Ch-ch-ch-changes

My wife and I own a small business that for eight years has resided at one place, and consisted of a design office and a woodshop, for building custom tradeshow and retail displays. My education is more in the design and CAD end of things, and we bought the company with the woodshop already integrated into it (I worked at the company for 12 years before we bought it).

This last few months we have had to close down the woodshop half of the business, and it has been a painful thing. My wife helped time and organise things so we are getting out without crippling debt, but the simple fact was we had to borrow money to keep it all going. It was, in essence, costing us money to continue operating, and that's not a business, it's a hobby with too much paperwork.

I blame myself, really. I love design, and having the capability to produce just about anything I designed was a big kick. But I didn't really love building things. I ignored that half of the business, and with that neglect, it stopped making money. In the later years, I let control of things slip. In cleaning things up to sell them, I'm finding things that I know I asked to be taken care of years ago, stockpiles of raw materials and redundant tools that cost me money because I had to re-buy them several times. But the most basic thing was that during lean times, the overhead killed us, and the lean times were getting longer and longer. Even before the economy nose-dived, the writing was on the wall.

There may be personal advantages to this. My wife and I could never take a vacation together, because one of us always needed to be at the office. It took seven years for us to arrange a week off (we went to Italy), and other than that we have only had the occasional long weekend (which were frequently interrupted by business matters). Now, we might look forward to having some vacation time again, together.

Now I'm going to focus on just design, which I know I can control, and which has very little overhead. I'll be working out of my house, and a warehouse that I'm using for storing my client's materials. I still have enough tools to do basic things, but I'm going to be focused pretty tightly on design, illustration, product development (my degree is Industrial Design), and tradeshow consulting and services. I am hopeful, looking forward. My wife is behind me the whole way, and that's the most important thing. Now the company is much smaller, and my wife will likely have to find a job outside, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. One down side to us both working at the same place was that if money was tight it was tight on both our paychecks. A little financial diversity may help, especialy since a freelancer's income is notably unstable.

I am hopeful, but it is still a painful process, deconstructing eight years of my life. I'm just glad my business partner is still with me.