Can this really be Done???

Hi Johann

We did use any of the stataegies you mentioned but we did commence a part time, vendor finance business in 2003.  My wife Karen work it full time and I ended up keeping my job until early last year.  We could have doen it fatster but the end result has been great, i.e. we both now work in our business full time and love it.

Radical changes can make big holes in your cash flow.  Maybe work into it, like we did.

Cheers,  Paul

Working for yourself is extremely rewarding.  My wife and I are your age, though we have run our own buisness for the past 4 years.  I started completly from scratch and had to work from the ground up.  I wouldnt say we are on cloud 9, but probably at cruising altitude.  I would suggest though having something to fall back on, or gradually work into  your own business by just 1 person working in it to start with, jsut so you have some stability in your income from the other.  I say this as we were in the deep end from the start, but we managed and now we get far better income.

We see PI as a sideline to our lives, though I do have many aspirations to own a few more properties in the next few years.  We have bought new properties, renovated old properties, bought off the plan, and currently building our new PPOR.  Our current house will become a IP, as we will just buy and hold for now.

Good luck with it all!

I own and manage a protective coatings business.  Our bread and butter work is abrasive blasting and painting, but we also work in a couple of niche areas like industrial tiling, polyurethane spraying (Rhino Linings Industrial Dealer), scaffolding, epoxy flooring, and other protective coatings, plus we do small amounts of fitting and boilermaking.  We do both site work, and I have 3 sets of sheds (all in the same street would you believe) where we have an abrasive blast booth, paint booth, tiling sheds, office and storage

Its actually getting to be a medium scale operation, and is very much family run.  My wife is the Workshop Leading hand, My brother heads the Abrasive Blasting Division, my sister in law is the Financial Controller and I have 2 Site Supervisors, plus 6 full timers and a dozen casuals.  I oversee the whole operation, do all the estimation and organisation of jobs.  We are very busy, all of the time.  We have some very good blue chip clients; Xstrata, Sedgman, Macarthur Coal; Thiess; DBCT, Multotec Australia and many good ongoing contracts with engineering companies.

It keeps us busy!  Hard at the start, but we have the finger on the pulse now.  I try not to work these days too much, but I still do the odd day here and there where needed, and still dont mind doing the hard yards (jackhammering old industrial tiles off, scaffolding and polyspraying are jobs only for the hardcore!).

Ive joined this forum pretty much because I need some type of outlet.  Over the past 4 years I have become so obsessed with my business, that many of my (neglected) friends have moved on and I need to talk to like minded people about things I am interested in – like PI!!!