excels at mediocrity

I used to draw house plans. A lot of house plans. I enjoyed it quite a bit to be honest. I would do the design work, see it built in the field and decide what I thought worked and didn’t. Next time i would implement the ideas that i liked, discard the ones i didn’t. Plans got better over the years. After a while, being in the market we are in it started to get a little old. Drawing plans that were so similar, clients not wanting to try anything new. I grew tired of it.

The other problem is that i started a couple of businesses over the years that take up a lot of my time. They also generate income that is not directly tied to the amount of time that i personally put in. With house plans i didn’t get paid until the project was done, sometimes not for months after. And if I could only do 5 projects a month, thats all i could do. I’m capped out. This is a hurdle of running a business that is basically selling your personal skills. If you are doing something that you can charge a lot for, it works well. In our market, people don’t want to buy house plans at all, so when they do pay they don’t want to pay a lot. So unless you can clone yourself, you don’t have a lot of room for business growth. You couldn’t keep an employee long because you’d be training your competition. It’s a dilemma.

I still like drawing plans to a certain extent. But just at my own terms. Its not fun anymore designing them for other peole. I don’t know why. It lost it’s luster. Bad thing is I have people asking me to all the time because they have been past customers or have seen plans I have designed. I kept doing it even though i was really short on time for quite a while. These days I just don’t want to. If i have time off from work, i want to be home making plans with my family.