25% of Our Revenue Just Went Poof!
I’m going to just dump what’s in my head into this post because there’s just so much. I need to vent.
Let’s begin with the pressure. There is an intense amount of pressure on me right now because of one task, and that task is to make sure the bank account does not hit zero no matter what. And since right now it is so close to zero it is eating up a lot of my time because i have to think ahead for the next few days and make sure there’s enough in there to cover everything. And that includes payroll which is about a third of my total expenses. The reason the situation became so dire so quick is because I lost 3 of my best customers over a 2 week span. All 3 were corporate customers and all 3 took their laundry operation in-house to save money. One of those customers alone accounted for about 20% of my total revenue. So these last 2 weeks have been the hardest for me since the start of the business. I hit a low point where I just wanted to quit and go get a job somewhere making $80k and not having all this stress. Of course, I’m not quitting.
But it’s like I’ve gone back in time 6 months to the problems I had last summer. One problem is that i have to keep the store open during the posted business hours and I just can’t pay people to stand around and do nothing, so I’ve been cutting everyone’s shifts. Instead of 2 people for every shift I’ve cut many of the shifts down to just one person. I guess I should take solace in the fact that i have had enough business to keep at least one person at the store during business hours.
Next on my mind is that i need to have a stern conversation with my newest employee because it seems when I’m not there she is spending most of her time at work on the phone. I don’t like that she’s abusing her phone privileges and so I’m going to put the kibosh on that quick-like. That should instantly turn her into a much better employee.
Then there’s the big picture. The next milestone is buying the delivery van. The plan has been to buy it in March, but now that February is so abysmal I don’t know if i can afford it. I think the van will pay for itself once i put the graphics on it. It will be like a moving billboard. But I was planning to have the initial down payment and graphics costs in the bank by mid-March. That doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. My car could go down at any moment. It’s got 142k miles on it and I’m still driving the hell out of it. The van is essential even if it means going into more debt.
The business itself has no debt. To keep the business debt free I’ve been taking on the debt personally and then investing those loans into the business. This basically means all of that interest is coming out of my pocket. But I think it’s worth it to keep the business debt free.
The last 6 months were an anomaly. That one customer grew my business by more than 20% and forced me to hire quickly. Now they’re gone, and the business is normalized and I’m over-staffed. The silver lining is that I got a glimpse of how my business will work at that high volume.
On top of all this I’m dealing with a dispute with the landlady about the water bill. I’m in a bad deal where the other tenants in the building pay me a fixed amount for the water and I pay the difference on the bill. Sometimes the bill skyrockets because another tenant has a leak or something. This happened again this month which is the 3rd time it has happened since I took over the water bill. I’ve been trying to get the landlady to install individual water meters on each business in the strip mall so that everyone pays for what they use, but the plumbers she tries to hire are horrible. She’s in Los Angeles, the building is here in Dallas! So basically I have to do the work of finding someone, which I haven’t had time for. But now I’m forced because the money I’m losing paying for other people’s water is off the charts.
Hmm… Did i mention that one of my dryers is down? I have 5 dryers and they are the bottle neck when we are busy so we are only operating at 80% capacity right now. I’m sorry to complain about all this. I need to get these thoughts out onto virtual paper and it’s better to post them in the blog so there is a record of what’s going on.
But I think that’s enough venting for tonight. I actually do feel more focused on what needs to be done: Marketing. Advertising. Sales. Customer Acquisition.
This story is part of a series documenting the journey of a Dallas startup called Feather Laundry. For your reference here is the Table of Contents for the series.
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