharp knives and tools; But on the other hand, you can get every type of kitchen knife at the dollar store; I have not been able to find solid numbers on what percentage of the population has their knives and scissors and tools professionally sharpened. Then there's salons and barber shops, which we service as well. They absolutely have to get their stuff sharpened at regular intervals
Time: Trade for time unless you hire and train; human resources systems score low on passivity
Scale: If you can hire more people, and do a great job marketing for mail order and subscription-based you can sharpen more knives; a human resource system would be my last choice; I'm not a great people manager guy

However, my wife is awesome at sharpening, had the idea to start it up, and any suggestion of shutting it down raises her hackles.

I have not yet read the thread by @NateKruse about fastlaning a sharpening business. I haven't (yet) invested in INSIDERS access.
 

NateKruse

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I have not yet read the thread by @NateKruse about fastlaning a sharpening business. I haven't (yet) invested in INSIDERS access.

Time: Trade for time unless you hire and train; human resources systems score low on passivity
Scale: If you can hire more people, and do a great job marketing for mail order and subscription-based you can sharpen more knives; a human resource system would be my last choice; I'm not a great people manager guy

It’s going to end up being a human resource system. My next big goals are to get a physical location then an employee.
 

SethChild

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Last year our net profits were $13,000. This year, it will be $19,000. Rentals represent about 50%, profits from coops and chickens (packages include one year of consultation) will represent about 35%, and hourly and annual consultation subscriptions represented about 15%.
Actually, with updated numbers I saw today, our net is around 30K YTD.
 
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MHP368

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Hello! Great to be here. I was catapulted into this forum by the book Millionaire Fastlane . I am an extremely stretched, but grateful, husband and father of five (all under 12 years old). My wife and I own a sharpening business and a backyard chicken rental business (both businesses are five years old), and my wife earns a rather small hourly wage caring for her grandmother 40 hours per week.

I'm here because I feel passionate about the inadequacy of what we're currently doing. We are poor, lack time to cultivate good relationships with each other and with our children, and we're exhausted. I feel overwhelmed most of the time.

My biggest questions right now, are:
  • Is either, or could both, of our businesses be(come) fastlane businesses?
  • Which business should we sell/get rid of?

That chicken thing is bizarre enough to have traction. Could you package it sort of like a franchise?

Get a book and a video series "how to" and sell access for whatever amount

Pay some marketer to get the ball rolling and voila

I feel like the yuppy crowd on reddit would eat that up , will it make you financially independant? No. Could it make you 5 or 6 figures before the "newness / weirdness" wares off? I think so
 

amp0193

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In other words, his business violates the commandment of time.

So how do you do it better than him? He's given you a great roadmap on what doesn't work. You have a great opportunity to come in and do it different and improve.

Personally I don't have the skills to do this. We could ship coops that are manufactured and shipped from another company.

I don't have the skills to design/engineer my products either. You get people on board who know how to do that. Contract it out. @ZCP think you could flatpack a chicken coop? Or at least get it onto a 48x40 pallet?

Could also ship other companies coops, but the margins won't be as good. Would make the most sense as part of the package deal, so you can make more on the other products in the package.
 

amp0193

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Thanks again for reflecting on this with me. To start, I'd like to mention a few challenges that the business currently has.
- We drive ten minutes each way to get to property where we raise the chickens (we live on 1/3 acre in a blue-collar suburb)
- The property is offered to us free of charge, but the landowner highly values his privacy so we can't have customers or employers come to the property
- Here's the time and money involved in a $450 (plus mileage) rental package
- A coop is/was built for $350 materials, $350 labor = $700
- Two chickens cost me $60 total (not counting the time and feed and equipment that I put into them, plus the time of finding a reliable person from whom to buy chickens [this has been one of our greatest challenges])
- I invest two hours in prepping for a delivery (gathering materials, packing, cleaning and repairing coop)
- I drive 45 minutes to residence
- I give a one-hour startup session, which includes unloading and setting up
- I drive 45 minutes home
- Talk with customer on average fifteen minutes over the phone over the course of the rental
- For about 15% of customers, I arrange with a customer to get to them a replacement chicken due to predator-loss or sickness or not laying well enough
- Six months later, I drive 45 minutes to residence
- Load up coop and visit briefly with customer - 20 minutes
- Drive 45 minutes back to residence, or to the farm, where I unload coop and chickens

Have you thought about charging more? Have you tested it?
 
