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About three years ago, I was leaving my house at 4:30 a.m. every day, driving two hours to my shop, meeting the guys and then driving another hour from the suburbs to get to the job site, usually in downtown Chicago, where we'd pay $30 a day for parking, be limited to working only between 10 a.m. and 3 or 4 p.m. and have to pay one of our workers $10 an hour just to sit in the vehicle all day and make sure nobody stole all the tools. My wife did all of the administrative work and answered the phone while caring for our twin boys. We were making good money and doing high-end, high-profile jobs, but it was a lifestyle that didn't leave me much time for my family.
Today, my wood flooring business is in my new hometown: Putnam, Ill., population 793. I've always got plenty of work, but I don't have to drive far or contend with traffic to get to it. In fact, I'm usually home in time to see my boys right after school. The work isn't the upscale kind of floors I used to do, but the cost of living here is a lot less than what it was in the Chicago suburbs. We have acreage, my kids have goats and ducks, and we can walk to the beach at the lake that is only a couple blocks from our house. I'm the kind of father that my wife and I wanted me to be, but it took a huge change in our lives and my business to get here.
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs working the family wood flooring business. My dad had the company since 1958, and I always enjoyed the creative side of the business. By my last year in college, I decided that after I graduated, I'd work for my dad, and we talked about me working into ownership of the business. We didn't have anything structured or in writing; in hindsight, that would have made things easier. As it was, he'd talk about retiring—next year. Next year would come, and he wouldn't retire. It was always "next year." I said to my wife, "Dad's never going to retire, and I need to get on with my life." My wife and I had put in offers on 13 fixer-upper houses in the suburbs, but we lost them all—people were bidding over the list price and just tearing down the houses to get the property. We had bought a tree farm out in the country while we were engaged, and we enjoyed the different pace of life and friendly environment down there. When the perfect house and property came up for sale in the same area, we bought it, even though it was two hours from the business in Elmhurst.
At that point, life took some unexpected turns. I was in a car accident that left me badly injured and in traction in bed for eight weeks. While I was recuperating, my dad had a heart attack. Within a year, my wife gave birth to our twin boys. Three months later, I came to work and my dad said, "I've had it, I quit. You need to tell me by Friday if you're taking the business over or not." I had two three-month-old boys, a wife and a mortgage payment. I didn't think I had much of a choice, and I took over the business.
In order for your own business to run properly, you become consumed by it; that's the devil in running your own business. When you have eight or 10 guys, you end up working 12 hours a day, and your family tends to suffer. My wife and I made an agreement: By the time the boys started first grade, I would sell the business or hire a manager to run it so I'd be able to spend more time with the kids. Growing up, my dad had always spent lots of time with us. We'd be headed for a job, the wind would be blowing from the west and somebody would have told us the day before that the salmon were biting. We'd show up at the job and my dad would say, "Mrs. Smith, we had a problem with the machine at the last job; we'll have to do this tomorrow." We'd go home, take the tools out of the truck, hook the boat on and be on Lake Michigan in an hour.
With the level of service we offered and the core of customers we had from being in business for so long, our business had a good value. We needed to build upon that core, make it stronger and turn it into a marketable asset. We needed it to be at a point where we could hand it over to someone and they could run the show. To start, we incorporated the business. We computerized all the estimates and the schedule, as well as our customer database, so if Mrs. Jones called, I could immediately see that we worked for her in 2002 and see which flooring, stain and finish we used. We made sure we had three senior employees who could do just as good a job as I could so that I was replaceable. We also set up good benefits and a 401(k) retirement plan for all the employees; we needed a good core group of employees who could be responsible when I took myself out of the mix. We needed the business to be organized so we could pass systems on that the new owner could use and be profitable with, and in essence, that's what we did. Dad had always kept the company pretty small with few employees, but my last year with the business, we did $1 million in sales, were up to eight employees and had three vehicles, plus my own.
In the meantime, I had started to build up some work for myself out in the country around Putnam so when I sold the business, I already had things in motion out here. It was a real leap of faith: I had to be confident that I'd built enough of a financial cushion that if the bottom fell out, I could put food on the table and pay my insurance. Back during my summers in college, I captained fishing boats on Lake Michigan, and the guy who taught me how to run the 40-foot boat always told me that when you're pulling into the slip, you need to look for an out in case you have a problem. That's how I felt about selling the business and starting over in the boondocks. I knew that if I had to, I could call up friends in the industry—local distributors or fellow contractors—and get work. As it turned out, by the time the business sold, I had enough contacts out in the country that I haven't had a dry moment since I started. Of course, in the country, word gets around. Last week I repaired and refinished the 5/16- by 1 1/2-inch floor on the first floor of a Victorian house owned by a woman who owns an insurance company in town. I've already had four people come up to me and tell me how great the floors look.
It is different work, and that's been one of the harder things to stomach. For the most part, I'm working in houses that are worth $70,000 to $130,000, and I'm sanding 150year-old pumpkin pine floors, not putting down $35-asquare-foot hand-scraped walnut. It's like going from cooking filet mignon to working at McDonald's. Some days you say, "What did I do that for." But I'm able to pick up the kids after school and take them fishing or sit down at the kitchen table for an hour and help them with their homework.
When I sold the business, my dad wasn't upset. He told me that there are more important things than work—that you only have a certain amount of time to spend with your kids, and you'd better enjoy it. And, as parents so often are, he was right.