The other big thing that's happened as of late is that the wife and I have become part-founders and part-owners of a startup business.
This has been in the works for some time; the company consists of six people -- my boss at my day job, my former boss at my day job (yeah, figure that one out), my coworker who had breast cancer (mentioned in my last few posts), a friend of my boss, the wife, and myself. We all have positions and titles, though some of them are more honorary than others.
I am the Senior Content Editor for the website and the Youtube channel/some of the social media stuff (sparingly these days, though I helped get most of it off the ground for my boss, who has never had any experience with social media of any sort), and help run stuff in the background like merchandise, some sparse marketing, etc. Until the business really gets some strong legs under it, I've sort of been a jack of all trades, helping out on anything and everything I can. This makes me writer, editor, idea man, pitchperson, and overall consultant on damn near everything.
Oh, and I also designed the logo. The original logo, anyway, which was slightly altered into the current/final one.
The wife is the Senior Social Media Consultant; she's in charge of the Instagram and Twitter, as well as some of the overall website design stuff and a bit of the marketing/how we present the company to the public-type stuff. Anyone who knows Daisy knows that she is very passionate, strong-willed and opinionated, and she makes herself heard during team meetings. She was originally somewhat lukewarm on the idea, and at times can get frustrated. It is at those times I remind her that between the two of us, we own a full third of the company -- far from a "controlling share," so to speak, but we're important.
My former boss and friend of current boss are drivers for the company. More details will come on that as we get to it.
My now-in-remission friend/coworker has a few roles within the company, but she's settling into the online advertising side of it -- Google Ads/adwords, SEO, ad campaigns, and other promotions. She is also the pretty face of the company for photos and videos, something that will more than likely continue into the future.
Finally, my boss is the mastermind behind everything ("Supreme Overlord," as I frequently refer to him). It's his vision, his plan, and while we're all owners/partners, it's his devotion to the business/project that moves everything forward.
All of this has been a long buildup coming. We began kicking around ideas late last year, which became a solidified idea after Christmas, which became weekly business structuring bridge calls (which still continue to this day and will for the foreseeable future), then a soft launch of the website in March...and well, between then and now we've continued to get bigger and bigger.
How much money has this gained us so far?
Well, um, year to date? Nothing. Yet.
After nearly six months of work, I just signed my contract tonight, making me officially a partner and part-owner. The paperwork took a long time to put together for everyone, and thus far only half of us have signed it (as it was just sent over this past week). The wife hasn't even signed it all yet. Projected earnings for phase 1 of the company plan has us each sitting at about $500 a month extra cash in our pockets with another $500 invested directly back into the company before it even hits our payroll. It's a rather simplified plan that should work well and will begin paying out pretty well once all balls are rolling. Is it "buy a Mercedes and quit my day job" money? No, nor will it be for any of us for some time. I don't expect any payroll checks to be cut for any of us before the end of the year, but there are some perks to be had in the meantime -- the boss takes us out to expensive "business lunches" or a "business dinner" about once a month or so, in thanks for the work we've all put in thus far. So, there's that.
In the past it's been hard at times to function as part of a team -- I am very much a born leader, type A personality, and I'm much more accustomed to directing people to do things and making them do those things, either through inspiration, manipulation, or (in rare cases) force. I don't necessarily like confrontation -- though I totally don't shy away from it -- but I wouldn't call myself aggressive. I am a Slytherin; I am cunning, plotting, planning, and a "my wish is your command" (instead of the other way around) type of person. Yet, for all of those personality traits, I have no problems working with this team. All six of us have worked together in the past for our day job for the mega-conglomerate telecom corporation, or we still do (four of the six of us still work there, including me). We keep our jobs and interpersonal relationships separate from the project, for the most part. For the company we are all equals -- equal partners, equal influences, all of us with our own responsibilities. That is not the case in our day jobs' program structure -- and certainly not the case for those of us who no longer work there.
But. For the moment, it is what it is. I'm fine with helping out, I'm fine with being contracted and a part owner of a company that isn't yet making any real money -- like any startup, it takes a while. And time will tell whether this one gets off the ground the way we'd like it to. As I told the wife, if it does, we're two of the founders, and we got in on the ground floor.
The other big news is our house hunt.
