Committing to Weekly Reports Again
I’ve decided to publish a weekly report on my business on Sundays, as I had planned originally but then abandoned. The monthly report doesn’t tell the whole story and too much information is falling through the cracks.
The biggest issue has been that my washer and dryer are at their breaking point. It’s understandable considering I’ve put 3 tons of laundry through them. That’s over 600 loads.
The washer bangs back and forth on the spin cycle anytime there is even a moderately heavy load in there. I’m forced to make small loads which is not a big deal until I get sheets or blankets or comforters. In those cases I’m forced to skip the spin cycle. Which causes everything to be much wetter.
The dryer’s heat setting is also broken. It randomly dries at different heat settings. It sometimes takes over an hour to dry a load because it is stuck on the lowest setting. You can imagine when the two problems converge how difficult it makes my job. And that happened a lot this week. I was over an hour late to 2 separate deliveries.
I also had a pink shirt bleed onto dark gray towels and sheets in the dryer. This was the 2nd time something bled in the dryer because of it drying at the highest setting. Needless to say all of these issues are costing me money in the short term and customers in the long term if I can’t smooth things over. I’ve issued multiple refunds and coupons this week.
The obvious solution is to get a new washer and dryer, which is what I’m doing now. The reason I hadn’t yet is that I was expecting to move into a new house at the end of this month. The house we were buying fell through just this Friday. So yeah, that also happened this week.
To top it all off sales dropped this week from the previous couple of weeks. Last week was my best week to date so a slight drop was to be expected sooner or later. Here is a graph of my weekly sales to date:
The confluence of all this at the same time has been somewhat overwhelming. Losing momentum like this hurts. But I also know it is temporary. I just have to keep working hard and I’ll regain momentum.
Falling down is a part of life. Getting back up is living.
A final note on committing and having the discipline to follow through. In the last few years I’ve been really trying to improve myself by building good habits. I have started many habits that didn’t stick. But the need for the important habits keeps coming back and I realize that I need to make those stick. One such habit was keeping track of my money, another my time, another going to the gym.
Writing a weekly report for this business was one that didn’t stick but has come back. What I’ve learned is if a habit is important enough eventually the pain of not doing it becomes greater than the pain of doing it. In this case, not doing a Sunday report meant that my sense of public accountability and the story of this journey were both being lost. Now I’m hoping to regain them.
That’s it for this week’s report. Until next week, ciao.
This story is part of a series documenting the journey of a 2016 Dallas startup called Feather. For your reference here is the Table of Contents for the series.
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