Is it just me - Page 2

It's normal to have highs and lows anyway. Winter was the slow season for me. Sometimes i would go for two or three months with little or nothing coming in for money from my carpentry business. I would fill in by hiring on with the town as a snow plow truck driver. It all worked out nicely. I would jump in a truck when things slowed down around the first of November. The carpentry work would pick up just as the snow plowing was playing out in the early spring.

The main thing is don't let yourself get discouraged when things slow down. You just never know .... a week from now you may have more work than you know what to do with.



If you're going year after year and see yourself slowly losing ground .... that's the time to start thinking about doing something else. There's no sense in holding on for so long that you eventually go broke.

Originally Posted by mikeinreco

Lol....I'm 45 and into this scrapping/selling stuff almost 12 years 7 days a week....will be hard to re-adjust to any regular job and in this bussiness sometimes I can make as much in a day as some poor SOB would make in a week working for the man.....at this point the grind is killing me....money is slow to come in due to low volume of calls....I have probably handed out 1000's of bussiness cards....have a "website" that generates calls....do gov't auctions etc.....not much more I could do other than quit or go all in and open up my own scrap yard (I definitely don't want to do that).....for now I will continue to grind out the ewaste I have and take pickups that are easy or profitable

There are different angles on things Mike. I remember as a kid ... most cities and towns had a skilled tradesman called a shoe maker. This was a gent that used to repair shoes. Maine had a thriving shoe manufacturing industry that employed thousands of people. The thing is that the world changed in the early 1970's. More and more .... shoes were manufactured in foreign countries that had cheap labor. Shoes became so cheap that people didn't bother to repair them anymore. They just threw them away and bought a new pair for low money. Shoe repair and shoe manufacturing in America went the way of the dinosaur.

I saw a lot of changes in the construction trades over the decades. Toward the end of it .... it became very difficult for the little one or two man operations to operate profitably. Most of the work shifted to the larger operations with at least 10 men on the payroll.

Gawd knows .... there's an abundance of work right now but a fulla would have a very hard time doing small " handyman " jobs profitably. Truck expense is a killer. It's senseless to put in a ten hour day with only three or four billable hours.

That's the thing ... see ? You have to look at your own operation from time to time and ask yourself if the world is changing around you. I'm not saying one way or another really. That's something you have to decide for yourself.

If you find yourself doing more of the same .... harder ?

That's the trap that a lot of older CEO's of major companies fall into in a changing world. Instead of adapting to the changes ... they try even harder.

Anyhow ... just shootin' the breeze and talking about different ideas here. You know your own situation better than anyone else ever could.