Chaos is the New Normal
Things are moving so fast that I can’t keep up. I’m just knocking out as much work as I can each day based on what is most important. The order of importance goes like this — 1) Customer orders, 2) Opening the store, 3) My daily duties at The Writing Cooperative.
Customer orders by themselves are often overwhelming. Last month (August) I logged 143 transactions. Keep in mind that each transaction is 2 trips, a pick up and a delivery. That’s not including the trips to the laundromat or dry cleaner to have the work done. And in September I’m already over 150 transactions with 2 days to go. Basically, I’m on the road 6–9 hours every day.
In the meantime, my uncle is building out my store on the weekends. He drives down from Oklahoma City to Dallas just to work on my store for 2 days. During the time he’s here, I’m constantly making trips for him to Home Depot. Here are some pictures of the store I took earlier this month.
These pictures are a few weeks old and we’ve made a ton of progress. The store is almost done. The only main project left is the ventilation for the dryers and the hot water heater which we are doing this weekend.
On top of all of this my bank account is plummeting at an alarming rate despite the insane sales. I’ve spent nearly the entire $9k loan I got last month. I have $5k left and I still have to buy the equipment, namely washers and dryers and I have to hire an employee.
This is just the tip of the iceberg because it doesn’t include the minutiae of the day to day things that come up, like a flat tire, or an important phone call with a supplier, or renting a truck to haul off all the construction trash, all of which happened this month. There’s just a lot going on all the time.
It’s a good thing.
When you are moving fast you don’t have time to get emotional about anything. You just have to keep moving. You start to become immune to the chaos. And you become acutely aware of the most urgent and important task at any given moment.
Also, milestones don’t matter anymore. The only thing that matters is cash flow. Is there more money coming in than going out? No? Get some sales. Stop the bleeding. If your cash hits $0 you go out of business.
I used to think I could handle $8k maybe $9k in sales by myself. That’s why I signed a lease so quickly at that point. I needed a store so I could hire people so I could handle more sales. Last month I nearly hit $10k. It’s funny how much more you can get done if you really push yourself. Or maybe I was just vastly underestimating my own capacity.
No matter what I need to get this store open asap. I shouldn’t be doing laundry or making deliveries, I should hire a staff and create a process for these things so that I can spend my time doing sales and marketing.
That’s it for this entry, I gotta go.
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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