Alright here comes business update #6. My last update was March 1st…Holy cow where does the time fly???
I seriously thought I had made an update maybe 3 months ago, but for it to be 7 months since my last update…that’s unreal. The speed at which time is flying doesn’t seem to be progressing linearly – it feels exponential. Maybe that’s because time is relative. When we’re young, we have so much of our life ahead of us. If we’re 6 and we theoretically live until 80, we could live 13 more lives up to 6 years old or put another way, we’ve only lived 7.5% of our lives. As we approach our 30’s, we have maybe 2.5x more life that we can live up to 30 or we’ve lived 37.5% of our life already. Everything seems to get shorter and shorter, relatively speaking.
Or it’s an odd phenomenon that everyone is feeling. Time seems too fast, but I guess that’s what our parents have told us all along; life goes by really quick. Also, given the circumstances of 2020, it feels like 10 years of history condensed into 1 heavy year. It’s unreal and it’s no wonder why so many people, accurately or not, are predicting the end times are near.
I digress. Let’s leave this blog update for business.
Yellowstone
The store is almost where I want it. As you can tell from the picture compared to the last update, we removed some items and added some others. I took out the ice cream and ice machine and replaced it with an alkaline machine and a refrigerator where we sell our own bottled alkaline water and reverse osmosis. I also ended up getting rid of our old faucet system replacing it with a used one that a customer had. It was a great addition and made the store so much cleaner looking.
The past months leading up to this update has really been focused on getting all the operations and store set up. When you don’t have a ton of money to throw into a business, you have to do a lot of it with your own hands. I’m happy with how things turned out considering I had to learn multiple businesses (water, keys, phone – discontinued), do all the store build, and design everything from business cards to water bottles. It was a great learning experience and allowed me to use everything that I’ve learned in the past several years.
In mid-June, I hired my first full-time employee, Luis. The store was finally making enough money to outsource 60 hours of work even though it was a stretch. I made the decision because I started noticing that I was becoming the bottle neck for growth at the business. I couldn’t handle all the work myself anymore. Customer service was declining, wait times were extended, and I was starting to feel stressed. It was a scary decision to make considering you’re not sure you’ll be able to consistently afford an employee but I made the plunge anyway and it paid off big time.
Luis is now at the point where he’s able to pretty much run the store. He’s currently able to do about 70% of everything that I’m able to do. Also, he speaks Spanish so customer service I think has picked up. I hired my second part-time employee two weeks ago. Alex works Friday and Saturday so that I can start getting three days to work on my other businesses. It’s a stretch hiring him but I need to make the investment so that I can focus on my other businesses.
Yellowstone Keys Training
Right before hiring Alex, I had the idea to take everything I’ve learned from car keys and making it a paid course. To kick it off, I made training videos for our new hires so that I didn’t have to keep going over basic training for keys. It was also great for me to see everything that I’ve learned put on “paper.” It was surprising to see how much I’ve learned about this industry starting with no knowledge. It’s been about 19 months since I started the store and about 12 months since I started on car keys.
I used the training videos to get familiar with recording and used an existing website to organize all the video content. I made our hallway into an extra room that can be used for more employee seating area and a little recording studio for all my video content.
I finished up the training material a few weeks back and now I’m starting to transition to creating the paid auto locksmith course. With this transition, I’m also planning to start consistently working on Unwage, which I’ll talk about in a bit. I plan to take the income from the locksmith course and invest that into building out Minidesk/Stationgeek.
I feel I’m about 90% done building out the store. I just need to finish the ceiling lights and change the outdoor signs. Once I’ve done that, I feel pretty comfortable saying that the store build out is done. I’m also about 70% of transitioning myself fully out of the store. I’m hopefully planning to partner with Luis. He has a buy in at 50% for 75k. If he does, then he’ll pretty much be in charge of running the entire place. It gives him incentive to get good and manage the store well. I wouldn’t feel comfortable owning the store 100% and him running it by himself. I’ll transition to just doing the marketing for the store. Later on, I plan to expand into mobile by buying a van. That will be our next way to grow our revenue.
I’m at the point where I stay in the back “office” working on other things. Luis knows enough where he can handle 80% of the store operations. I still have to be at the store because of the car keys, but hopefully in another 6 months I’ll be fully out.
The office set up in the back. 
Got the thinking brain on.
The store officially hit 100k in revenue this weekend and we still have about 2.5 months to go for 2020. I. think we’ll land on the 125k mark by end of year. This is a 3x-4x increase from 35k – 40k when I started. Next year, I aim to be at the 200k-300k mark. I think by adding the alkaline machine, focusing on marketing, and adding the mobile van, we should get to that number. Also, we’ve seen an increase in foot traffic and hopefully we’ll be out of the pandemic by then.
Everything that I set out for, I feel the store has been accomplished thankfully. Hopefully that continues.
Unwage
Now that I’m transitioning from working on the store entirely myself, I have time to work on Unwage and other businesses. I took the past two weeks to really figure out my strategy for Unwage. I have a general idea but I don’t have things really locked in yet. However, I’ve gotten a bit more clarity on it and I plan to start writing content for it just to start the engine. I figure I can always adjust as I go along.
Minidesk/StationGeek
I really want to start working on the physical products business focused on remote work. I plan to launch the auto locksmith course and use the proceeds to launch Minidesk/Stationgeek. I haven’t decided on a company name yet. The goal is to be able to start working on it Q2 of 2021. By then, my aim is to be making profit from Yellowstone, Auto locksmith course, and Unwage.
Bitcoin
Bitcoin has been ranging in the 10k region for quite some time. It just recently went past 11k a few days ago. This is on the heels of Michael Saylor, founder of Microstrategy, who invested about $425 Million dollars into Bitcoin with his companies cash reserves and Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square, investing $50 Million of Square’s extra cash. This is a huge endorsement for Bitcoin and I’m sure it getting other companies thinking about what to do with their excess cash. With the governments incessant printing of money, companies are trying to find a better alternative than storing their reserves in USD which is losing its value daily.
My goal was to sell Yellowstone and invest into Bitcoin but it doesn’t seem likely now. I think selling it in this environment would be a waste. The best alternative was selling half of the store to my current employee but the odds of him coming up with the cash seems to be pretty slim. I guess we’ll see what happens.
What’s Next
You’ll probably start seeing me post more about Unwage and my other business ventures. I feel I have a decently stable cash flow with Yellowstone and Usana. I’m now have the time and cash flow work on higher upside businesses. In the next 6 months (April, 2021), my goals are:
- Focus on marketing on Yellowstone to increase profit while doing the finishing touches to the business.
- Launch my auto locksmith course
- Write content for Unwage
- Finish Unwage Academy courses
- Decide on first product for Minidesk/Stationgeek
That’s the major business updates i have for now. I look forward to seeing how they all turn out when I do another business update. Until then, let’s stay focused on what’s ahead!