In my life as a wood flooring pro, I've found that when you finally pull the trigger on what seemed like a scary decision, you realize you shouldn't have waited so long. You look back and say, "What was I thinking? Why did I see it as such an obstacle? How did I manage to work before this?" After you make the decision, you're so relieved and wondering why the hell you thought it was so hard. I felt like that when I started my company, and also after I hired a salesperson for the first time. I had another moment like that last October, after I physically—and mentally—moved my business out of my house.
Like many wood flooring pros, I was running my installation and refinishing business, which I started in 2004, out of my home. Of course, there were many times I thought about getting a separate location; it's something I dreamed about in the back of my mind. I wanted more space, but taking on the additional costs and responsibility seemed like a big mountain to climb. I felt like I was saving money running the business out of my house, and I wondered: What would moving to a separate location do to my costs?
Being busy with day-to-day activities had me putting off thinking about it, but as we added more trucks and more guys (right now we have six employees; we usually have between six and eight), it started to weigh more heavily on our family. There were always guys coming in at different hours, from early in the morning to late in the evening, and we had to be there, or if we weren't there, we had to give them access to go inside. It isn't that you don't trust your guys, but with an open door, there's no privacy. My boys are three, five and seven, and in the morning, the guys would be coming to the house getting their work orders and trying to get material, and my kids would be running around and checking things out while I was trying to talk to the guys, all while keeping the kids safe, and that became tough.
Our whole garage was really committed to the business. We have a two-car garage, so I couldn't store tons of material in there, but we had shelves where I could store enough finish, sandpaper, wood for repairs and other supplies so that we weren't always running out to buy it. I'd try to keep a space open because my wife wanted to park in the garage (hardly an unreasonable request in New Jersey) but it was a challenge, to say the least. Of course there was no place for the kids' bikes and stuff like that, so it was always disorganized, and the garage was always dirty and dusty from trying to do a lot of activity business-wise in a small amount of space.
I could also tell the neighbors were not thrilled with all the trucks coming in and out each day, which I could understand.
Finally I started to put a list together of the things I was spending money on that having a new place might counter. We were spending tons of money on disposal costs, because we try to provide a full service for the customer where they don't have to deal with anything—no hassle and no mess. So we had a recycling company coming and picking up trash at every job, which was getting costly. I was paying for parking at a site half a mile up the road that wasn't a secure location, and one of our trucks got stolen. We had some insurance coverage, but we ended up losing about $10,000 because the truck was full of new equipment. (They found the truck empty up in Newark; the police said that's what thieves do—steal your truck, empty it and ditch it.)
These cost pressures were adding up, and then my wife came across a place for rent that was literally less than a quarter mile from our house. It had everything that was on my list that I needed:
• a place for me to put a dumpster
• large storage area
• a fenced-in area to park my trucks
• a small office.
And the price was good. I realized I was actually going to save money.
I moved the business in October, and now that we have this location, I can get to work, focus and get things done in a professional manner. When you're working from home you have distractions. Maybe it's three o'clock and you were going to take a phone call but the kids are getting home from school—people think you're running a daycare on the side! Sometimes I had customers coming to my house to give me a deposit or a payment, and they would tell me, "Oh, I was expecting a building!" They knew our company and our reputation, and it looked professional from all other aspects, but the missing piece was a place to actually do business. It's also a huge improvement when you're hiring employees; you really don't want to be interviewing them at your house.
Now that the business is out, it's almost like we have an addition on our house. What was my office is now a family room/computer room for the kids, and we refinished the floors and painted. The garage is totally redone with new paint, polished concrete floors, organized bikes and toys, and the cars can fit in there all the time now, no problem! It's a different world when I go home.
Having more space is great, but probably the best change is that I can leave work mentally. Before, I would work in my office at home, eat dinner, put the kids to bed and go back to my office doing work-related things. Now when I leave my office, I don't go back, and I don't notice any difference in the amount of production, either. Before, it was easy to end up there doing day-to-day tasks, fiddling around. Now if I am working from home, I'm doing something to improve my company, working on my business instead of in it!
Looking back, I wish I would have made the change sooner. Just like with the challenges of starting my business or hiring more employees, now I have to ask: What's the next thing in my business that I'm putting off and viewing as such a major obstacle that I should just go after?
