Friday, December 21, 2007

Another Business Owner

So after what seemed like a drought of ability to find business owners, I've met yet another one. This guy is a friend of a coworker of mines and he owns and runs his own landscaping business. Again, while this isn't necessarily a business that I want to get into, it was nice to talk about the different things he does and how his business has evolved over time.

Apparently he employs some guys from Mexico who come over on 10 month VISAs and then they are away during the winter months when business is slow. This has allowed him to pick and choose the different stuff he wants to do when it comes to the actual work on someone's yard and frees him up to do more common business accounting and marketing tasks.

It's been very motivating to talk to a couple of people who own and run their own business. While my previous attempts have been unsuccessful (mainly because I keep giving up), it restores some optimism about building a business and a steady flow of income when you see how other people have been successful. The thing I seem to be lacking that these others have is the motivation that pushes you to keep going when things get tough. If these guys fail (at least two out of three), they don't eat or can't pay their bills. So they have to keep going, they can't pick and choose or switch to something else.

On a side note, today is the first day I really take a step in implementing the Little Book that Beats the Market's approach to value investing. I sold off two of my stocks a couple of days ago before the year mark since they had lost money. Today I sold off my winners that are now long term gains, and I purchased four stocks to replace them. I also took a gamble at some GE stock since they are favored well in the upcoming energy crisis and need to switch over to alternative power sources.

After a couple of weeks you get a good idea about how the stocks performance will range for the year, so I'm hoping that the picks I made from the screened list will be good ones. I tried to base it off of my knowledge of the state of different industries as well as how much upside potential a company has. So we'll see how it goes.

No comments: