Hard decisions…

I did not write last week because I was not sure to write about.  We have been having challenging weeks here at HT. As honesty and humbleness are part of the mission of this blog, I must share with you that things are not going as they are supposed to. You measure your business on many aspects: Growth, Sales, Prospects and a myriad of other indicators. Ultimately, though, you have to take into account the profitability of the business and if it really is a business.

Well, this business was started 10 months ago and it is doing very well in certain aspects. Those are projects for the future, established accounts, revenue stream established, but they are not sufficient to sustain the amount of expenses that I chose to include in the business. The easy thing is to say I was mistaken in establishing a high structure of expenses from the get-go. Anyone with a good sense will tell you that is just stupid. I can choose to be stubborn or prideful and tell you that I did it because of XYZ reasons, and in my head, I still hold those reasons to be valid. (Stubborn, I guess)

Well, the reality of it is that I think I made a wrong choice.  I should have waited to get more established cash flows in. My idealism got the best of me and so I move on. But, what to do, well the only thing to do when you measure your business is to make changes in your expense base, and I will have to do that. My timing was off in hindsight, I believed that we would be able to close more contracts and established a better base by now, but the truth is we have not.

Although there are lines which are doing well and we have a few projects that should close within days, they could be weeks or months before we see cash flow coming in, and that is the unfortunate situation. I have put into this business more money than I wanted to originally, and I can’t do that anymore. You can’t throw more money into it, even if you know it is going to work, if all you are doing is supporting expenses which are not justified. If they are justified, then go for it.

So, after weeks of deliberating, I do it and as I fall down and express my gratitude to a couple of co-workers, I push myself off the ground, dust off and continue in this hard journey of entrepreneurship.

Keep Calm and Stay Humble…