Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
If later in life means, more recently... I started my first business during COVID in my late 30s. Doing great!
Do tell, if only in general terms - might just be motivational, or might inspire someone in an adjacent area.
I am fortunate in that I took a very niche applied science in university, and was successful in that career as an employee/consultant -- geophysics. So I have high value, rare technical skills. I blew out my knee in the high arctic doing scientific surveys -- so I decided to try to parley those skills into something where I could be my own boss. Fortunately I also picked up a business partner with a similar background (former coworker) who wanted to run the business side of the business.
During COVID I started an equipment business to provide the required specialty tools to other geophysicists -- things like ground penetrating radar and such. There was exactly one business already operating in this space in Canada, so there was room for a second player. It's a high capital business -- I'm basically taking the capital risk of buying rare equipment and spreading it out across the continent. (People don't want to buy a $50k device to use for a week.) But it was a huge risk -- I have one business partner, and we both wagered out houses on the startup loan. We're past the hump now and our revenue is directly funding growth, so huzzah! (It took six months to get our first client -- but now it's about six hours between clients, without having to do any marketing bullshit.) I have real world hands on experience with all the gear and am not just a sales robot, which keeps everyone coming back for advice, opinions, networking, and we are growing by word of mouth.
My boss is a hardass though. ;)
Buy your boss a tropical island vacation
The side effect of running your own business, but not being large enough to hire a bunch of people yet -- if you take a holiday, the business just stops for that period. We can't do that, so no holidays. On call 24/7 essentially (although more realistically, I average about 60 hours per week.)
There are chicken and egg problems involved in getting that holiday. We need an employee to cover the shop, but the income needs to be high enough to afford their salary (they need to be a technical specialist like me). So I need to get to about an 60-80 hour work week to justify the employee and then find someone with the same super niche skills, and then spend a bunch of time on knowledge transfer. Ideally, they want to buy in so they're becoming part owner, but that makes it even harder to find an employee.
So, hopefully I'll get a vacation within a year or two...
Find customers where you want to vacation
Or do a "staycation". Check in to a local hotel when there's a long weekend.
In any case, hard work will pay off.