It's funny how things get started - Day 1

I like to consider myself finincially independent.  Whatever that is supposed to mean.   To me it boils down to making enough money through investments and self-employment to pay the bills.  That doesn't mean having a yacht or 3 vacation homes.  It means just getting to a point where the bills are paid.  The hope is that if you can get to that point, maybe you can work a little longer and save up a little bit of a nest egg before quitting your day job or you can quit your day job to pursue your life's dream, whatever it may be.  When I started my first business, financial independence didn't cross my mind.  I was just hoping to retire at 55 and knew I would need some sort of income or savings between 55 and 65 (or whatever retirement age is these days).  So I thought that I needed to figure out a way to make more money than I was currently making to ramp up the net worth. 

So in 2010, I met with a friend of my parents, Scott and Laura.  He owned a couple hundred fast food franchises around the midwest.  My parents set up the meeting for me to talk with him about starting a company of my own (as I had hinted to my parents that I was thinking about doing).  Well, Scott and Laura walked me through how I could get funded and how to move forward.  When the meeting ended, they said, "your homework is to send us your business plan".  They didn't say I should start working on one or do you have one.  I understood this as, put your money where your mouth is. 

Over the next 3-4 weeks I spent just about every evening researching or writing that business plan.  I also had to figure out how much my typical job was going to yield and how much equiment was.  This was a second fulltime job and my wife was not impressed.  This took way more work than originally thought. 

From this homework assignment, I started soliciting banks to fund my new business.  I settled on a small community bank that was willing to take a chance on someone they felt had good industry experience and would be a hard worker.  In mid 2011 I quit my job as a civil engineer to start a railroad construction company called Ready Rail LLC.  Over the next 4 years my wife and I killed ourselves to make it work.  It went well and after 4 years we were approached by another construction company to acquire us.  We worked out a deal and I went to work for them, albiet with a little money in my pocket.  With the money, we bought two warehouses; a mini-storage and a maxi-storage across the street from each other in Prescott, WI.  We cut our teeth on that while working our day jobs.  We then bought another property to build more maxi-storage and a small retail building in Green Bay, WI.  While working I built up our maxi-storage and was able to make it work while working fulltime.  We eventually sold our mini-storage and our property in Green Bay to concentrate on the maxi-storage business and buy another piece of property to develop in Hudson, WI.  That was the straw that broke the camel's back.  It was time to quit my job to concentrate on this fulltime. 

We had reached financial freedom, albiet just barely, but we knew there was upside in future buildings and the new property that we were going to develop.  So the beauty of the financial freedom for us was that we'd get to concentrate on real wealth building fulltime.  I'm not sure if I'd have been able to do this next project while working.  At least not the lead up to construction.  Tons of paperwork and back and forth that would be next to impossible working at a full-time job. 

So from that simple meeting, from which I got some homework,  we've been able to change our life.  It has now been 9 years but we've increased our net worth about 7x over those 9 years.  There is just no way that we could have done that working a job (a very good job, even) and saving $15,000/year maxing out a 401K.  I've totally stumbled upon this idea of financial freedom and wealth building but I like to think it saved me from the rat race.  I could certainly lose it all within the next 12 months, but the lessons I've learned are invalueable.  I think I could build this same wealth in 1/2 the time if I had to do it again.  The journey was the important part.

So next time you're wondering if you should or shouldn't just remember it can start with something as simple as writing a business plan.  It can take a year to write.  It's okay.  Just starting and continuing is the important part, not speed.  But you do have to continue and to persevere, no matter how little.  Start your snowball today.  Before you know it it will be the size of a small car, then a house, then a planet.  Start small....