(no subject)

[dragonlady7]

Oh gosh. They've certainly changed things around here. Well...
I am not dead. I am reasonably well-medicated. There is a shakeup at work, the regional manager of 25 years is leaving for greener pastures, and the incompetent coworker who has bedeviled me for years is becoming the store manager even though she doesn't have the common sense God gave a gnat, but I don't really care about any of that because...
I am dropping to part-time, and am going to be trying to leverage remote work out of them to even further reduce the time I spend in that miserable office.
What am I doing instead?
I am going to commute biweekly to my hometown, in order to help my two little sisters with their various projects. Baby Sister has an organic farm just outside of Troy, which does pasture-raised poultry for meat and eggs (turkeys and chickens-- just meat turkeys), and also has a CSA, which is like a subscription to a farm-- you give the farmer operating capital up front, and in return get a box of what they grow every week for the duration of the growing season. There's also a grass-fed beef operation on the premises, and a cut flower business. They're renting the operation in hopes of buying it when the older couple who own the business retires, but so far that isn't materializing. In the meantime, I want to learn about running a small business and my sister has the knowledge.
The other little sister, the older little sister, ok that's the most confusing method possible of explaining it-- anyway, she lives downtown in Troy now (this is the sister who used to live with me) and works as an administrator. But she has a dream of opening a yarn shop with a physical retail and online presence. I know about running online businesses, that's mostly what I do at work, but I don't know about owning it. Hence my impromptu-apprenticeship with the other sister.
So I figure, I have to transition out of my current job anyway, so I might as well transition family-ward.
I started all this before I knew about the shakeup at work, but I'm feeling pretty smug by now. :)

Anyway. I'm working MTW every week at the old job, which is annoying, but I figure I can deal.

I have a lot of ideas and I'm mostly throwing them all at walls to see if they stick. *shrug* Among the ideas is raising a couple of peacocks for the feathers, but my sister's husband is resistant to adding peacocks to his farm, so I am attempting to bribe him. Which is entertaining.

Comments

[eveiya.livejournal.com]

I still stalk you here too! Mwahahaha etc. Even though I never update my own LJ these days.

Good luck with the interesting new career projects.

Peacocks really are noisy bastards, though. A big house near where I grew up had them in the grounds when I was a young child and they screamed all the time. You could hear them for miles and miles.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I'm aware they're noisy-- but my sister keeps several hundred turkeys and chickens, a dozen cows, she's got pigs sometimes, roosters-- I mean, it's not like the neighbors don't expect it.
I want to hand-raise it so it's inappropriately tame, though. That's my ambition.

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

Hey, I'm happy to come help as slave labor!
The CSA actually gives me a crazy idea of my own...I wonder if any of Quigley's Cakes followers would like a weekly/monthly cupcake subscription. I'm envisioning her delivering boxes of cupcakes every Tuesday or something...

Thoughts on running a a yarn business: Why have a physical location? While it might draw more customers, because of course people like to touch the yarn and really see the colors, you add in huge costs: rent, taxes, utilities, salary of someone to keep the store open regularly. (The last is the one most often skipped - and that dooms the business. I have written about SO MANY businesses in Schenectady which were one-man-bands, and the person would run the business on "whenever" hours - the stores were never regularly open every morning, lunch time and evening, which are the prime shopping times, and weekends? REALLY irregular hours. But paying someone to sit there, at $10 or maybe $15 an hour, to sell maybe that much an hour in yarn? Problem.)

My friend Tisha resolved this nicely up in Greenwich by opening a shared-business for crafts. There's about five of them, and they take the store hours in turns and share in paying for the expenses.

In Schenectady, another arrangement: one owner rented out space in her store to crafters to sell stuff. She offered a variety of deals, ranging from a set price per month to a percentage per sale to a work-share.

Another successful arrangement I've seen for crafts (the idea being, you see, that craft supplies are sort of hard to draw in a regular clientele often enough to pay for the person sitting there at the store) is to have crafts plus something like a coffee house, with lessons offered and people encouraged to hang around knitting and buying coffee or whatever.

So I recommend those sorts of out-of-the-box plans if she is really set on a physical location.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Oh Ann used to work for a bakery, out in Chicago...
Some of the CSAs have bread shares, or egg shares, or milk shares, or fruit shares. It wouldn't be that weird to add a pastry share. Or something with a subscription...
It's worth exploring, anyway.
Once your tiny child becomes a little larger you could totally come hang out at the farm sometime, there's a U-Pick garden that's fun for kids to play in, and Willa's only ... 17 months?

We have a lot of ideas about the shop and we're well aware that just a yarn shop isn't *that* viable. We've both been working retail so long we're pretty up on what it really entails. What's the name of the craft shop in Greenwich? Mom drives up there every week for a knitting bee.
The yarn shop being a physical location is based on Fiona's time working downtown in Troy-- we want a space for classes and things too.