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SethChild

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Have you thought about charging more? Have you tested it?
We're thinking about slicing rentals from our repertoire because it is seems to restrict us to a local market, and there's not enough locals to rent that would enable us to hire our jobs like repairing cleaning up coops. We've also considered significantly increasing rental prices to make it worth while, for example making them the same price as owning the setup. We've also considered raising prices. Based on conversations with customers, I do think it would reduce the number of rental customers, but perhaps that's what we want. But we could also still consider franchising, but do it in a less labor intensive way than rentthechicken.com.

Since we have two businesses and feel so stretched, and the chicken business has so many facets, we're leaning toward putting more into the sharpening business and slicing out the parts of the chicken business that require the most work, and then only providing the products and services that are less-labor intensive for us, and making a some cash next year off the work that we've done up to this point.

If we decide to inject more time and energy into expanding the chicken business, I'm starting to think that engineering our coops to ship and sell might be the way to go. Not to complain, but the fuzziness and lack of clarity is quite challenging. :)
 

Davejemmolly

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if it was me, I'd try to diversify out of the 'live chicken' business, and concentrate exclusive on a flat pack chicken coop, and driving traffic to your website that shows the best way to look after chickens, what to feed them etc... make it interactive and kid friendly, to pitch it as an education exercise.. kids recipes for eggs etc.

I could be wrong, but I can't seriously imaging people laying their hands on the their own chickens is overly difficult, but the coop and knowledge is the impediment.

Would be much easier to scale as well, as it takes out a lot of the 'one on one' interaction with the consumer.

just my thoughts
 

amp0193

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and slicing out the parts of the chicken business that require the most work

Before you give it the axe, significantly raise the price and see what happens. Whatever price would make you say "If I could do it for X, this would definitely be worth it". And see if anyone pays. If not, well then I guess you're done with it.

Not to complain, but the fuzziness and lack of clarity is quite challenging. :)

It's tough man. No road map for entreprenuership. Dealing with some "fuzziness" myself right now. Trying to navigate the best path forward. Keep at it.
 
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SethChild

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Before you give it the axe, significantly raise the price and see what happens. Whatever price would make you say "If I could do it for X, this would definitely be worth it". And see if anyone pays. If not, well then I guess you're done with it.



It's tough man. No road map for entreprenuership. Dealing with some "fuzziness" myself right now. Trying to navigate the best path forward. Keep at it.
Thank you for the encouragement. If we decide to tread a safer path of doing it very similar to what we've done, I think this is the way to go. Thanks a bunch!
 

SethChild

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if it was me, I'd try to diversify out of the 'live chicken' business, and concentrate exclusive on a flat pack chicken coop, and driving traffic to your website that shows the best way to look after chickens, what to feed them etc... make it interactive and kid friendly, to pitch it as an education exercise.. kids recipes for eggs etc.

I could be wrong, but I can't seriously imaging people laying their hands on the their own chickens is overly difficult, but the coop and knowledge is the impediment.

Would be much easier to scale as well, as it takes out a lot of the 'one on one' interaction with the consumer.

just my thoughts
This really resonates. This is the way I'm leaning right now. My wife and I are talking ongoing about our direction. Thank you so much for taking the time to comment.
 

SethChild

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We have decided to sell theeasychicken.com. Thanks to all of you who commented on this thread almost a year ago now. Also, my wife's grandmother passed away this spring, so we're piecing together income to meet our needs while we grow Jansen Sharpening. @NateKruse how is your sharpening business doing recently?
 
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NateKruse

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We have decided to sell theeasychicken.com. Thanks to all of you who commented on this thread almost a year ago now. Also, my wife's grandmother passed away this spring, so we're piecing together income to meet our needs while we grow Jansen Sharpening. @NateKruse how is your sharpening business doing recently?

I'm sorry to hear about your wife's grandmother.

My knife sharpening business has been completely on hold since I moved to San Diego for my slowlane job in March.

I'm moving into a house next month and plan to get back into the business after that.

How's your sharpening business going?
 

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