Ten Years

How 10 years of being a Mr. Mom to newborn twins while selling video game accessories over the phone empowered a fading purpose and turned an old basement into a potential business opportunity worth millions. 

Stuck in between a rock and a hard place

Following the ‘NORM’ of enrolling the twins into a respectable preschool while commuting back and forth to work was not a viable option for me.

$1400 x 12 months = $16,800 / year ($67,200 / 4 years)

Should I put all of my eggs into the preschool basket and absolutely have nothing left for living expenses or place my children into a below average environment and scrape by? I desperately searched and searched but NO default solutions addressed my needs.

Mr. Mom

I decided that staying home with the twins was our best option. It took a few months but I negotiated with my employer and performed my way into working from home.

I hurried down into the basement and cleared out a small space for my computer and desk. I didn’t have much time to get organized because the next morning was going to be my first day as a work from home Mr. Mom.

After five years of do-it-yourself effort. I painted hung old kitchen cabinets to the unfinished basement wall and nailed together a temporary wall to separate the space into two sides. The left side was for business and work as pictured below.

The right side of the basement was for the home school. I painted the walls, added a foam floor and toys, and purchased low cost furniture.

What have I gotten myself into?

How am I going to sell video game accessories over the phone and home school children at the same time? In desperation, I grabbed an old school yellow pad and wrote down the chaotic details as they played out. Subsequent days were spent prioritizing the details into color coded shapes. I’ve always had a natural inclination of drawing pictures. I guess my brain just works that way.

Adjustments

I put the shapes into a schedule but constantly had to rework the pieces into new patterns because every time my children hit a new stage in their development, (crawling, walking, talking) the schedule would break.

Constraints

When my children were in their high maintenance stage, I spent 99.9% of my time stuck inside the house tending to their needs. A bottle here, another bottle there, and more bottles way over there. Finding new business opportunities was limited to cold calls and email blast in between naps. Making in person visits was impossible with two infants in car seats.

Good Enough

The holiday season came in like lion. Non-stop ring, ring, ring, alongside crying babies forced me to become extremely, extremely efficient and effective with my time and sales effort. My process was NO where near perfect but it was enough to get my children fed and my customer’s orders out the door without incident.

A Different Effort Is Required

Thank GOD for my gym membership. having a consistent place to unload the stress enabled me stay upright and cross the finish line. Solving a problem that doesn’t have a ready made solution requires a different effort. It’s a journey of trial and error experiments filled with temporary failures. Everything moves really fast. You never get a chance to get settled because the twist and turns, popping up at moments notice, love knocking you and your plans into uncharted waters. Stress testing your daily processes will become a mandate if you successfully want to get to the next day. It’s like throwing a handful of marbles up in the air and then trying to catch them all before they hit the ground. You work and build with the marble(s) that end up in your hand and ignore the ones rolling on the floor. Only at the end of the journey can you look back and see what you’ve built.

My children now are in school and I’m proud to say that they are doing very well.

Looking back at my past entrepreneurial efforts, I now see similarities between a Start Up company and solving open ended problems. it requires a different effort that the status quo solution of writing and following a business plan. The twist and turns that will knock you in directions beyond your imagination, renders any preconceived plan null and void. The business plan effort works great for ready made businesses such as franchises, convenient stores, pizza shops, laundry mats, and barber shops. There’s plenty of real world examples out there to reference and emulate. These living business models have been tested and survived the violent seas of uncertainty. When you’re launching a brand new way of doing something, there’s no blueprint to reference because nobody has done it before. You just feel your way through and build it piece by piece like my basement. Coming up with the idea to stay home and care for my children was the easy part.

Management Matters!

Executing in an environment which allowed me to experiment, receive feedback, and make quick changes was the key to my success.

Follow Newsletter

Step One – Add us to your contact list

Step Two – Text below command to above email address

emunikay wellenton news#