Getting Back In The Saddle
May 16, 2008 | General
Wow, I can’t believe that it has been so long since I posted a blog!!
There have been a number of reasons for this but it is also a question of once you get out of the habit and, more importantly the discipline of doing something, it can be really difficult to get back into it.
This can be both one of the biggest pro’s or the biggest con’s of having your own home based business. There is no one breathing down your neck everyday to push you on (except maybe the wife) but when you do pull things back round and start making progress, then you get a far greater feeling of achievement and satisfaction because you’ve done it all by yourself. You have to search out your own motivation and momentum but if you can achieve that it is infinitely more powerful than that provided by someone else.
I was absolutely gutted when I wiped two of my three sites completely off the web, but after I’d had a stiff drink I realised that it wasn’t exactly the end of the world. Although I had spent a lot of time on them, there wasn’t actually that much content on them that couldn’t be replaced. I even had about half of the 6 - 8 blogs that I’d posted on this site saved in Word documents but there didn’t seem much point in reposting them.
I decided that it would have been a lot worse if it had happened in six months time and I certainly won’t be making THAT same mistake again. I’m also a lot more aware of backing up, I was able to go through the whole ’setting up’ process again (a lot quicker this time), I changed the theme and I made improvements in the back office of the sites that I probably wouldn’t have returned to for a while.
So, in answer to the point raised in my last blog, yes, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you DOES make you stronger’.
But I wouldn’t want you to think that rebuilding my sites is all that I have achieved in the three weeks since I have been away. I did lose a little bit of momentum, but because of activity that I did before, things have still been happening.
A big thing that I had been dealing with was trying to sell my old car.
It was a bright yellow SAAB convertible which we had owned for 7 years. It was without doubt the best car that I have owned. I can still remember how many times I looked out the window on the night that we first brought it home as it sat there gleaming on the drive. I was probably grinning like a new father but in many ways it was better than that because I didn’t have to get up in the middle of the night and help with the feed. I can still remember driving down to my parents on Boxing Day, a month after we first got it, 3 degrees outside, heater full on and the roof down.
We covered about 100,000 miles in that car including several holidays in Europe and at one stage I had visions of holding on to it until it achieved classic car status and passing it down to my son. Overall it was very reliable and people we knew always waved when they saw us because we stood out - stood out against the river of black and grey cars that flood along our streets.
But alas life moves on and our ageing children dictated that we needed a car with a ‘bit more space in the back’ for those longer journeys. I suppose that it could have been the smaller, newer, more economical, cheaper to run Mitsubishi Colt that made way but for once, we had to make the more sensible decision.
It was in excellent condition but had a couple of mechanical repairs to be completed before I could sell it for top money - if I sold it as it was, with a leak on the power steering and no air conditioning then I would probably have to settle for about half of optimum price. Now, it would cause my fingers to bleed if I went into all the in’s and outs and up’s and downs that I had to contend with to finally get it finished and advertised for sale but that is not really the ultimate issue.
I will however tell you one part of the saga to illustrate my point. The air conditioning was not working and my garage owner who was doing the repairs told me it needed to be tested to see if it was a major leak or whether it just needed recharging. I wasn’t that lucky. I was told by the man that came to leak test it (not my local garage owner) that I needed a new condenser unit.
Got a local car part company to order one in, £135 and 5 days wait because it was the weekend. I booked the car back into the garage to have the work done and by now at least 2 weeks had gone by since the car was first checked. Got a call from the garage to say that they had fitted the condenser but it wasn’t just that - 3 pipes had also perished and they had got a price from SAAB - over £500 !! I couldn’t believe it, I almost ran all the way down to the garage because I had this overwhelming urge that I had to get this sorted out and find a solution because there was no way it was economical to repair at that cost.
It was probably another 2 weeks of hitting the internet and visiting 3 local scrap yards but I managed to secure a good set of second hand pipes for £65 in total. After that I had the car professionally cleaned- it looked fantastic - and the first person that came to see it bought it for £50 less than I wanted for it.
The point is I could have got rid of it without doing any of the mechanical repairs and had to settle for around half of the final figure that I finally got. Then it would have been really tempting to give up after being told that new air conditioning pipes were going to cost over £500 but by this time I had already had a replacement steering rack fitted and bought the new condenser plus labour so stopping there was not an option. I had to hold strong on my original conviction that it was better to sell it in tip top condition.
So I had to buckle down and work harder than I anticipated to see it through. But was it worth it?
Well I probably got an extra £600 than I would have done if I had just done a minimum ammount of work to sell it. Whether you think that is worth it depends on how much £600 means to you. But to me I got far more than that.
I got a great feeling of satisfaction that I had achieved everything that I wanted to when I first set out and that I kept going despite the obstacles that got in the way. I also felt good that I passed on the car in such great condition and pretty much in the condition that I bought it over 7 years ago.
And this is the way that you have to look at your own home based business. You have to have conviction, you have to work harder than you imagined to overcome obstacles that will occur and you have to have integrity in your final work.
I wonder if they looked out their window that night as it gleamed in the driveway. I suspect in fact they did.
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