“And now you’re working for $15 an hour? Why aren’t you in business anymore?”
I don’t believe I said what I’m making now.
I closed the shop when the building started to fall off.
I kept the benchtop machines and sometimes will build a few cabinets if it’s for somebody I know.
I sold the rest of the stuff. I was getting payments for the bigger machines for a couple of years since I owned them all outright.
Sorry. I must have mixed someone else's posts in with yours.
I closed the shop when the building started to fall off.
I can't speak to your personal business circumstances, but nearly every successful business owner has weathered repeated economic storms in the life of their business.
In my own, I've seen it go from a cockamamie idea in my head, to a thriving concern that produced excellent products and great jobs, to just me and a couple of helpers, down to just me and my truck, then slowly climbing back to the brink of real success again.
If you made it for five years, I've just got to believe that you could still make it. Businesses that make it to the five year mark, are pretty solid. It takes some exceptional adversity in the marketplace to kill a business that's made it that far. The only other thing that can kill it, is if the owner simply decides to pull the plug.
I know all about the construction market falling off. I think everyone in the trades does. What I found in my own business, was that the market for high end sheet metal work was being slowly taken over by the modular, assembly line sort of products. When I came into the business fifteen years ago, the high end only accounted for maybe 15% of the market anyway, but that was plenty for us to maintain a strong and healthy business. Nowadays, that's probably down to about 5%, and in the Dallas area (where we moved seven years ago), it's even less.
We suffered horribly because of being edged out like that, and the proliferation of illegal labor didn't help either. It pushed the wages and the product quality down across my industry.
My wife and I bailed and went into a completely different business for about three years, but closed that when the products themselves didn't perform to our standards. We went back to doing what we've always done, but had to re-learn the market and a new business model. Now that we've got it, we're about to give our competitors hell.
Anyhow, we're drifting off topic here. I just wanted to reply to the points in your last post.
As a former business owner, I'm sure you can appreciate the fact that what you pay your employees is based upon what your products can fetch in the marketplace. If it takes an employee one hour to produce $50 worth of salable goods or services, you can't possibly pay him $50 an hour. If you paid him $25 an hour, that would be 50% of the gross, which is unsustainable in any business I know of. $15 an hour (or about 30% of the gross) would be about tops for that employee, I would think.
Naturally, that employee's pay would increase if he could produce higher revenue per hour for the company. That's just the way the simple economics work.