Starting a new business

So,
I've decided to start something new, a creation for that matter.
No journey is a better word, the thing that I am doing, my actions, are more than a creation, more than a singular thing.
It's like setting off down a path, you may know where the end is, some peak far off in the distance, but you've never walked the trail, you don't necessarily know what you will find along the way and you definitely don't know how long it's going to take.

This isn't my first business. Ever since I was a wee lad I have "started businesses". What that means is that I worked for myself, I knocked on doors of neighbors and begged and cajoled them to give me money, and then when I got older, I decided to do the real thing.

A lot of my businesses have been duds. Ideas that came and went, a burst of manic energy followed by the creation of a website that would fade into nothingness ... and that's ok. I've learned a lot, and more importantly I've had fun along the way.

Now it's not to say that I'm a fly by night business man, I've had my fair share of success. I've convinced people to give me 10's of thousands of dollars, sold millions of dollars worth of things and created jobs, employing people and giving them income that they have been able to live off of and support their families. It's pretty cool!

I currently have a business that I am running remotely. It's called the Atlanta Deck Company and is a construction company based out of, yep you guessed it, Atlanta Ga.

I started this business in the fall of 2019. Well, I kind of started it at the beginning of 2019, worked for like a month, built a deck and pocketed a few thousand in cash and then said fuck it and bought a one way plan ticket to Montana ... but that's another story.

Now that I really started it, I was actually able to be successful quite quickly. To all the nay sayers out there, it's not my first construction business so you could say I had a bit of head start. I pretty quickly built it up to ~$50k monthly revenue (no lie I actually managed $50k in our last month) and then proceeded to ... well, things got a little complicated. We'll just leave it at that.

But! Alas, the business came back from the dead, I was on the other side of the continent, traveling around on a bicycle, essentially a homeless vagrant and somehow, people still wanted me to build decks for them. Oh the magic of internet marketing! So, being the kind and hospitable man that I am, I said yes, and promptly searched my contacts for a contractor that would be willing to do the work for me.

Fortunately for me I found one, and now, two or so months later I had a semi successful business that I was able to run remotely. Now, we're not out of the woods just yet, as you all know Corona Virus is a bitch and FUCKED a lot of small businesses. Fortunately for me, construction was deemed an essential business and we were allowed to continue working. It definitely impacted us to a degree but thank our lord and most OG carpenter, Jesus Christ, we're still in business and still making money.

Now this story is not that story. While I will still be working on that business, tweaking things here and there, I want to start something different. For the longest time I've wanted to build tiny houses. I've dreamt of them, designed them, even built one to boot, but never to the degree that I wanted. The whole idea around tiny houses began when I started to see how much waste was created in the modern construction industry. Especially for something like a deck we would constantly tear down a perfectly (or nearly perfect) good deck just to replace it with a slightly larger and newer version of itself. What happened to all of that wood, all of those beautiful trees? Off to the landfill! (Fortunately, I lived near a recycling facility that would take the wood and turn it into mulch, but still, the wood is good! we don't need to waste it)

So, that brings us to the current moment. My dream, my muse, my current fascination, my current obsession. Creating a closed loop business. What is that? A business that uses and reuses all of the waste and byproducts of it's operation.

Let's take a look at how it might look.
For instance a deck company uses a series of inputs (in our case wood, metal and concrete) to create a deck or something similar. The waste we produce is comprised of : old boards from demolition, cut off ends, metal scrap (mostly things we break) and then the odd amount of packaging material. I'm not too worried about the last part, what I'm most interested in is all of this left over lumber.

Essentially, in theory, what I can do is
A: build deck
B: reclaim wood, metal, bolts, etc
C: turn said materials into secondary product that we can resell

The magical D (ha sexual puns) is that we can take some of the money that we generate from business operations and use it to plant trees! Ah it's beautiful! A true closed loop cycle. In theory we should be able to plant more trees than we consume (as long as we price things the right way) as well as creating jobs and serving our customers.

So! This is the beginning. Call it a starting off point. We have to start somewhere so we might as well start here.
My fingers are tired of clicking away on this keyboard, and I must really read some of these books that I've grabbed off the shelf, so this is where this post will end! but the next post will include how I got started AND how I've already generated revenue.

Let's go boys!