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In the beginning, it will probably be you, but look for ways to expand the business. You should be giving 15% of your day on ways to grow the business. In the business that I own, the owner started out with a yellow page ad, himself, and a Secretary from day one. He thought it separated himself...

You can"t work on your business, if you are working in it.My competitors work in their businesses, and they might work six months out of the year every day. I think we"ve no gone 18 months straight where my guys have had unlimited hours available to them. Someone has to take the bird"s eye view...

Ugh, my last two applicants that called looking for work are known drug abusers. The first guy worked for me in the past, and he"d come to work and lay down on the ground a lot. The guys sent his ass home. The second guy we called friends of our laborers who work at other tree companies asking...

There is research behind the bolded part (in the book, the "Millionaire Next Door"). The more dull an industry is, the less likely there will be competition, and thus, there are higher profits. It is more interesting with us because we don"t do just residential work, we do huge jobs up to 100k...

I"m going to post more of what we do, since I get a lot of questions about labor and skills. I enjoy my anonymity, but it"s not hurting me to say what we do. None of these are my companies. Getting a guy who is not afraid of heights is one thing, teaching him to climb up and not take all day...

Living too frugally and making too much don"t mix, you need more debt, deductions, equipment, and you could also trying paying bills ahead to get a discount. You don"t necessarily need to do it with debt, some equipment can be written off 100% in the first year. It is what it is. Bitch all...

And thankfully, we are patient enough to have all of our employees be closer to 3. That"s why we go through so many people. My profitability is much higher than my competition"s because we only take employees that give a damn. P.S. Because we do work with the major cities and wealthiest...

Has it really been years? Wow. I"m not doing a 401k, for them, or me. I have too much money going out (some jobs are 100k and they take 90 days to pay), and if I"m making 20% profit before overhead, it"s way better than the market is doing. And I"m amazed how a single guy making $800 a week...

Yeah, being totally debt free isn"t always good. I have about 75k a year in depreciation and amortization (from the goodwill of the company) as a tax shield, plus we are getting 25-30k a year in a tax shield from our vehicles that are getting the .55 a mile deduction. Think about it, I"m paying...

I just don"t understand what value this stuff has to a business. I"m big on Google, but don"t see what FB would offer.

That or you can go on my ignore list. Bye bye. This thread is for people who are interested in being self-employed, I don"t play forum games. And I don"t enjoy discussions on politics at all.

Please end your unsuccessful derail of this thread. It"s about entrepeneuralism, not trolling or class warfare. If you paid attention, every example I used was how other people dodged taxes illegally. I don"t do any of the stuff they do.

Just stop. Any further political discussions can go here, where I don"t have to read them .

OK Obama. You don"t need to tax me at 50 percent to have nice roads.

The reason why we dropped off from doing like 900k in sales in my first year to doing not even half of that the next was because I didn"t reinvest. I kept all of my cash sitting in a bank account. I wasn"t taking serious that there were 40-50 companies that popped up out of nowhere; I didn"t see...

But some people do buy a business just for the write-offs. If you can run your cars, cell phone, gas, take part of your house as a deduction, take 50% of meals and entertainment and work in vacations as travel expenses, it adds up. And in high cash businesses, they all pull cash out. I know a...

One thing I"m learning is that it is best to ignore industry projections, and just expand for future work. You can never have too many clients. External factors be damned, there is more room to grow in our core business. I believe we have the best equipment and staff, so it"s all our market. I...

It"s quotes like this that are making us not understand what you are talking about.

I"m considering throwing up another billboard. There is a place in town where all of the corporate vendors and Execs drive to. It is super expensive ($3,500 a month, but 1,200 if I go up on a rotating basis). My strategy of targeting wealthy customers is working. We just got a 5k job from...

I feel like you are talking about two different things. I believe in reinvesting. My first year was awesome, but the second year not so awesome. The industry started growing, so lots of other companies popped up out of nowhere. People couldn"t tell the established companies from the...

A friend of mine owes $10 million in his LIFO pool on a business he might sell in it"s entirety for 5m. So he"ll owe 5 million to the IRS when he sells. Some years when inventory is hard to get, he can"t sell anything in the last two months, because the tax ramifications of doing so are higher...

