Freedom is Just Another Word For Being Your Own Boss
Give What You Love A Chance To Give You What You Need
If you’re not averse to a little risk, your passion could be the key to your future(s).
“If you’re wondering when it’s time to change tracks, it’s probably now.”
Preface
It is true what they say: Your worst day being self-employed is better than your best day working for someone else. Whether you are unemployed or just hate your job, keep reading because I’m going to tell you how my wife and I reinvented ourselves three times. The first time was a side hustle that became a twenty-year retail business. The second time we built a successful service-based business with only a $27 newspaper ad and retired just eight years later. The third time our love of vintage vinyl records gave us a home-based retirement gig.
Background
I enlisted in the Army on a whim in 1971 right out of high school and much to my parents and fiancé’s dismay. In their defense, I should probably have done more than leave a note on the kitchen table. Some of my friends had been drafted and the scuttlebutt was that enlistees were treated much better in basic training than draftees, so faced with that and what I believed was an inevitability, I made the command decision to enlist. After a year and a half in West Germany as a reconnaissance specialist and M551 Sheridan tank gunner, I reenlisted to become a computer programmer. After completing my studies at the Adjutant General School I was stationed at Ft Huachuca AZ. working for the DOD until I was discharged 3 years later.
I got a call sometime in the summer of 1979 after 3 years working in New England to interview at my old team in the DOD as a GS11 programmer and started right away. However, The job entailed a five-year stint in Heidelburg Germany before returning to Ft Huachuca. It was a GREAT five years, but that story is for another time. We returned to Ft Huachuca from Heidelburg in 1985.
A side hustle gets out of hand
An opportunity presented itself two years later that would eventually lure me away from the security that my GS-12, step 9 position guaranteed. I was an avid golfer and my dad (a lifetime PGA member) and I had curated a large classic and antique golf club collection. I was always buying bags of clubs at yard sales and flea markets that had a collectible wedge, putter, or driver in it that I wanted to add to the collection. We added 600 sqft to our house to display the collection and store all of the extraneous sets of clubs I had to acquire while in pursuit of the real collectibles. They were all fine playable clubs for the most part, just not collectible.
I started a little side hustle by putting an ad in the local paper that just said “Used Golf Clubs For Sale” and a phone number. Once a week or so I’d get a call from a prospective buyer who would come by to see whether I had anything they wanted. One day I got a letter from the president of our homeowners association stating that selling anything out of our home was a violation of the HOA bylaws. Coincidently, this HOA president was also the president of the only Country Club and golf pro shop within 70 miles.
So now I had to find another outlet for dozens of golf club sets, odd clubs, and bags. As luck would have it, there was a small strip mall 1/2 mile away with a 600 sq ft space available for rent at $250 a month. I took it, established wholesale accounts with Golfsmith, McGregor Golf, H&B Golf, Dexter Golf Shoes, and J&M Golf Supply, and opened a nice, albeit small golf shop with a 100 sqft repair area for re-gripping clubs.
I hired a very nice retired gentleman named Dave who loved golf to run it during the week for a percentage of our net sales. Two years later he was the salaried manager of our new 1,200 sqft downtown Main Street location. Oh, and the pro shop at our country club had dropped all their golf club sales, and the club president had moved on (Be careful what you ask for). My wife and I enjoyed our membership there very much, although putting on those tiff greens was like putting on glass.
A year later, in 1989, I quit my civil service job to follow my bliss. We relocated the golf operation to a 1500 sqft store on Hwy 441 in central Florida, where one wants to be if one is serious about succeeding in the golf business. Four years later, with some trepidation, we moved 4 miles down the road to a 6,300 sqft location across from the mall where we spent the next fifteen years.
If you love what you do, aren’t afraid to take a risk, and are patient enough to expand only on demand, you can absolutely make something out of nearly nothing in America.
Call The Man
Early in 2008, my wife and I were both pretty burned out in our careers. Jo was a real estate broker in Florida and Georgia at a time when the housing market was in turmoil due to the bank lending scandal, and I had the golf business which had just weathered four years of a six-lane road widening project. It seemed like the right time to make a change while we could still do it on our terms. We had a vacation home (the cabin) 500 miles north in the Blue Ridge Mountains that we had visited nearly every other month for the previous three years. Our stays at the cabin grew longer each time we went until finally, we decided to live there full time.
