I've spent a large part of today doing a formal Break Even Analysis for the business I am proposing to start, All Around the House Unlimited, and the one that The Hub has started. I think it's interesting that I'm the one who does all of this research. The Hub just picked up a hammer and a paint brush and started working. I even used the spreadsheet program in Microsoft works which is similar to Excel.

I hate spreadsheet programs. You have to put the numbers for the formula in backwards. ( Instead of telling it H39-H40=H41 you have to say "=H39-40") The symbols aren't what I'm used to. When I try to use the help button it explains things using terms I've never heard of, because I never got past Algebra I, and that was only by the skin of my teeth.

You know, I'll say this for General Math I and II - those classes covered things like how to balance your checkbook and how to calculate interest on a loan. I went to a financial planning seminar with about 40 people who were thinking of going into financial planning. The fellow giving the presentation - Power Point It's Everywhere!! - put up a credit card balance, an interest rate, and a minimum payment and asked how long it would take to pay off the balance if only the minimum payment was made. He asked everyone in the room. What I said, with complete confidence, was way, way off from everybody else and I was the only person close to being right. What strange looks! From Wacko to Guru in 60 seconds!!

But about the break even analysis....

For those of you who have never considered going down this particular rabbit hole of self employment, a break even analysis is a fancy name for figuring out whether or not you can pay your bills every month, and if not at first, at what point will you be able to "break even". If you aren't going to business for yourself, I don't know what you call it. I think it may be called "getting your s*** together", but, of course, you can hardly put that in a slick paperback and expect anybody to pay you for it.

Anyway, I learned a lot from this excersise, not the least of which is that I really need to get my s*** together. I figured out that with a decent paying part time job, that if I could generate only 20 hours of work a week from the business I could exceed the break even point. However, the real point of self knowledge came from this: When I went to estimate The Hub's share of the household expenses I initially estimated his share as only about 25% of what actually gets paid in the household. For instance, the car I drive has a payment, the one he drives doesn't, so I put the whole car payment under my expenses....and I left it there. But I also intitially put the entire cost of groceries, health insurance, light, water, and heat under expenses my work should cover, as well as 1/2 the mortgage, the credit card in my name, etc. And it took me a really long time to get it. I sat here and puzzled over the thing, thinking, "well, he must be responsible for something." HELLO! It took me almost as much time to divide the expenses more or less in half as it did to work out the analysis! You'd think somebody as old as I am, who has been married twice, would be able to grasp the "shared responsibilty" concept, or at least be able to understand that I'm not responsible for everything. And guess what? A burden shared IS a burden halved!

Then I had to do the really ickey part the research which I have been dreading: checking out the competition. It's not because I'm afraid of the competition. In fact, my research confirmed what I suspected that I don't have ANY competition for exactly the kind of services All Around the House Unlimited will offer. In my area, most services that cater to the home are very specific. You can get someone to clean your house. You can get someone to walk your dog. You can get someone to do your laundry. But you can't, at any price, get someone to clean your house, walk your dog, and do your laundry...nevermind clean your house really, really well, and notice that your dog is lethargic on his walk, and figure out how to get the wine stain out of your damask table cloth. That is what I want to do. I want to follow the advice of Mother Teresa "Do no great things. Do small things with great love." While the guy at the SBA reminded me that the finish to "Jack of all trades" is "master of none" and feels that I will devalue my work by not having a strong specialty, I disagree. Martha Stewart made an empire out of her knowledge of domestic matters, and I'm a LOT more trustworthy than she is seeing as how I haven't been convicted of a crime.

But, still, I needed to find out how to price these services, and not just "the national average" or a "range". That meant I had to find out from other people in my community who provide these kinds of services what they charge, 'cause what goes in Boise may not go here in the County. Which meant I had to call people up and ask for quotes....and, as much as I hated to do it, I knew that even if I didn't tell a bald faced lie, I was going to give these other honest hard working business people, exactly like me, the impression that they were talking to a potential customer and waste their time. And I dreaded, dreaded, dreaded doing it.

But it wasn't so bad. I only talked to one person, who confirmed what all of my other research lead me to believe about pricing. Every place else I had to leave a message. And, though I started fairly early in the day and left my cell phone number, no one else called me back. So I figure that, if I can at least call people back quickly, I'll be ONE step ahead of the specialists!

So, what do you think?