Fast Track Girl:
Summer arrived and business slowed down. We cut back on our employees’ hours by working most of the hours ourselves. Consequently, the employees were forced to have to seek employment elsewhere, at least for the summer. We didn't know what to expect in sales and didn't want to spend what we did make on unnecessary payroll expenses.
Shortly after we opened I got behind with accounting. Accounting for a small cart with no build out expense didn't take near as much skill as a store and the LLC. I was overwhelmed and barely had time to sleep much less learn how to do all of the accounting overnight.
So I found an accountant/bookkeeper/consultant in Nov. and contracted her to do all of our books and taxes. I was too busy with the holiday retail season to be able to meet with her much, then she was too busy at tax time to meet with me, so we spent the summer getting caught up. We got an extension on our taxes and are still cleaning it all up right now. The books should all be in order in the next few weeks. This should've been done from the start, lesson learned! I have learned a lot from her (Mabel) and look forward to learning more. But I have a lot of work to do still! Including going back over the past year and looking at where the waste was and the consequence of not knowing how to better manage the cashflow earlier on. Hey...you learn by doing.
We spent the summer learning, organizing, cleaning, making repairs, and working on bettering our systems. My older daughter (Leasa) is a manager at Chase. Chase has awesome training programs for their management and Leasa has offered to put together a basic employee handbook for us. Just basic legal stuff using templates. She's going to come in and do training with our new employees on how to handle customer complaints, difficult customers, inappropriate employee behavior, etc. She does this training at Chase.
We contacted Best Buy Solutions for Small Business and Best Buy Geek Squad to meet with us to discuss some computer and POS software concerns we have. They sent four reps out to gather information from us about what our needs are. They came back with a proposal of what they think we need to do to solve the problems. We like their solution but are investigating it a little further before we decide. Beside it'll be $4k to implement it after we spent $2500 on our current system and it's not that urgent of a problem at the moment. I'd rather grow that money by spending it on more product.
We'll be meeting with a several different SCORE counselors in the next few weeks. These are retired business owners and advisors who volunteer their time to help others. I'd like to meet with someone who has a strong background in retail. Also in accounting, for comparison sake just to be sure the person we're currently using is the person we should be using.
Called the insurance broker from my last job to get health insurance through the LLC. When you're a sole proprietor (as I was in my cart biz) you get self employed insurance and they can put exclusions on your policy for pretty much any medical issue you've ever had. Not this time! We got group insurance for us and full time employees, which we don't have many. Since I'm the decision maker I made sure that the Mayo Clinic (here in Arizona) was on our plan. Now we have our primary care doctors at the Mayo! I'm no longer stuck with crappy insurance through my employers. I had a say so in it.
More to come...