As I alluded to in my last post here, we have gone month-to-month on our lease in this apartment, primarily because we want and need to move out of this place and into a house.
I rented the house in Newton for five years total, both with my ex as well as living alone for the three years before I moved up here and married Daisy. Living alone in a full-sized house did a few things for me -- for one, it made me a bit stir-crazy when the only other living beings I could talk to were the cats (who, sadly, do not talk back), but for two, it was a learning experience in knowing everything I absolutely do not want when it comes to purchasing a house to live in.
In the past three months, in this apartment, this series of events has taken place, in this order:
1. Water leaked from the bathtub in the apartment above us down between the walls in our laundry room, for weeks on end, until the walls began bleeding water and caved in. After three different repairs, the final one being a brand new pipe upstairs and a 3x4 foot chunk of the actual laundry room wall being torn out and replaced (over the span of close to three weeks) it was fixed.
2. The apartment above us clogged the shower drain in the master bathroom, which caused all of their shower/drain/wastewater to back up into our shower as well, multiple times. After three plumbers' visits and snaking the pipes with heavy duty equipment, and installation of a new valve in our own shower (after it backed up so much that it overflowed our shower and onto the floor) -- over the span of about two or three more weeks, it was fixed.
3. The built-in microwave above our stove fried itself mid-vegetables and completely stopped working. It took two weeks for the maintenance team to order a new one, get it to arrive, remove the old one, and install the new one.
4. Mid-cycle, the dishwasher died two weeks ago tonight. It left itself full of water, which would not drain -- the wife and I had to manually drain what we could and soak up the rest of the water with towels (thankfully, the wife did this one night when I was at work, because I was about to lose my fucking mind at this point over something else in this apartment breaking). The maintenance people came to look at it three different times before finally agreeing to replace it. The new one gets installed tomorrow.
5. The air conditioner died not once or twice, but three times over the course of last weekend. The first time, the furnace fan motor died. It was removed by maintenance, rebuilt, and replaced. The second time, the rebuilt motor blew some of the wiring. It was repaired and was much quieter. The third time it died, a capacitor of some sort was added to keep it running when it tried to kick off when it wasn't supposed to (it was explained to us, poorly, that the added part was some sort of fuse-like device). The fourth time it didn't die, but the condensation pipe from the AC wasn't properly connected, leading water to drip down onto the electronics and make loud electrical crackling noises every time it kicked on, which was a bad thing -- maintenance came at midnight on a Sunday night and fixed it. Luckily I was off work. Since then it's been running fine.
Yes folks, this was over the short span of three months, and all of this has happened since and after we decided to not renew our lease and pursue the purchase of a house.
"We need to get the fuck out of here," I told Daisy, "because the next thing to go will either be the toilet, tub, stove or the refrigerator."
The toilet and tub have both been repaired on occasion in the past, I might add.
Again, I lived in that house in Kansas for five long, uncomfortable years, and never did it have so many major things go wrong with it that this place has had go wrong in the past three months. The most I had to worry about there was the occasional drain backup in the basement and the brown recluse spider population.
To those ends, we've been aggressively pursuing houses to purchase here in Omaha, and have acquired a realtor and everything. We've looked at probably ten houses so far, but the market is terrible for homebuyers right now -- we made a serious offer on a house about a week and a half ago, offering $7500 above the owners' asking price in order to be competitive and help secure it, and our offer was very quickly and soundly rejected for a better one. That is how terrible the market is right now, folks -- houses routinely sell for far higher than the list price due to competition, and while Daisy and I do fine, we're not liquid enough to make exorbitant offers outside of a fairly fixed price range, no matter what we've been pre-approved for.
We made a fair offer on another house tonight, or we will once the paperwork is processed tomorrow/Monday. It's a house that's been on the market awhile and the owners are looking to sell it sooner rather than later, by the way it sounds, out of moderate desperation and no offers that we know of (normally houses sell in less than 24 hours in Omaha). It is delightfully retro, in a good neighborhood, and is huge. We probably won't get it either, but we've also left ourselves wiggle room for negotiation and counter-offers from the sellers.
It is very hard to not get discouraged, truthfully. There are many parts of Omaha I would never want to live in, and just as many houses that are selling for large amounts of money that look like rat nests. We've seen a few of them.
So it goes, though. So it goes.
I'll keep all apprised.
