So project development has drawn to a bit of a halt of late as there has been something of a cash flow constraint from our backer… or Dad as he is known. Which is fine really as it has given us a bit of a pause to make sure what we do next is correct. This wasn’t helped by a fraudster emptying my accounts of everything either, so the last of my savings are toast.
But worse things happen. We lost a family member in the same time frame, I photographed a house with the occupants still in it whom were being evicted and I hear about heart breaking tragedy most weeks through the RNLI channels. So at the end of the day - it is only money, and whilst there isn’t much coming in at present… this is just temporary (I hope!)
Commercial work is slowly building so I am hopeful come the end of this year we will start to see the balance of payments in the positive rather than negative. I don’t quite have the volume yet to settle the travel costs/equipment costs/insurance etc, but it is getting close to even - there are two reasons for this, the one out of my control is the nature of the beast - work appears in dribs and drabs so stringing the work together into a coherent pattern is near impossible. With more work scheduling should become easier as I can lump three or four jobs together in the same direction to make a meaningful day. Travelling to the Cairngorms one day, Durness on the next and Poolewe on the third for £50 a shot doesn’t even come close to covering the travel! Which kinda brings me on to the second point, which is in my control, I need to work SMART - agency work is poorly paid so I need more high quality clients - which is happening as I am starting to gain a bit of a local reputation and following. I could use converting at least one of my occasional clients into another regular/exclusive and I think things would start to look a lot clearer.
But commercial work is only one side of the overall plan. Once we have the huts then it will be time to really knuckle down to building the whole workshop business up! I am under no illusion as to how quickly this will all happen though, it has taken 3 years of hard work to just about hit even, so this is realistically going to be a 5 year mission to build up to something profitable and sustainable.
On the positive though - we are finally on the list to get some proper internet speeds up the glen! The 1mb/sec that we are currently offered will be superseded by something considerably more modern! This should make getting work out so much easier than my current technique of strapping a USB stick to a cat and sending it off down the mountain side!
