The Frog Blog

One year ago I started this entrepreneurial opportunity and so far I’m still going at it. It’s had it’s up and downs, but I do feel It’s going well so far. I still feel my partners are the right ones and I’m learning everything from management to taxes.

It’s also worth mentioning that we’ve had to hire employees, which is a really good feeling and scary one as well. Not only do I have my family that I have to work hard for, but I have to work hard for my partners and employees as well.

I think my two biggest weaknesses are my communication and delegation ability. Speaking has always been a challenge for me, but I recognized that challenge a long time ago and I think I’ve made strives to improve it, but I’ll probably never be a great speaker, but I hope to continue to get better so that some day I can at least say I can communicate very effectively.

Delegation is my second weakness and a newer one that I have recognized as of lately. I started to have to delegate in my previous job and it felt pretty easy there because it was either finish it or not. If not then I’ll do it later. With this business it’s a little different. My expectations have changed, I don’t have time to come back to it later, I need it done right so not only do I depend on our employees to do the jobs I have to delegate to them, but I have to be sure that I’m communicating it well so they are equipped to do them. So delegating and communication i’m seeing go hand and hand.

I hope that year two brings more customers and more employees!

I think there is a lot of disagreement with whether working from home is good or bad in the software engineering industry. I think the reason for this disagreement is because each person works differently. I do have a slightly different perspective of it now since I’m an entrepreneur though and I want to share that.

When I worked with Duck Creek, for most of my time there I went to work everyday. When i finally moved back to springfield, it increased my commute from 5 minutes to 30 minutes. It was at that point I started to work from home more. My typical schedule was WFH (work from home) on Mon-Wed, and commute to work Thurs and Friday. This gave me a good mix of both.

When I started my own business, other than traveling, I am WFH 100% of the time. For me, here are the pros and cons:

Pros

• I work faster and more efficient from home. This is a combination of having more control over my office environment
• I am more comfortable. PJs win over bluejeans/dress pants ANYDAY
• Going out to eat less. It’s just me. I do still try to get out on thursday, but that’s much better than  3-4 days a week
• Family gets to see me more

Cons

• I miss the fun conversations

When it comes down to it, I don’t feel communication is hindered. I have a webcam and a headset that I always use to discuss with my team and It’s become a very effective tool. This is a subjective opinion though. A lot of people put a lot of value in face to face, and I even do at times. This is my typical philsophy:

Remote work is good for when I’m focusing which is most of the time.
Face to face is good for when We’re planning or trying to solve a specific problem.

I will end this post with some opinions:

• There is no prescribed way for whether software developers work best at home or in an office
• Remote option is very beneficial for a software startup
• In software, there is little/no benefit in restricting your employment pool only to people that live locally to the company
• There will be times for face to face, but let the developer generally work wherever they want to. You’ll get the most bang for your buck.

Things got extremely busy and I stopped posting as frequently. I do want to provide an update for my friends and family on how everything is going.

Here is a typical weekday for me:
Wake up without an alarm clock at around 7:30 am
Stock market research/getting ready/vegging: 7:30 – 9am
Work: 9 am – 5:30pm
Dinner with family and playing with kids: 5:30 – 7:30pm
More Work: 7:30pm – 11pm

I find a lot of enjoyment in my career, and even more now since It’s my own venture. It can be stressful at times, but the reward outweighs the stress and I’m not talking about the money. The money is still an unknown thing for me. I make enough to survive, but it’s still a startup, I’m not rolling in the dough, but having choice and a high level of influence is very liberating.

Mainly I work from home now, so I don’t get out much which does sound depressing, but I’ve never been one to want to get out much anyways, and besides I have Thursday lunch with some buddies In Bolivar sometimes. That brings me a lot of joy for the week when I can actually make it.

Overall, I’m still very happy about my decision to do this. I still can’t say I’ll be successful, but when it comes down to it,”Successful” is a very subjective term anyways, but I guess an objective way of defining “Successful” for this conversation is if I never have to go back to normal employment again, then I’m successful at becoming an entreprenuer, realizing that not being successful doesn’t necessary mean failure either.

I’m starting to be more conscious about personal goals like becoming healthier which is good that my job is normalizing enough in a way that my mind can focus on that. We’ll see how that plays out in the upcoming months.

I’ll try to be more frequent about posting to my blog, but you can always ask me how things are going as well!

I had decided (as my boss) that I was going to only work half the day on Friday so that I could take a trip to see my parents this weekend. When Friday came, I had to tell myself that I could not take a half day off after all because of some unexpected work that came up. That kind of sucked, but was necessary.

Other than tonight, I was able to avoid any work this weekend which felt good, but this week I hope is extra busy. Extra busy means we are making progress, so here’s to a busy week!

