Expansion Part II
So, after mentioning the idea of expanion, the next night Lance says basically “Hey, I wanna quit what I’m doing and come work with you.” I was caught off guard by this – I’ve always had a plan in mind for eventually getting Lance involved (if he wanted too) at both a worker and eventually management level (and ownership level). But I didn’t expect a question like that to pop up. Â
Well, Meredith was the “Link” there – she saw the blog, and mentioned it to Lance, and well, it came back to me. Working with Lance again would be great – he’s a great worker, motivated and intelligent. But he completely lacks any sort of ego, which is sort of weird and hard to explain. Â
So, I pulled up the sims I had worked on, plugged in what he makes now, and produced some answers. Had lunch with him and Meredith today, and chatted about it. Â
There’s always 3 answers to income in a situation like this: What you NEED to make, what you WANT to make, and what you CAN make. I know what he makes now, so I needed to have question #2 & #3 answered. Got that, so now I plug all that into my calculations for what the bill out rate is, payout rate, etc., etc., etc. Â
Not bad really, either – to be fully supported at his Need To Make rate, he’s only got to work 27 hours a week. If he can do 40 hours a week and manage to maintain that level of work, it’s a nice pay raise from what he’s making now (which is nothing to sneeze at), along with making a profit for the company too.
Adding a partner to the company changes the game considerably – in ways I knew was gonna happen away. In a sole proprietorship, the reality is what you have is what the company has, and vis-a-versa. In a partnership, then you have to start dinkin’ with profit levels – what goes in your pocket -vs- what stays in the company. Profit becomes a very different value in that case. And my sims adjust for that.
Now the next goal – plan the marketing for picking up the clients I need for him to do this full time quickly. That’s my next big project for the company.
Working as a team again is going to be great. It works well at multiple levels – doing the jobs by yourself sucks to start with, but from a business stability standpoint it works extremely well.
A Day Off…
After meeting with Meredith and Lance, I hung around with Brandon for… hell, like most of the rest of the work day, and some after that. Next week I’ll get my YMCA membership, and start the whole training thing with him. Prepaire for pain. Ug!
After that, ran off to see Pirates of the Carabean 3 with Meredith and Lance. Unlike Spiderman 3, Pirates 3 didn’t suck. Pretty solid movie, though I thought 2 was better (Meredith looked at me like I was crazy when I told her that. 2 was better because it had more of what makes a pirate adventure movie great – a damned good fight scene.)
I know I mentioned Spiderman 3 sucking before, but I will say there was one damned funny line in it worth repeating anytime I should be so unfortunate as too see it again: Flint Marko is the name of Sandman. In one scene, Spiderman is pissed, and says “Marko!” And Meredith, without missing a beat, says “Polo!” fairly loudly. That was the fucking highlight of Spiderman 3 – and if what the crowd contributes to a movie is the highlight, the movie sucks REALLLLLLLY bad.
Tomorrow though, it’s back to the grind. I’ve still got a buttload of shit to get done projects wise.
Working Out
As I’ve mentioned a billion times, I’m going to be doing the Navy Seal Training program. Looks like I start next week with Brandon in the evenings. I am so god damned hyped about doing this it’s not even funny. Yes, I know this is gonna hurt like a bitch for the first couple of weeks, but I know what I want to look like, and this is a damned good way to do it. Actually, when I studied what you end up doing, it’s also a pretty fast way to do it. Â
One huge advantage to doing the Navy Seals program – because it doesn’t require anything specalized, even if I’m on the road I can continue to do it. I only need a hotel with pool (easy to come by) and a spot to run. It’s running, pushups, setups, pull ups, and swiming.
The part that’s going to hurt the most is going to be the swimming – I LOVE to swim, but I’ve never been a strong swimmer. But it does some serious shit to your body – you use everything at once. When you start, it’s 15 minutes of non-stop swimming. I can do that. When you’re done with the program, it’s 75 minutes of swimming a day, 5 days a week. OUCH. That will be nice though – I’ll finally feel like I’m a good swimmer at that point (if you can swim for 75 minutes, you’ve well exceeded the endurance nessiary to survive just about anything that can happen to you in water 🙂
I’ve been dragging my feet a bit on getting started on this partially because I wanted to have the cameras here. Why? Well, I want to document this. I want to do the podcast anyway, so you can see the changes in my face that way as a bonus, but what I want to do is set a mark for the camera, and just shoot about two pictures without my shirt on to slowly see the changes. That way, if I get to week 6 and am feelin’ like I’m not getting anywhere on things, I can just look back at week 1, 2, 3, etc. to see how things have changed. Good theory, as long as things do change (which, I have zero belief they won’t – even if I just swam 15 minutes 3 days a week, things would change. This is a little more radical than that 😉
Speaking of Cameras
All my equipment is here. Filters, tripods, mikes, etc. EXCEPT THE FRIGGIN’ CAMERAS! ARGH! Gonna call tomorrow and find out where my cameras are – it’s killin’ me. SOooooo close to being ready!
Projects
While I’m Damned Good at most things, that doesn’t mean I’m always right. Sometimes I just plain fuck up – it happens. This week I managed to have a fuck up. I got a huge bulk of info a simulation project, and away I went with it. Had problems with one of the software packages in my toolchain, so I used and Excel sheet he provided to build up the database. Talk to him mid week, and we both realized something didn’t sound right. A quick meeting later and… well, he didn’t lable one of the tabs as “OLD”, and somehow randomly I managed to pick THAT one to work from. *SIGH* Nice, ‘specially since this is a project due on the 18th! Â
Sometimes, things just don’t go right 🙂
Best Fucking Commercial For 2007
Seriously – this has to be the best damned commercial I’ve seen this year. I’ve watchted it multiple times now 🙂