The largest package is the culmination of about a month of work. The bride contacted us right around Christmas, and we just shipped her invitations out today. That order alone is about $850 of the total, and all told it probably took us less than 20 hours of work to produce. That's roughly equal to what I brought home every two weeks from my previous job. Granted, that was after taxes, insurance and 401K. But that was also after four times as much work in half the time (80 hours of work in two weeks). So I'd say this is definitely a better option. :-)
I think I've mentioned before the amazing amount of freedom that has come with making this change to working from home. But I guess it still surprises me sometimes. Between my wife and I, we do tend to work more hours in a given day than I usually did before. But we also enjoy a lot of freedom that we didn't have before. We typically wake up to the sound of our son in the morning rather than an alarm clock. We don't have to go to bed so that we can get up early and drive to work. We can take a 20 minute lunch, or a 2 hour lunch, and no one can tell us any different. It truly is the best job I've ever had.
Another thing that is great about working for ourselves is the professional freedom. If we really like a product we can push it more. If we don't like a product, we don't have to try to sell it to anyone. There is no high pressure selling. What's more, if we decide that a particular product should cost more because it's harder to produce, we simply raise the price. There's no negotiation. We don't have to try to convince the boss. We just do it. If the customers like the product but don't like the price, they'll let us know.
On top of this, we can also immediately decide if we want to give a discount to a given bride for whatever reason. We can provide products to family and friends at whatever discounted rate we choose, and have no one to answer to. It really makes you feel a lot better about your work when you have more control over the processes and ethics of it.
So many people stress out over their jobs simply because they have none of these freedoms, and feel as though they are nothing more than a cog in a machine with no input whatsoever in their work environments. Working for ourselves eliminates this issue almost entirely. We answer only to our customers and each other. As long as we keep our customers happy, they'll keep us employed.
Our business model is much like that of an eBay seller in that we rely almost entirely on our shop reputation to let customers know that we are trustworthy and provide an excellent product. Because of this we absolutely must provide at least as high-quality a product as our customers are expecting. It must arrive on-time or sooner. And we must be able to communicate with them in a professional and friendly manner no matter what. These are the only things that we can do to make sure that their feedback is always positive.
At the end of the day we are both just so thankful to have been given this opportunity and to be able to make it work. It really is an incredible feeling to be able to make a living, especially in today's economy, without working for someone else. And it all comes down to these little packages that we ship out almost daily.
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