Once that decision was made we had to either sell or close our respective businesses, liquidate everything of value, and buy vehicles compatible with 4 seasons living in the mountains. When that was finally done, we hit the road one last time for the nine-hour drive to the cabin. One of the most joyous days of our lives. We didn’t have much of a plan for the future. We only knew where we wanted it to be.
I think at first I thought we had retired because for several months we spent our time shopping, gardening, shopping, decorating, shopping, weatherizing, shopping, golfing, shopping, entertaining, shopping, relaxing on the back porch gazing at the view, and of course, shopping. As much fun as that sounds it wasn’t sustainable. I saw the writing on the proverbial wall saying “You’re bleeding out buckō, go back to work”.
So, there it was, reality was showing its pointy little head. What should we do? What could we do? I romanticized about another store but knew for sure I didn’t want the hassles of an inventory-based business ever again, and neither of us wanted the stress of paying rent, utilities, wages, taxes, and overhead. So we had to go solo, maybe a service-related business. But what can we do? My wife is brilliant and I’m a thoughtful bloke so after some consideration we decided on an unlikely and relatively low investment path forward. We were going to be a husband & wife handyman team.
However, handymaning isn’t instinctual, so before hanging out our shingle, there was some basic learnin’ to be got. I took a job at our local Ace Hardware where for the next six months I received a crash course in practically everything one had to know before embarking on such a multifarious career as handyman. Looking back, I still didn’t have a freaking clue what we were getting ourselves into. Good thing too, or I probably wouldn’t have attempted it. Ignorance is bliss, until it isn’t.
I put a $27 ad in our local paper claiming all sorts of researched, but yet untested skills. And I’ll be damned if the calls didn’t start coming in! Thanks to the internet, common sense, and lots of luck the “Call The Man” husband and wife handyman team got through those early months replacing water heaters, toilets, faucets, and some light electrical and plumbing jobs without any serious mishaps. The jobs were usually short in duration but plentiful enough to pay our bills so that our dwindling savings were spared while we were learning OJT. Let me be clear though, we paid our dues with lots of tedious and backbreaking jobs. We weed-whacked rocky and hilly yards (fields actually) for hours upon hours at $10hr and cleaned filthy cabins for rental companies where, after cleaning supplies, we made only about $3.50hr.
After we learned the ropes I changed our business name to Magee Service Group, created a website, subscribed to Angies List and Houzz, put the website link on every online guide I could find when I searched for handyman services, and put all our customer testimonials and work photos on the website with photos so prospective customers could get a warm fuzzy feeling before calling us.
Then a few months later came our big break, a call not unlike the others but an opportunity we hadn’t even considered before. A couple from Florida needed someone to remodel their brand-new vacation log cabin’s unfinished basement. It was 1,200 sqft of nothing but cement floors, poured walls, one outlet, four light bulbs, and a badly stubbed-out tub and toilet. They wanted a bath with large a tile-in shower, a bedroom, a storage closet, and a huge family room, all clad in tongue and groove pine, including the ceiling. The circumstances were perfect for us newbies who hadn’t done wall framing, wet tile work, or electrical and plumbing to this degree. The owners wouldn’t be living there and they wanted to pay us in three large installments that would cover both our labor and materials. We talked with them for a couple of hours. Then we went home to prepare an estimate. That was a wake-up call. So many details and materials to figure into it. The logistics alone were mind-boggling! One missed or incorrectly performed step and the budget and timeline would be worthless. Two things my Pappy used to say came in handy. First, “You can’t make a living on a large volume of small losses” and second, “What’s the worst thing you can do here?”. So I didn’t leave anything off my estimate. I accounted for every nail, screw, and shim as well as potentials like delivery charges, dumpster, and licensed subcontractors if needed. I found an estimating app for my iPhone and laptop so my estimate was extremely detailed and professional looking. My wife and I were billing at only $20 per hour at that time and our estimate really impressed them so we got the job, but not for the reasons I just gave. They said that we were going to be their first choice unless we totally blew the estimate. They said that their initial impression of those who came before us was dismal. We looked them in the eye, spoke in complete sentences, showed up on time, and didn’t do, say, or give any impression that we were padding our costs in any way. They had confidence in us even though our experience was lacking for a project of their scope. We were over budget some in the end but that’s because they changed the scope with the addition of the outside deck and a hot tub. We hired a plumber to bust up the cement floor and reroute the rigid pipe and an electrician to wire the hot tub but except for that, we did all of the plumbing, electrical, tile, and carpentry ourselves. We emailed the owners photos every day of what we had accomplished. Their basement came out beautiful and we never looked back.
