Thursday, April 24, 2014

State of the Biz
 spring 2014

what!!

Odie's got a brand new bag! Thank youuu, Trouble!

Pretty big news on the state of the biz front, Tsubo is remodeling and I am moving to VIE Custom Fitness. I will super miss being part of the Tsubo gang; but VIE is closer to my house and to public transportation, and bigger with more equipment. I can train pull and rotate for real now, there's bars and eee heavy bags! It's also more expensive (than free), but still reasonably priced. I feel like it's a step from business with friends to business business.

I'm looking at that last paragraph and I never noticed before that business is spelled like busyness. Not to sound like a broken record, but I have been hella busy—well first, taxes, and then second, all of the above. Finding the new space, putting together the paperwork—certification, insurance, resume—to get into the new space, getting my photo taken, geez, for their website like a real live trainer. All fun, exciting, but time-consuming stuff, and already there's been just a little bit more of everything going on. I've been saying to myself that something was gonna have to give, and that something was probably going to be the blog and that finally actually happened. You didn't even notice, did you: the blog's been dark for the past week and a half. Which seems not to have hurt the blog's stats at all, those have coincidentally leveled up to around 350 hits per day, which is giving me a little bit of FOMO ...about my own blog, haha, like I'm not the life of the party after all, the party's going on really nicely without me. I'm completely kidding, by the way. I'm not upset.

Anyway I'm still transitioning into the new space, and another thing that was kind of forced on me—between doing my taxes and figuring out my budget for actually paying rent—was that I finally took a hard look at my living expenses, I've been prompting myself in my journal with these 26 Steps to Living a Life You Love and have been stuck on #10 for the better part of a year. It turns out that my expenses are right about where I thought they were, I'm kind of like with expenses the way I am with calories—I don't count, but I used to count religiously so I have a good feel for them. YMMV! Anyway I feel like I'm more on solid ground now that I actually know them, and I actually know that between working three days at the office and with four solid clients I could actually be making a living for the first time since my sister died. Though right now, I might only have three and a half solid clients now that Nora's in tournament season.

So step one, cut a hole in a box—

No wait.

Step one, shore up my four clients.

Step two, then what.

I hope this is reassuring to folks who want to start their own business and all the advice you read always says, start with a business plan! Eek, tabula rasa. But another way to do it is, just start scribbling and take a step back now and again to see what you've scribbled...