I have a very good neighbor with a holiday home just across the meadow. We share an interest in amateur woodworking. He has a small company in the north of England, producing custom stock from stainless steel strip. Until last summer he had begun to wind down for retirement, leaving his company to coast for weeks on end while he lolled about here with his wife sampling la dolce vita. He had taken his eye off the ball.
Disaster struck. First the local 'jobsworths' at the Council Offices revoked the [admittedly verbal] planning permit for his new workshop. Then, it turned out his top employee, left in charge, had started up in competition, and had been operating his own company on the QT for a year while still drawing a good salary. He 'borrowed' my friend's best customer, used his spare's store to build the required machines - and was suspected of using the firm's transport as well. Then we got the recession. My friend has many years experience of booms and busts, and came out in round four punching above his weight. He shut the workshop, [ 4 guys sadly lost their jobs] and went back to where he started 25 years ago, in the garden shed. Using his many contacts and experience he managed to survive, working 25 hours a day, even sub-contracting work out so all he touched was the invoices! The ex-employee is really struggling in a near depression with one customer, for while he's a really skilled machinist, he's inexperienced in business.
Point is, successful business is not just techniques and good manual skills, it's luck, good contacts, downright cunning, forethought, strategys for 'what-ifs', the determination to work your socks off and then some. As eny fule no, it's easy to make money in a boom.
When you work 9-5, that's all you do. When you work for yourself, you not only make the product, you market it, you handle the complaints, the work wear, the soft soaping of the customers, do the quotations, run the front office, get the finance, fight off the IRS, run the transport, make the coffee, organise the tool inventory, keep the stock, run the overdraft, chase the bad payers.... all of which usually add up to 16 hours a day and weekends.
Starting up now in the present economic climate would be hard. Some ECs will go bust, yes, but the tough nuts will stick in there 'till judgement day, using all their experience and life skills to survive. Wresting work off them will be a real challenge!
Yesterday my friend emailed that he was in a position to move back to proper premises as business had picked up, and they were hoping to snatch a weekend soon in the Bocage. We'll have a rib of beef and a few bottles of 'Old Speckled Hen' ready!
Alan
