~ Reinvent yourself with a $27.00 ad in the classifieds ~
If you’re wondering if it’s time to change tracks, it probably is
It is true what they say: Your worst day self employed is better than your best day working for someone else. Whether you are unemployed or you just hate your job, keep reading. I’m going to tell you how my wife and I reinvented ourselves twice. The first time was a side hustle we started which became a twenty year retail business. The second time we built a successful business with only a $27 newspaper ad and retired just eight years later.
I joined the Army on a whim right out of high school much to my fiancé’s and parents dismay. I probably shouldn’t have just left a note on the kitchen table. My friends were being drafted and I had heard from multiple sources that enlistees were treated much better in basic training than draftees were. I chose combat arms (recon) because my recruiter promised me I’d be stationed in Germany and I thought it would be pretty cool if my soon to be wife and I could experience Europe on Uncle Sam’s dime. After we were settled-in over there and some time had passed we re-evaluated our future in combat arms and I reenlisted for a job as a computer programer to ensure a safer environment. The Army sent me to the Adjutant General School and then to Arizona where I worked for the Dept. of Defense in the Army Communications Command. After six years in the military and my reenlistment approaching the Department of Defense offered me a civilian position doing my exact same job but for a lot more money. We took it after very little thought.
It was 16 years later and I was GS-12, step 9 software engineer at the DOD when my next opportunity presented itself. I was an avid golfer and my dad (PGA life member) and I had curated a large classic and antique golf club/memorabilia 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 even put an addition on our house to display the collection and another addition to store all of the extraneous sets of clubs I had to acquire in pursuit of the collectibles. They were all fine 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 and a prospective buyer 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 our home was a violation of the HOA bylaws. Coincidently, this HOA president was also the president of the country club where we were members which operated the only golf pro-shop within 70 miles.
Well, now I had to find another outlet for dozens of golf sets, odd clubs and bags. It just happened that 1/2 mile away there was a small strip mall 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 real nice albeit small golf shop with a 100 sqft repair area for mostly re-gripping clubs.
I hired a very nice retired gentleman named Dave who loved golf to run it five days a week for a percentage of our net sales. Two years later he was still with me as the salaried manager of our new 1,200 sqft store downtown on the main street. Oh, and the pro shop at our golf course dropped their golf club sales and the old 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.
After another year I quit my civil service job and we relocated the golf operation to central Florida which is where you want to be if you’re serious about succeeding in the golf business. Four years later we moved down the road and across the street from the mall to a 6,300 sqft location where we spent the next fifteen years. If you’re patient, expand on demand and love what you do you can absolutely make something out of nothing in America.
Then, in early 2008 my wife and I were both pretty burned out in our current careers. She was a real estate broker in a market that was in turmoil due to the bank lending scandal and I had the golf store which had just weathered four years of a six lane road widening project. It seemed like the right time to make a change while it could still be done on our terms. We had a second home (cabin) in the Appalachian mountains that we had visited nearly every month for the last three years. The stays at the cabin got longer each time we went and we finally decided that we’d rather live there than just visit.
Once the decision had been made we had to sell/close our respective businesses, liquidate everything of value and buy vehicles compatible with 4 season living in the mountains. That finally done, we hit the road one last time for the nine hour drive to the cabin. We didn’t have much of a plan for our future. We just 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 couldn’t be maintained forever and I could see the writing on the proverbial wall that said “you’re getting poorer by the minute”.
So, there it was, reality was showing its pointy little head. What should we do? I loved the idea of 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 and overhead. So it had to be a service related business. But what can we do? My wife is a brilliant lady and I’m a thoughtful bloke so after some consideration we decided on an unlikely but almost investment free path forward. We were going to be a husband & wife handyman team.
But first there was some basic learnin’ to be got so I went to work at our local Hardware store for six months where 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 was bliss, until it wasn’t.
I put a $27 ad in our local paper containing claims of all sorts of researched but yet untested skills. 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, faucet repairs/replacements and other light electrical and plumbing jobs without a serious mishap. The jobs were short in duration but plentiful enough to pay our bills so our dwindling savings were spared and we were learning on the job. Let me be clear though, we paid our dues with a lot 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 buying cleaning supplies we made only $3.50hr.
I changed our business name to something more credible sounding and created a website, subscribed to Angies List and Houzz, put the website on YellowPages.com and every other online guide I could find when I searched for handyman services and I put all our past customer’s testimonials on the website so prospective customers could get a warm fuzzy feeling before calling us.
Then a few months later it happened. We got a call not unlike the others but it was an opportunity we hadn’t even considered. A couple from Florida needed someone to remodel their brand new log cabin vacation home’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 a tile-in shower, a bedroom, storage closet and huge family room, all clad in tongue and groove pine including the ceiling. The circumstances were perfect. The owners wouldn’t be there and they wanted to pay us in three installments. We talked with them for a couple hours. Then we went home to prepare an estimate. That was a wakeup call too. 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 is “You can’t make a living on a large volume of small losses” and second is “What’s the worst thing you can do here?”. So I didn’t leave anything off my estimate. I accounted for every nail, screw, shim as well as potentials like delivery charges, dumpster and sub contractors if needed. I found materials estimating software for my iPhone specific to home construction and time and cost estimating software for the laptop so my estimate was extremely detailed and professional looking. My wife and I were billed as a team for only $20 per hour at that time so there’s that and our estimate really impressed them so we got the job but not for the reasons I just gave. They said that we were their first choice unless we totally high-balled the estimate. They said that their initial impression of those that 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 the impression with our estimate 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 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 the plumbing, electrical, tile and carpentry ourselves. We also emailed the owners photos each day of the work we had accomplished. The basement came out beautiful and we never looked back.
Our Angies list and Houzz references flourished and we won Houzz awards every year to post on our website. I also added “Kitchen’s, Baths & Basements” prominently on the website with photos of our work. Our newspaper add was constant and top left now in the classifieds. We were now targeting the vacation home market exclusively and got jobs from all our own marketing plus referrals from the HVAC, plumbing and electrical contractors we had hired along the way.
I bid jobs on a cost-plus basis (by the hour plus materials) 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 paid a higher price to account for every eventuality, even if none occurred.
Our “Truth in bidding” policy page below explained 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 the 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 counted on those same priorities when we got to their project.
We did twenty six kitchens, baths and basements over the next three years at only $50hr and retired at age 62.
Four years later we got a call from one of our old HVAC contractors saying he had just bid a job at a big cabin and wanted to know if we would come out of retirement before he recommended us for the basement renovation his customers had talked to him about. I told him to go ahead and we would decide after talking with the homeowners. Very soon after that we got a call for a meet & greet at the cabin. It was a massive three story cabin with a blank slate 1,200 sqft basement like the first basement we ever did except this one wasn’t even stubbed out for a bathroom. The new owners were great folks and gave us almost cart blanche to design and build a rustic storage closet, bedroom, full bath, custom quad bunk area and great room with wet bar and a tin ceiling throughout. Our website was no longer online, we told them we hadn’t worked for the last four years, that we had sold our work van and a lot of our tools and my white hair was below my shoulders. I wouldn’t have hired us but they did. The HVAC contractor’s referral and our honesty was 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 too scary for most people but when you do it the right way it’s easy to shine amongst all the local-yokel competition.
Without a doubt the most important things that contributed to our success were listening, communication, honesty and promptness.
On a personal level don’t be afraid to fail, go all in and remember that your job is to make the clients vision a reality so leave pride behind you. The customer (and your wife) is always right.
