[Mike Halliday]

Poor!! You don't know what poor is!

4 holidays  this year..... ONLY 4 .........and last week my wife told me not to have the truffle juś on my  steak as it was an extra £14

Times are getting hard

[tim handley]

 i feel a four yorkshiremen moment coming on....................

[Dave_Lee]

Dave I thought you started on your hands and knees cleaning a Carpet The SafeClean way using Natural Sponges  so you must have borrrowed a fiver of your Mum

You are quite right Ian, I did start out that way, but that was part time whilst I was still in the army, I didn't get a proper machine until I went full time.
Dave.

[Dave_Lee]

your loaded Dave and you know it

Ha, ha, one day Colin, I'll tell you!

[COLIN BRIGHT]

Shaun is right...he is skint...in fact it was only last week I had to drop in a food parcel from my private helicopter...poor lamb, in fact It was a lamb I dropped

[Shaun_Ashmore]

All I need now are some matches to start the fire guv'nor.

Shaun

[SimonW]

At the end what are your real thoughts people?
Until he won't be busy enough there is no point leaving his employer to undertake his business into higher level?
Or all decisions in such a situation depends from your bank account only.

I believe if you won't try you'll never know.

[Mike Halliday]

I think our business pays a full time wage for part time hours

 if he is consistanlyly working part time then he is earning enough to pack in his other job........unless he is charging cheap prices or his other job is paying a fortune (and if so why does he want to be a carpet cleaner?)

[Simon Wilbraham]

Hi all,
I work for local governmet (so job as secure as working for the local government can be!).
I earn a decent salary. Nothing amazing but enough to live on and save a bit.
My wife works part time and we have a 21 month old toddler.
I have managed to purchase some additional leave so I can use these days to solely clean carpets.
This will allow me to not turn down business.
On average I earn the same weekly income working partime cleaning (in the evenings and the odd weekend) that I do working full time.
I have taken leave tomorrow so I will be working full day tomorrow. Wednesday evening,  Thursday evening and Saturday morning.
The risk I guess would always be there of leaving a full time job to go alone!
After 12 months trading I am considering reducing my hours in work just enought to cover bills (mortgage etc).
This will remove a majority of the risk.
Fingers crossed anyway!
Simon

[Doug Holloway]

Hi Simon

If you have a job where you can reduce your hours and stay employed then this is a  great way to get established.

Carpet cleaning is a difficult business to get established and I would estimate 1 in a 100 are actually cleaning 10 years after starting.

This doesn't mean the others have 'crashed and burned' but most usually just could not get enough work all year round. Some would have decided that they actually liked the stability of a 9-5 job.

Some would have found it too physical or have back problems and some would have used as a stepping stone to launch other more lucrative businesses.

Working part time is a bit like a virtual share portfolio, it doesn't really matter if things go wrong.

Full time there is no safety net but on the plus side I wouldn't work for someone else now,

Cheers

Doug

[Hilton]

AND,

I hope you are declaring all this extra income to the tax man..

Seriously if you are happy splitting your time then keep going as you are, plenty of people have second jobs such as behind a bar or in a restaurant or such like to supplement their full time income, so it seems you are you have the best of both worlds at the moment.

However if you are serious about running your own business at some point you will have to make that leap of faith.

[Doctor Carpet (Ret'd)]

Coming at this from a slightly different angle....

When I bought my business from another carpet cleaner I spent quite a lot of time looking at his accounts.
It seemedto me that if the business continued in the same manner that it had done under the founder then I would earn the same as I was doing as a bank manager but for considerable less hours work and definitely less stress.

I was also aware that the accounts didn't perhaps fully reflect the actual income of the business. I also knew the previous owner did not work full time but had a very nice life style. So my thinking was that with my " selling skills" I could probably increase the number of jobs.

12 years on I had manged to triple the income by a combination of doing more jobs and increasing prices. With  fairly low fixed overheads this translated into a huge increase in net profits and an income vastly in excess of what I could have expected to be paid in the bank.

Rog

[Kev Martin]

I know sod all about CC but what I do know and believe  is that if you are determined and happy you will succeed  as self employed and the more time and effort you throw at it the more you succeed whatever business it is your in.  There is in my opinion no advantage being unhappy doing a job of work you dislike whatever amount you earn.  In short if you like it and you are reasonably  successful at this stage get stuck in and stuff the other job

[Dave_Lee]

Looking back on how I started and the difficulties in becoming established and the time it took, I think the best advice I could give, would be to save up enough to cover your outgoings for at least 3 months, plus enough to support a good marketing campaign, before you even think of giving up your existing full time job.
Dave.