I was talking to my dad this weekend about my new company. He was a carpenter that worked for himself for many years, so I asked him how people knew to hire him? To a certain degree his situation is much different than mine, but there were similarities. He had to do subcontracting at first which I’m doing quite a bit of, but on the other hand, all of the clients, people, and prospects he installed carpet for was local and his customer base was local. Mine could be anywhere.

My weakness is marketing and sales. My strengths are in software development as an engineer and I can make ideas and requirements come alive, but I need to communicate that to the world. I need to develop my my brand and while I have a little time to do that, I don’t want to let it get away from me. So I would expect in the upcoming weeks that I’m going to announce my business site (www.ioreadygo.com) and I think it will be good and I’m always looking for advice from anyone that would offer it to me.

Alright then, enough talking, time to start week 3!

As a disclaimer, I’m not an accountant, and I’m merely talking about my understanding of tax law. I’m subjecting this to the entire world to tell me if I’m wrong or right about it. Do your own research or talk to a CPA for your situation.

I’m in the process of projecting my company’s earnings for 2018. Just like bigger corporations do, I am setting a target and going to do my best to hit that target.

Then I get to projecting my personal net income after taxes. Wow taxes are complicated. I spend a significant amount of time on Sunday going through tax law, creating a spreadsheet so I could project what my income looks like. I also crunched the number of what “Trump Tax” would look like. The numbers are quite surprising.

Starting at ~45K it looks as if federal taxes are going to be more for a married couple with 2 kids. So far Trump Tax has boasted double standard deductions but what it doesn’t boast is that it gets rid of personal exemptions.

Consider the following math for a married couple with two kids.
Standard deductions:
2018 projected: $13,000
Trump projected: $24,000

Exemptions:
2018 projected: 16,600 ($4,150 * 4)
Trump projected: 0

Lets do the math:
2018: 13000 + 16600 = 29600
Trump: 24000 + 0    = 24000

Plus in certain states Trump tax makes it so that you can’t deduct local taxes from your federal tax bill. One redeeming factor is that child credit is subject to change, but it would have to go up quite a bit to make up for that difference.

All that said, projecting is kind of fun is a sick way. Planning for how much I’ll owe the government or how long I could survive without work seems to be very necessary.

As I sat with my family tonight, I thought about some of the factors that went into my decision to start my own business. I’ve always heard that only people that are single or folks that have two working parents in a family are the only ones that should risk starting their own business.

I guess I didn’t listen to that. Now granted for my situation, my acceptable risk threshold was much lower than a single person. I had to consider things like the cost of individual insurance vs group policies, or questions like how long could I survive with no work?

Also, I know those kind of thoughts never go away as an entrepreneur. They may evolve based on the degree of success, but we are always trying to play the game many moves ahead. I’ll have to accept there has to be a balance. Why work if I can’t enjoy life and family along the way.

To give some peek into my first week as an entrepreneur: Priorities have changed, distractions are happening, and I’m more excited than ever about it. I’m pretty sure I got COBRA setup for the rest of this year and still working on long term disability and life insurance. Soon, I’m going to be working on rolling over my 401K into a self directed IRA and preparing for open enrollment for health insurance.

Surprisingly I’m pretty calm about it all. I feel like I’m partnering with the right people and I’m handling everything right in motion; that or my new really nice office chair is just extra comfortable and I really should be freaking out.

Anyways, good week, if all the weeks were like this one, I’ll take it!

Today was my first day at work as a business owner. It felt incredible. I was getting even more pumped as the day went on about what I was doing. I felt confidence, more relaxed, and ideas started to enrich my mind. That feeling is very addicting.

I know bad days are inevitable, but I hope that I can remember days like this during those times to get me through them. Perhaps even use days like to day to flip a bad day into a opportunity. Who knows? That’s why I’m blogging I guess.

This is me before leaving on my first day:

When I got home, I also saw that my COBRA papers had came in the mail. While this is the more boring part of leaving the regular world of employment, it’s absolutely a necessary one.

COBRA is basically is a law introduced in 1985 that lets you keep your Heath insurance (dental and eye as well) for a period of time after your graceful termination from an employer. We’ve elected to use COBRA for at least the rest of the year. The process seems streamline with links to elect on the internet, so I’m hopeful I won’t run into any problems here, after all, health insurance is the law now. 🙂

This is it. The night before I start my adventures (full time) as an entrepreneur. So much uncertainty, but so much excitement.

I have my morning even planned out pre-work.

1. Get up at my usual time (7 am)
2. Exercise
3. Cleanup/Get Ready
4. Go into Springfield to meet up with team by 9am

Normally I’m going to be working from home, but we are getting together this week to get all of our ducks in a row (I miss Duck Creek already). It will feel odd, but change always had a good and bad part to it. I’m going to try to embrace the good part.

I hope to blog about my different entrepreneurial experiences. Everything from taxes, insurance, and other business benefits to how I deal with it in my personal life and how I manage my work life balance. All of this is unknown to me at this point so I’ll just blog as a learn.