Brownies Septic & Plumbing

Know what your monthly nut is and what you need to do weekly to get there. Don’t let the end of the month sneak up on you, be extremely proactive, always working towards next week’s income. If you just focus on today or this week, you’ll run short by the end of the month.

As others have said, be very cautious of adding expenses. Don’t chase expenses. Make sure you can afford it every month before adding on some service unless it buys you time and you need more time to make more sales.

I had a paten attorney put it to me this way, “I’m not going to risk losing my law license for your idea.” That pretty much cleared up thoughts about their potential for ripping people off of their ideas.

Each country is whole new patent filing process so yeah, it can get extra expensive. And then are you going to sue people for infringement in that country at the end of the day? That’s the big question.

It’s a tough business, that’s why there’s so few. Services are hard to grow. The majority of general public doesn’t have the funds to make it to the finish line so we won’t take just any project which limits the market size. If we were uncaring people, we’d take any project that walked in the door but then they’d run out of funds half way and it’s a waste of everyone’s time and especially their money. For some people, trying to license is the better route which can provide some some development work for us to make something presentable and functioning for them but even doing just that much is pushing $10k a lot of the time. The vast majority of our customers are going to tooling to try to make a business out of it or they’re already in a mature business and we’re just making their next thing. We’d only take on a project that is oriented toward licensing if they really are going to put in the work to do it. It’s not a “if you build it they will come” type of scenario. It’s getting it out there and pounding the pavement so to speak so we want to make sure they have that in them.

The job itself is generally awesome. We get to invent, brainstorm, build, and test stuff every day which is the ideal place fore engineers. The happiness level of the day totally depends on the customer’s personality though. Some people understand R&D and some people don’t. We have to drive that home so much to them but some people just don’t understand that each prototype is a test no matter how many times their told that. We even meet before we build stuff to say here’s what might go wrong and our plan B and C. So difficult customers make for a difficult day, said every entrepreneur ever. But the cool customers that get it and who are experts in their field are freaking awesome and an absolute pleasure to work with. They’re really involved and add a lot of value to the project as a member of the development team rather than just being a funder of the research. So we try our best to filter out potentially bad customers but some get through once in a while.

I’m guessing you work in a factory because most people aren’t designing the production tooling as that’s a job in and of itself. Prototype molds for something like RTV castings sure, no problem doing that in-house, but designing the entire production mold is usually done by the tooling company. Did I get that right or what type of place do you work now?

If you’re thinking about making the leap, I’d have two suggestions:

Make sure you have a lot of work lined up to keep you busy before leaving your day job. It takes probably a year before you’ll have enough to be full time and comfortable. It’ll take several years to figure everything out before it runs smoothly. It took me six to really run well and could sleep well and we’re still making improvements all the time more than ten years later.

Manage your cashflow and business savings like a hawk. It’s very easy with expensive COGS to get into a scenario with tens of thousands in receivables, which sounds great, and yet no money coming in for a few weeks for a payroll that’s due now. We have a line of credit and savings but that came with a little time after the first few years of figuring stuff out.

Ultimately it’s rewarding, fun work but it likely won’t make you a millionaire. Developing your own products just might though.

I own a product development / engineering company, this is literally what I do for a living as a business… AMA.

You’re being down voted but you’re 100% correct. Only inventors can be granted patents and they may assign their patent rights to anyone else they please. Anyone can file a patent but if it were proven they were not the actual inventor, their patent could be invalidated.

This is not to confuse first to file with first to invent which is a different matter entirely.

The interest paid against a loan would be categorized as an interest expenses on your P&L. That would be captured on your tax filing and would reduce your taxable income by the amount of interest paid out in that tax year. It doesn’t matter who the loan was from for that to happen. You can make a loan from yourself to the business and charge the business a reasonable interest rate or the loan could be from anyone or business.

It doesn’t matter the source of revenue or the category of expense. They aren’t balanced against each other in any way at tax time, they are all just added up: money out versus money in.

Tax write offs are just expenses the business incurred. Say I make $100 in revenue but I had to buy some paper and pencils that year for $20. I’d have $20 in business expenses to write off against my total revenue for the tax year. So I’d have $80 in taxable revenue for that tax year after the business expense deduction (write off).

Even if you alternative tax years you’re just kicking the can down the road. Businesses actually do this quite frequently. They try to make as many deductions as they can and will even go negative sometimes and all those loses will carry forward into future tax years. Amazon did this for years and years by reinvesting into the business and accumulated massive tax deductions so this is one way “corporations don’t pay any taxes.” Well they took huge losses for years and years and are just catching back up on those losses as deductions in current yearss, they’re not “not paying taxes,” they just had no profit to tax even though they had revenue.

There are tons of videos on YouTube on how to sell on Amazon and they are free. Really that’s all of the TV you should be consuming if you’re going to undertake this endeavor.

Learning is good, just try to keep the cost of the mistakes small.

How can you say that it is net when you don’t know what the marketing cost will be yet? That was kind of my point in saying it’s likely gross profit (operating profit).

It is good that you’re starting small though and just be ready to make essentially no profit and this be a learning experience to improve upon, which it sounds like you’re prepared for.

$3 in what I’m assuming is actually gross profit and not net profit doesn’t sound good on Amazon. You need much higher margins.

Computers, phones, paper towels, cell phone bill, tools, continuing education.

You can only write off the expense. So the money that goes out of your account. So when you say vice versa, it cancels out to no benefit for A or B. A has money coming in as revenue but money going out as an expense so essentially nothing happened but a waste of energy.

“It would take me years to tell you everything, because it took me years to learn it all.”

“you’ve been such a great customer I can replace them at cost so it would only be $x.xx. I of course can’t do this for just anyone or all the time, so just this once because you’ve been great over the years. Just be extra careful with the these new ones! Thank you again for being such a great customer.”

The same people who pay to place a Google PPC ad for their business brand name. You don’t need to run an ad for Target when I typed in Target.

So you’re doing $400k in sales and have $200k to pay your two salaries and/or reinvest with? That’s not a bad business for the family.

My advice is to do the smallest possible run to see if it will sell first. Can you sell ten? I have a thousand units of something that I can’t sell because the whole industry took an abrupt turn in 2020.

Is that $200k after a base salary? I’m about to start making products out of my decade old service based company and curious about the margins after all the overhead. Also, how many employees do you have. I really have probably 100 questions but I know we’re all busy as hell here.