I keep thinking about the cost of living increase, and it just keeps slowly creeping up on me each trip tp Home Depot, grocery store or getting fuel. Our bosses aren't giving us a raise each year!
I like the idea of small town living and keeping a lower overhead, and it made me think....
Could you pack up, throw a dart at a map, and start your business over again in a new spot?
I think about this A LOT! haha Living in San diego is expensive. I literally just paid almost $9/ gallon for gas the other day (it was an off freeway station and I was on a time crunch but still. I think I could but I'd probably do it differently. I'd probably need to niche down a lot more to build that base up. When I first started my business I was doing a lot of very simple handyman jobs then grew in to general contracting. I grew the team slowly and it worked over time. If I had to start in a new city (probably a new state), I would take a lot of the big picture stuff I learned and focus on one or two services till we got more entrenched int he community.
This reminds me of the show Undercover Billionaire. The challenge was to drop a successful entrepreneur into a random town and build a business valued at $1 million in 90 days.
That was before COVID. To me, COVID was like someone bumping into the record player at a party. The music kept playing but the rhythm was never quite the same.
Sometimes today's business environment feels like a new Wild West. Back then there was potential profit and actual profit. But there was also potential danger and actual danger. Opportunity and risk traveled together. I think we're seeing some of that today.
With today's cost of living and the rising cost of doing business, can we still afford to be so cavalier about picking up and starting over? Or does success today require a completely different strategy?