Our Angies list and Houzz references flourished and we won Houzz awards every year and posted them on our website. I also added “Kitchen’s, Baths & Basements” prominently on the website with photos of our work. Our newspaper ad was top left now in the classifieds due to its consistency. We were targeting the vacation home market exclusively and got jobs from our own marketing plus referrals from the HVAC, plumbing, and electrical contractors we had hired along the way.
I bid for jobs on a cost-plus basis (materials + labor) even after we had a team working for us. I justified it by explaining that when you bid by the job instead of by the hour you have to pad the bid with every eventuality so even if everything went according to plan the customer overpaid.
Our “Truth in bidding” policy page below explains the importance of trust between customer and contractor and that “It Is What It Is” meaning that it takes as long as it takes to do the job right. If the contractor provides a detailed estimate, a daily summary of work, and progress photos there shouldn’t be any distrust issues. Contractors that get paid by the job usually have just one incentive which is to get to their next job as fast as they can. Their bottom line depends on it. Our incentive was only to do a great job and create a loyal and satisfied customer base. We did that in spades. We routinely had clients that waited over a year for us. We couldn’t give accurate start dates because our current job was our focus and the scope of work expanded on most jobs. Prospective customers could appreciate that and knew they could count on those same priorities when we got to their project.
We did twenty-five kitchens, baths, and basements and retired at 62.
After sitting on our asses for four years we got a call from one of our old HVAC contractors saying he had just bid on a job at a big vacation cabin and wanted to know if we would come out of retirement because he had recommended us for a basement renovation his customers had talked to him about. I told him to set up a meet and greet and we would decide after talking with the homeowners. Very soon after that, we got a call to meet the homeowners at their cabin. It was a massive three-story log cabin with a blank slate 1,200 sqft basement like the first basement we ever did except this one wasn’t stubbed out at all for a bathroom. The new owners were great folks and gave us almost carte blanche to design and build a rustic storage room, bedroom, full bath, custom quad bunk bed area, and a great room with a wet bar with a tin ceiling throughout. Our website was no longer online for them to see our work. We told them we hadn’t worked for the last four years, that we had sold our work van along with most of our tools, and my white hair was hanging well below my shoulders. I would not have hired us, but they did. The HVAC contractor’s referral and our honesty were enough for them. Four months later we left them a house that they sold a year later for a $250,000 profit and they called us to credit our work for making that possible.
I hope our story gives just one person the confidence and incentive to take a chance on a new self-employed career. The principles that helped make us successful will work for almost any new venture and assist almost any current enterprise. Entrepreneurial-ship is scary for many people but when you do it right, it’s easy to stand apart from the competition.
Without a doubt, the most important things that contributed to our success were listening, honesty, promptness, and communication.
On a personal level don’t be afraid to fail, go all in, and remember, your job is to make the client's vision a reality, so leave your pride behind you. The customer (and your wife) is always right.
Vintage Vinyl
Our final chapter
Collecting is as addictive as any drug, but hopefully far less destructive, and probably second only to hoarding on the OCD meter.
My wife and I shared a passion for collecting vintage vinyl records. We became vintage record dealers as a way to expand and enhance our collection without going broke. We would buy personal record collections just to get our hands on a few records that were on our want list, but it turned out to be a very enjoyable and lucrative business venture that lasted well into retirement and only ended because of COVID-19 which made it impossible to restock.
We attempted to sell at record shows but it was a lot of heavy lifting and the travel expenses cut deeply into our profits. I was a software engineer back in the day so I initially built an e-commerce website for online sales but competing with eBay was futile so I decided that eBay was the best venue for selling online.
