Life Lessons: Building a Good Team
Garage Door After the Repair
To say the last two weeks has been rough is probably an understatement. Not my husband just had a massive stroke rough, not even close! But… more like getting hit with one life lesson after another rough as it pertains to managing your property and running a business on your own kind of rough: the former being an outcome of my husband having a stroke.
That said, life lessons are always an opportunity to learn and to grow, so I thought I’d devote this blog post to sharing my life lessons and what I’ve learned from them.
Life Lesson #1: When you hire a contractor and they give you a bid, make sure you have in writing that the bid covers a contingency fund. You do this because if they go over their bid in construction, there is money to cover the overage and you don’t discover later that corners may have been cut in the construction to stay on budget! It might take a year or two before you discover said ‘cut corners’ but they will make their presence know and most likely at an inopportune time!
Life Lesson #2: This one relates to the above scenario… trust your gut! If you are dealing with things that you are not familiar with, trust your gut. This is a hard one to do as I find people are always prone to second guest themselves, myself included. In trusting your gut, you also must learn not assume the people you hire are the expert. If something feels off, trust that feeling and do something about it. Just because the person you hire to do the work is nice to you and you feel like you have a good relationship with them, remember… its business and they are in business for themselves at the end of the day. If something feels off, research, investigate it further and get a second opinion, don’t just believe what they say because it is easier…. Easy might come back and bite you in the butt in the long run!
Life Lesson #3: Hire a good team and once you do, keep them! I am currently in the process of doing this one. Owning a home, acreage and farmlands, or a very big garden, requires maintenance. Find a good plumber, once you have them use them for all your plumbing related jobs. Don’t hire a handyman, or a contractor…. to take on plumbing… it’s a crap shoot if you do, meaning you have a 50/50 percent chance they will do the job correctly. If you are on the losing end of that crap shoot you will be paying to have the job done twice. The same holds true for electricians! Having a good master plumber or electrician on your team is like winning the lottery (although I’ve never actually won the lottery so perhaps that is not a good reference… but you get the idea!) The same goes for a good contractor!
Life Lesson #4: If you discover you have a “bad apple” on your team, get rid of them! Forget the concept of loyalty when it comes to things like this… it is survival of the fittest and if your plumber, electrician, handyman or contractor lets you down, it means it most likely cost you money and in this day and age of ridiculous high inflation and the cost of living, losing money because you are being naively loyal is stupid! Cut your ties and your losses and find a new and better team member!
Life Lesson #5 This is a big one… live within your means because at some point SHIT HAPPENS! For the last 29 ½ years Andy and I have not lived within our means… and up until last September we were always saddled with credit card debt! I’ve spent the last year focusing on living within our means and building safety nets. Shit does happen especially when you own an older home, and sometimes it happens many times all at once especially when it comes to home maintenance. The first inclination is to defer the maintenance. We took this approach on our last house in Denver, and it bit us in the butt when it came time to sell it! I learned from that experience and am trying to address home maintenance issues as they come up or at least get them in a timeline so I can budget for them; for example, replacing our gutters on the main house. Unfortunately, sometime unforeseen things happen, and repairs need to be made immediately. For example, a kitchen sink leaking, or your garage door dislodging itself from the wall! Repairing these kinds of things cannot be put off as worse things can occur if they do! This is where the safety nets come into play, get the repairs done and figure out later which safety net will cover the cost! And… if doing this means you have to table a project you are working on or hoping to start, then table it and learn to be okay with it. I’m finding this last point rather hard because I’m a go-go-go kind of person and find stopping to take a breath and regrouping after dealing with a “Life Lesson” is not necessarily in my nature. However, at the end of the day, this too provides a learning opportunity and with that an opportunity to grow as a person.
So, this week I’m taking a moment to breath… to let the dust settle from all these freaking Life Lessons and just focus on what I can accomplish on my own in a day. Then when that day is over, I will take the same approach the next day, then the next and so on… some things are just out of our control, people and situations are two such things but if we (I) can learn from them than as crappy as the experience might be, it’s still a good and useful Life Lesson.
