Surprise, surprise, another article that is not the conclusion of the My College Football Experience series. Sorry to delay that one, guys, but it demands a certain amount of time, energy, and effort that I quite literally don’t have right now.
For the unaware, I was told in late February that I was no longer going to be an employee at AES - my stable, W2 employer. From that day forward, I have poured myself into my wife and I’s short-term rental design business, Hannah Reid Interiors, and let me tell you, starting a business is not always sunshine and rainbows.
I say starting a business because only in the last couple of months have we really devoted 100% effort into this thing… both of us.
I guess, technically, we formed our LLC in late 2023, but we weren’t really operating as a full-time, all-in business until May 2024 or so, and even then, I had a W-2 job, so I wasn’t quite full-time… yet.
Hannah was.
She was able to walk away from her W-2 job at the University of Colorado last March to pursue design opportunities full-time.
She initially got on with a designer based out of Austin, Texas, and worked with her for a couple of months, gaining a lot of experience and honing her skills as a short-term rental designer. That company, we came to find, was probably not ready for or equipped to hire Hannah when they did, and they still had a few things to work out that we just couldn’t quite see eye-to-eye on.
In the couple of short months that Hannah was with them, we were approached about several design opportunities here in Denver, so, ultimately, we decided to—or Hannah, I should say, decided to—leave that firm and embark on our own venture, signing clients here in Colorado to have their properties designed by our newly rebranded design firm, Hannah Reid Interiors (previously Cool Vibes Design Co.).
It has been since May of 2024, exactly a year since I really began my involvement in the company… although, with one foot in my W-2 job as a wind developer.
Until February, that is!
That whole backstory is just to give you guys some context as to where we are today.
Being laid off lit a fire under me and a sense of urgency that wasn’t present when I still had a W-2. As much as I disliked that corporate job, it provided some stability financially that just isn’t present in the self-employment world. Plain and simple.
When you embark on an independent business venture, obviously, there is a much higher degree of risk. We’re really lucky that we have a few other revenue streams working in our favor. Two Airbnb properties and a generous disability rating from my time in the Army certainly help.
With that, however, on the other side of the coin are the three mortgages, several other bills, and the various other miscellaneous expenses that come with social outings, restaurants, and just generally wanting to enjoy our lives to a reasonable degree.
Alas, there is work to be done.
I’ve considered myself an entrepreneur for many years now, but this is really the first venture that I’ve committed to 100%, and therefore the first venture that I have gained a deep understanding into what it really takes. Our livelihoods depend on the success of this business, as it stands today. My severance package from AES will eventually run out. There will be a slow season with our short-term rentals, and then all that’s left is the income that this business produces.
Things are great right now, but they may not always be. This month has been a little bit slower than the last, and that has served as a reminder that working for yourself in this service-based industry that we’re in can be inconsistent, and we need to prepare ourselves to weather those storms and slower months. I think that’s one thing that Hannah and I understand, and are preparing for. Just because things are good right now doesn’t mean we’re taking our collective foot off the gas.
She and I both are quite literally working, at a minimum, 12-hour days. This is the unglamorous part of business building that a lot of people know is going to happen inevitably at the early stage of starting a business, but until you’re in it and you’re stacking these days over and over and over again, you can’t really understand or comprehend this chapter.
Things are always hard before they get easy.
What I mean by that is, you look at Jeff Bezos or somebody like that now on their billion-dollar yacht. He’s hired—this is a critical piece—he has hired the right people that he trusts to delegate his responsibilities and manage and operate everything in line with his ultimate vision.
We’re not quite there yet - hiring, I mean. In the early days, everything filters through you as a founder. Every problem, every fire, every miscommunication, every damaged item, every returned purchase flows through Hannah and I. Trust me when I tell you, that’s exhausting.
We’re approaching a point, I think, in the near future where we can start to hand off some responsibility to an employee or two and buy back some of our time. There is, however, a lot of risk associated with that, too, in maintaining your brand identity and, frankly, the integrity of your business.
