OK, well, the first business planning meeting occured last night. I handed out four notebooks (one is mine) for everyone to use – it the official company notebooks for ideas, plans, brainstorming, etc. I really wish I had enough startup cash to afford 4 WinCE based machines (particularly, 4 WinCE based cell phones!), but this will have to do for now.
We also decided on the company name – Heabo and Jess came up with something I think is very marketable (I won’t explain all of the hows and whys of it being marketable):
Everything And The Sixpence In Your Shoe
The name is long – something I typically wouldn’t approve of. However, most people won’t remember the full name, they will remember one of two details – the Sixpence, or, Everything and… That’s fine with me. I’m already plotting out how it’s going to work.
Startup overhead is VERY low. We need some new clothes (basically, ministers outfits. I need the normal white tab colar, the ladies need something too) for actually performing the ceremony. I’m going to handle checking with the city on various legal issues starting Tuesday (can’t today – this is the big final programming push on Trajectory today through Monday. After that, I’m freed up considerably to do this) Jess and Heabo will be starting to get some of the paperwork ready, and I’ve got some paperwork to create (Job forms to track our work, etc.)
The per-hour rate for the company is $30 / hour – a paycut for me, but a pay increase for everyone else involved. I’m going to guess that for MOST of it, they will be more busy than I am. However, for some of the weddings themselves, I’ll probably be a bit more busy – some people expect thier minister to be male, and I’m the only guy minister in the group.
Even though startup overhead is very low, we still have to caugh up some cash here and there. Tonight I’ll try and finish my startup costs sheet for each type of service we plan on offering. The basic premise of my job at the moment – I get all the shit work for starting the business and managing it, they get all the real work. Can’t decide if that’s good or bad. And when it comes to managing, well, there’s not much to do – they are self motivated people, all of us, so they will happily go do thier thing, I just gotta watch paperwork and watch for potential problems (since at the moment I’m also self-appointed corporate legal advice for the company, until I can put a lawyer on retainer.)
All and all, I think we’ve got a winner of a situation. Low startup costs, ‘free’ labor (Heabo and Jess are not working at the moment, so, if they don’t have work to do it’s not costing us.), and an interesting market to work with. Our plan is basicly verticle monopoly planning – instead of growing the business horizontaly (IE – instead of growing the business and adding ministers or attacking the market of other ministers, we add services from other related wedding based areas like wedding planning.) It’s still going to take time before Jess, Heabo, and Dave have anything near full-time work (and Heabo CAN’T have full time work, since she’s going back to school), I estimate a minimum of 6 months. However, once that happens, Jess and Dave will pretty much bet set in life – a huge pay increase (without taxes, about $4800 / month in income). Heabo and I also will be doing good between my normal paycheck, and the extra income from the company. Plus, the way I calculate payrates, the company will get a good amount of standing capitol quickly, since I factored in getting a decent profit base from each job after all is paid.
On a seprate note, Midnight Ryder Technologies is becoming profitable – income now outdoes that outlay for tools, web hosting, etc. Not bad. After Trajectory, Jumpman:2049, and Gremlin Panic!, I will probably be able to quit if I can meet my estimates of sales.
Funny part for me – realizing that I now work three jobs now. *SIGH* At lest two of them are working for myself (well, SixPence is a four-way partnership) I’m glad that this time I’ve got three other people working with me – and I think it’s gonna be a great team.