Today was one of the few days at work and I was feeling agitated. It was a combination of factors that attributed to this feeling and it isn’t a good feeling. When you are in charge of your own business, you don’t get paid to work. There is no salary for a job like this. The amount of business you are able to generate ties directly into how much money you make. So there will be days like today where things just don’t go your way and you spend your entire day losing money. Generally days like this are days that you want to forget about.
The first ongoing agenda item is that there are lots of little orders that don’t amount to much or orders for quirky items that require more work than the profit you make. These scenarios take time and even though it’s not in your best interest to turn away business, it’s not particularly profitable business. Next was our typical round table business discussion not being proactive but spending too long on unimportant issues and not focusing on ways to make money. We talk about slow moving items in slow selling industries and how to boost sales when it feels like we are just banging our heads against the wall. Then the fax machine stops printing and it’s not like there is a tech help desk to figure it out. So we have to spend about an hour troubleshooting this hardware issue. After that charade we have a customer who has the wrong item and he needs an upgraded model that just has me scratching my head on how we couldn’t get it right the first time (we actually couldn’t but the details aren’t worth the explanation). Then my business day comes to a short end as I have to do more community service. My time is worth something and spending it on the community doesn’t make me any money. It’s hard to value my time directly but I’d say I’m costing the company hundreds of dollars with this community service compared to the 150 dollar fine I could have paid and ended up with a mark on whatever record society keeps. I spent time breaking down skids so this guild house can use the wood from the skids. This just goes down as a complete waste of a day. Days like this put you out of business if you have too many of them. I’m over it.
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