In any given moment, on any given day, I have about a thousand other thoughts running through my mind on how to best improve efficiencies in our business so that we can continue sustainable growth.
The long and short of it all is that all the preceding ramblings are why I haven’t had a chance to sit down and wrap up the College Football Experience series.
So, don’t crucify me.
Or do.
I don’t give a shit.
It’s my blog and I’ll write whatever the hell I want. All things considered, I wouldn’t have things any other way.
I know that the investment we’re putting into our business now will yield dividends down the road.
Let me rephrase that.
I know that’s not a certainty, but I know that burning the midnight oil now is necessary for a business to get to that healthy stage where there’s a steady influx of business to be delegated to and well executed by a team of trusted subordinates.
This is what it takes, and this is what we find ourselves in now - sacrificing for, now - for the opportunity to own a flourishing business sometime in the near future.
In what we consider to be our first year fully operating in this business, we have learned so many valuable lessons that will benefit us in the long term - more than I can list in this blog post while keeping it under a reasonable length for your reading or listening pleasure.
I won’t bore you with the more technical lessons learned to optimize efficiencies in our business, of which there have been plenty.
I feel like every single project that we’ve done, we finish with two or three new practical implementations to improve our processes. That’s why experience is so priceless.
Much bigger than any process improvement though, I think more than anything, the biggest lesson that we’ve learned is just to find people that you can trust and count on.
“But Reid, you don’t have any employees yet. Who the hell are you talking about, Hannah?”
No, who I am referring to is our subcontractors.
Our business quite literally could not run without them, or I suppose it could… at a vastly, vastly, vastly lower volume.
What I’ve found with our subcontractors is that you cannot put a price on people of integrity. It literally does not matter to me if somebody can do the job cheaper or faster.
I’ll take a little longer timeline or a slightly larger bill if I know it’s great people that I can trust to execute the vision the way we intended it to be executed. Period.
I feel like in the long run, that’s the best way to grow a business and more importantly, to survive in business.
Surround yourself with those people of integrity.
I think that’s something else that Hannah and I have a pretty good grasp on. Neither of us are afraid to take one small step back if it means keeping our deliverables at the highest quality - not sacrificing for speed, or lower cost, or… anything.
We will, and we have, passed on jobs where the client requests too tight of a timeline that we don’t feel we can deliver them a beautiful design on time with. Or, too small of a budget, for the same reason. Or, they want to work with contractors who don’t understand the nuance of installing a short-term rental property, and looking at things through both the perspectives of a host’s return and a guest’s experience.
Passing on some projects in the short term is what I think will separate our business from other short-term rental designers in the long run.
Contractors aside, we’ve gotten a great peek behind the curtain as to the true colors of some other professional associates of ours. I won’t get into detail, but I’ll say this… as soon as you involve money into any relationship, it changes everything. Even if it may seem harmless, or mutually beneficial, or whatever it may be at the beginning.
The dynamic of professional relationships contingent upon some financial incentive is always subject to change if either party’s financial picture changes in any way.
Period. I’ll leave it at that.
The best relationships that we have in this business with vendors, subcontractors, and other various partners all have the same foundation - we respect each other, and trust in the quality of each other’s work. That’s all there is to it.
We’ll refer you because you do awesome work, you refer us because we do awesome work. We can vouch for each other. With this natural, non-monetarily incentivized relationship, we can both maintain a steady stream of organic referrals based on that foundation.
I didn’t intend for this entire blog post to be a reflection on the journey we’ve been on thus far in developing our business, but I guess this was just an authentic rambling of what has been on my mind as of late.
Hannah and I both are neck deep in this and invested in seeing this business continue to grow and flourish and become the vehicle and the enabler for us both to live prosperous lives full of rich experiences.
That’s it for this week, folks!
I think there’s some value in this one for other people on the self-employment journey, like we are.
Maybe something in here will save you from learning a hard lesson, like we have a couple of times so far!
Until next time,
Reid
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