This thread is about maximizing cash flow, not politics. No one wants to pay taxes, regardless of political affiliation. I"ve known businesspeople who are both conservative and liberal, and they all duck taxes equally. I guarantee if you had to kick back the government 50% of your action, you...

I"ve known auto dealers to engage in LIFO accounting manipulations to make their profit go away. At the end of the year, they write down a good portion of their inventory as worthless. A friend of mine showed me his monthly financials, he had earned 770k November YTD, and in December his YTD...

Look at the tax rate schedule for a C-corp and you"ll have your answer.

Agreed, but I get butthurt when I pay 50% of my action to the government.

Tell me about it. There are times when you feel guilty about the profits you are making, and then the market goes sideways and you are spending money just to keep the doors open. I made a few mistakes my second year in business, because I kept people paid when it slowed down. The first year I...

I wouldn"t buy equipment I don"t need. But the more expensive pieces of equipment can kill you in repair costs as it gets older. I have a big rig that costs 50k to replace new and the frame has started to rip. I"ve spent 5k in the last year patching the frame, and it keeps ripping. It"s clear to...

Wow, I just looked at a year-to-year comparison, and we are up 12% in sales and profits are up 25%. I believe the extra advertising is helping. We may break 600k in sales this year, which would put us at pre-recession numbers. There may be less customers, but my ad budget is huge, so we are...

I"d really like to pocket 7-8k more a month. I did buy the business out, so have plenty of amortization and depreciation write downs. 7-8k more a month is a lot. I understand what you are saying. Some of the debt I don"t want to go. My estimate vehicle is driven 50-60k miles a year, and provides...

No trolling here, please. I"ll make an honest attempt to answer a troll post, but after that, any more trolling and you are dead to me. Anyway, one thing I have learned about business is that you do have debt, but the important thing is to structure it to your benefit. Now that my loans are...

Rewind a bit before talking about advertising. Realize that for eating places, it is about location location location. If you have a good one, you won"t need to do any advertising. I"d also consider a website (nowadays you can find a good hosting company with templates) and make sure you have...

So things are going really smooth. I"ve moved to be closer to the business, and the employees are freaked out. Productivity is up 1/3 and they are doing a lot better controlling costs. A bigger customer of ours has verbally agreed to give us a $30-40k contract in the Winter, which is our slow...

Its surprising, isn"t it? But these type of customers say the same thing. "We see you guys around on the road a lot, you must be doing something right." A lot of times, they tend to be the neighbors of the customer we are working on at that time. Some days, 1/3 of our calls have been from seeing...

The rarely seen triple post. My monthly advertising budget is as follows: Phone book #1 (across three books): $900 a month AT&T (book and online): 350 Local community book: 125 Small book in rural area: 50 Billboard #1: $1200 Billboard #2: 600 Internet: 350 (website, and Google adwords)...

From here, I can draw observations on trends: 1- Radio traffic is down for some reason. No one called off of radio this week. 2- Newspaper is getting stronger, and is cheaper.Going back eight weeks, newspaper is yielding one call for $10 apiece.In comparison, billboard is about $500 apiece...

Sometimes people say they enjoy and learn from my thread. But the biggest thing is to owning your own successful business is increasing your customer hits, and then closing them. As Peter Drucker said, "Marketing is the most important thing, everything else is detail work." If people ever listen...

I don"t believe it affects companies with under 50 employees. At the most, I"ll run one manager, one secretary, two crew leaders, two skilled labor, and two not-so skilled labor.

I"m not sure if this thread is worthy of being a sticky, but whatever. We are having our best year in three years, and now I"m going to have to worry about the tax man. I"ll have to call my CPA to figure out how to reduce my tax burden. Because I had to make this a c-corp, the tax rate is 50%...

If a photo shopped parody isn"t enough, how about a top-10 show on CBS? Seriously, we all know you probably fap it to an Aquaman poster above your bed and dream about him inserting his trident into your tight little ass, giving you an anal-tartar-sauce-creampie, but don"t bring that level of...

I read this Aquaman comic. Everyone knows Aquaman sucks, and the only thing that sucks more are neckbeards like you who think he"s cool.