April 6th, 2019
I’ve realized now that I’m writing this for the both of you, Mason and Charlotte. I just realized that the last blog post was January 23rd a few weeks after Charlotte was born and now she’s 13 weeks old. I can’t stress enough how much time flies.
I quit my job at Minco Auto & Truck Accessories a couple weeks ago. My last day was March 15th. I worked there off and on for 9 years. I gained from that a vast amount of knowledge about cars and trucks. I quit three times actually. I quit the first time to open the Tallahassee Indoor Shooting Range. I quit the second time to go work for my friend James Schiller in Tampa. I quit the third time to go work for Alpha Foundations, and that is where I learned how a company should be ran. AFS is easily the best company I’ve ever worked for in my life, also the most organized and professional. That’s how I’ll model KLD Fence & Deck.
I wanna talk a little bit about what led me to quit my job at Minco and go to work for myself, but the real reason I’ve woke up on this Saturday morning is to write more about my dad.
First, I’ve been building fences since 2014. I built my first fence for a guy named Sean who owned the CrossFit gym I went to named Black Box. It was a solid fence. I built it very similar to how I build fences now actually. I do a few things a lot better now, like the 2×4 separation and the post concrete. Anyway, I built it on the weekends. I was working full-time at Minco the second time. Over the years, after changing jobs three times and doing jobs for people on the weekends, it got to the point in mid-2017 where I was booked out a month and a half on jobs. Enough people knew that I built fences and word got around. I had to start an actual schedule because of all the estimates I was going to and all the jobs I had lined up. This continued at Minco for two years straight.
I was taking you to daycare in the mornings around 8:30 and then going to Minco at 9. Usually, I’d work until at least 6, sometimes much later, with a 30 minute lunch somewhere between noon and 2pm. On the weekends, I’d work 8 to 5 both Saturday and Sunday building fences. Last year, I worked every single weekend, except probably 6 or 8 weekends. Luckily, I stayed about 4 weeks out on work, which was about two medium size fence jobs. Well, nothing in particular changed this year. I just got lucky on my estimates. Half a dozen people gave me a job to do. I was really sick of working weekends, and I had like 8 weekends worth of work to do. I had to make a decision. Either I keep working at Minco (and stop building fences on the weekends) or I quit Minco and work these 6 projects. What made it an easy decision was that it was $15,000 in fences, of which I would profit $7,500 in a month or 6 weeks. I just had to quit Minco and do the work. So I did.
These last three weeks have flown by. I’ve been very busy. My truck transmission went out, again, and so I bit the bullet and bought a new truck. A 2017 Ford F-350 with 45k miles. I’ve been in Panama City a few days doing a fence, I’ve got a big fence in Quincy I’ve half completed, and it’s been raining a couple days. Overall, it’s been an excellent first few weeks. I’ve got jobs lined up until the second week of May and several more on the horizon.
More to come.
Love,
Dad
S.M.U.R.F. 