Today marks the two-week anniversary of my transition to full-time self-employment. I would like to say that the last two weeks has been the South Dakota equivalent of sitting on a beach drinking Mai Tai’s (whatever that would be), but that hasn’t been the case. Today also marks the one-week anniversary of bringing my son, Micah, home from the hospital.
Bringing Micah Home
Karine and I are extremely thankful to have Micah home with us, but we’re exhausted! Visiting our son in the NICU for 6-8 hours daily for the first 71 days of his life was tough. Taking care of him 24 hours per day is an entirely different challenge: twelve diaper changes, eight feedings, five tummy times and two medicine dispensations every day. Just thinking about all of those tasks makes me tired! It also means that one of us needs to be awake at 11:00 PM, 2:00 AM, 5:00 AM and 8:00 AM every day.
The life of a new parent is not easy, but if I had to go to an office from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM (plus a half-hour commute each way), our time home with Micah would have been much harder. After six years of having my head down and working hard, I’ve had the luxury of thinking very little about work during the last two weeks. Instead, I’ve had the luxury of spending a lot of time with my new son and knocking out the pile of papers I have to write for my seminary classes. I’m extremely thankful for the elaborate software system and team of virtual assistants that now run the day-to-day operations of my business.
Plans for World Domination Future Business Growth Plans
Now that things have settled down a little bit at home and I’ve gotten all of my major projects and papers for Seminary done, I plan on taking over the world refocusing on my business starting next week. I have a laundry list of miscellaneous product improvements and marketing tasks for my newsletter business, Analyst Ratings Network that I need to knock out. I’m also running a Black Friday sale from Friday through Monday to my newsletter distribution list, which has now passed 25,000 subscribers.
I also plan on building up my website development consulting business, Matthew Paulson Consulting, starting in the month of December. I have a couple of assistants that can help with the production work when sales start to ramp up. Most of the up-front work that I need to do up-front will be involve setting up a sales website (content, case studies, SEO, etc.). I had done pretty with it before starting with Factor360, but haven’t been able to do much of anything with until now for non-compete reasons. I don’t plan on growing this into a huge business over time, but it will be a nice addition to my other business units, which will improve my company’s income diversification.
Finally, I plan on starting an entirely new online business unit early next year. To be honest, I have no idea what that’s going to be yet. I only have some vague ideas about the process that I’m going to use to figure out what my next business will be. I’ll write more about that as it begins to take shape.
Happy Thanksgiving!
