When we moved from Massachusetts to
Kentucky a year ago the plan was for S to stay home with our sons and rebuild
his pottery business. In the past year we’ve both learned a ton about the
difficulties stay at home parents face, especially those that are also trying to
build a business. To say we were naïve when we went into this would be an understatement.
Incredibly, S has been able to rebuild his studio, launch his website, and
begin producing work for sale… all while providing wonderful care for our sons
and without the benefit of significant start-up capital.
Building up to and shortly after
his launch at the end of last year, we were feeling really optimistic. He
literally sold out of his inventory during the holidays and quickly put that
income back into supplies to continue building the business. Then the long,
colder than normal winter set in and we were quickly confronted by the fact
that our rental property and it’s uninsulated garage where he set up his
studio, wouldn’t allow him to make work not to mention the fact that it doesn’t
have the electrical service required to run his electric kilns he usually uses
for the first firing of his work. He struggled all winter to try and insulate
and build a wood burning heater and set up a small studio inside the house but
progress really stalled out for a few months.
Once the weather started turning,
he started producing work again and was finally able to do gas kiln firings.
Upon opening the gas kiln he discovered that the firing had not gone well and
most of the work was unsellable. He did some repair work on the kiln, tweaked
his glaze recipes, produced more work and did another gas kiln firing. Again,
almost a total loss. Yesterday, he was trying to figure out what the problem
could be and began to disassemble his kiln to do a complete examination and assessment.
I was watching from the kitchen. When he pulled the last ring of the modular kiln
up, the entire floor of the kiln gave away. The whole bottom of the kiln had
degraded to the point of crumbling away and now sits as a pile of rubble in his
kiln shed. So now we have two electric kilns that are unusable at our rental
and a completely dead gas kiln.
We spent most of yesterday morning feeling
pretty awful about the situation. All of the hard work he has done over the
last year to overcome all the ridiculous obstacles trying to build a business
with no capital and two toddlers on hand has come to a screeching halt. At this
point we have to make a decision about proceeding, options range from scrapping
the whole business idea to using the emergency savings to build a cheap make-do
new kiln or, on the really big financial impact side, taking out a business
loan to get him the equipment and studio space that would really support art as
a business.
How do we proceed? At this point we
have very little (financially speaking) invested, do we put the idea on the
shelf for a few years so S can seek other income opportunities while we continue
to focus on debt? Do we dip into emergency savings and continue to trickle
money into the business as a bare minimum approach? Do we go “all-in” and move
to another location that would better support a pottery studio, or rent studio
space, or buy a place and build a permanent kiln and studio? It’s so hard to
decide what to do, we want desperately to be out of debt but we also want to
raise our sons at home and both have careers doing what we love to do.
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