There is a lot to learn before entering into a business like this. For example, collectors want first pressings so being able to discern a first pressing from a repress or reissue is critical so you don’t buy something you’ll take a loss on or worst case can’t resell at all. The record grading process is another aspect of sales that is too often either abused or not taken seriously enough. Every record you sell that isn’t as described is going to be returned and your reputation suffers along with your bottom line because sellers eat the return shipping costs.
Avid record collectors are extremely picky and they need a warm fuzzy feeling that they are dealing with honorable sellers who know as much or more about the products they’re buying than they do. Success on sites like eBay is made and lost by your feedback score, photos, and descriptions. We were very good at it because as collectors, we understood what buyers wanted and because we never embellished or cut corners.
There is a certain satisfaction in the cleaning and grading processes as well as selling itself but the real thrill is the hunt and the rush you get when you find that first pressing of a rare highly sought-after gem in great condition.
Our record-collecting interests fell into 4 categories of which the contents often overlapped:
- First pressings of Rolling Stone Magazine’s top 500 albums of all time.
- First pressings of renowned artist’s debut albums due to their reletive rarity and significance. There were, generally speaking, fewer copies pressed of the artist’s debut album. If the debut record sold well, the record label would repress and eventually reissue more records to meet the demand.
Examples of debut great albums:
3. Banned and recalled record covers due to their rarity as there were usually only a small number released before they were recalled and re-released with new cover art.
Examples of banned or recalled covers:
4. Records sought for their value.
Examples of highly collected albums:
A great source of knowledge for record collectors is Discogs.com. It is arguably the most comprehensive online source of information on recording artists and nearly every version of every record ever pressed.
Record collecting is engaging and rewarding on several levels. I won’t go so far as to say it’s a good investment. That depends on your initial investment and the market going forward although it has been very strong for a long time now and sales of turntables and records increase year after year.
Many people today have never heard the unique sound produced by vinyl or even thought of music as being a tangible product, to be held, cleaned, played, and cared for. The process stimulates a whole new appreciation.
We reduced our collection by almost half a while ago, culling all but the rarest, most collectible, most valuable, and personal favorites. It was difficult but now that it’s been a while and we’re, oh hell, who am I kidding, we still wish we had them all.
So go for it, you’ll love it!
Caught In Lockdown With My Pants Down
I flew through life by the seat of my pants, and I mean flew, wore the ass off my britches a couple of times, that is, until COVID-19 and the lockdown in 2020 stopped us all in our tracks.
Jo and I had retired from Magee Service Group in 2015 except for a 4 month basement remodel late in 2019 and were selling vintage vinyl records on eBay, which was a full-time affair with all of the travel, product preparation, listing, and shipping. All of a sudden, hamstrung by the lockdown in March of 2020, I was unable to travel to buy record collections or even sell what I had in stock because people were understandably worried about surface germs.
So we were caught with an eBay inventory of nearly 1500 pricey albums. Now, when you buy record collections, most of what you have to buy to get the good stuff can’t be sold on eBay due to its condition or commonness and some can’t be sold at all. I only listed albums on eBay that were sought after and would stand out above the competition. So I needed another sales venue for the majority of our inventory. When lockdown hit we had around 2500 records in the local antique mall that were in pretty good condition but unworthy of our time on eBay. They did well enough over time that they paid for all of the albums we had ever purchased plus our private collection. It pays to have diversified sales venues.
I didn’t jump right back into eBay after the COVID lockdown ended. Our lockdown lasted for nearly 3 1/2 years. (Another story for another time) We moved 4 times between 2021 and 2023 looking for a forever home. (Found it btw) In 2021 I gifted my record room at the antique mall to a kind lady who had been keeping it up while we couldn’t. The 1500 eBay albums and our private collection moved with us each time.
Once settled in our forever home I made some inquiries and sold all of the eBay inventory and a good portion of our personal collection to a record store owner in New England a few hours away from us. Yes, I sold them at wholesale, but remember, they had already been paid for many times over by our lesser albums at the antique mall, so it was pure profit. I sold all my CDs and extraneous music gear to a local record store just to be done with it all, pulled up my britches, and moved on.
So, the moral is not to set aside what you love for what you think you need, rather, give what you love a chance to give you what you need.
© November 20, 2024 RidgeMagee
