Cash Flow With Joe

Business and babies

Business and babies

 

I’m running on fumes this morning. That’s to be expected with a newborn, but the last couple of days have been exhausting, especially for Ashley.

 

Last night we got the baby down for the night at 11:30 p.m. by swaddling him on my chest. While I enjoyed the tenderness of those moments, it also meant I was going to need to sleep in a semi-upright position. I adapted and fell asleep until an hour and half later when he awoke needing to eat.

 

I think he nurses just enough at night to eliminate the hunger pangs and fall back to sleep. But since he doesn’t nurse long enough to get full, he’s right back up in an hour, waking everyone up.

 

Poor Ashley is pitiful right now.

 

I’ve been looking for ways to help her sleep for longer periods, and thanks to her amazing friend, Sharon, we now have a few bottles in store that I can help with. This morning, I got up with one of those bottles at 4:45 a.m. and was able to feed Eliyab and get him back to sleep in a baby carrier so that Ashley could get a few hours of consecutive sleep.

 

That carrier has come in handy. Yesterday, I was able to put him in it and get him to sleep while I shopped from home for rehab materials. It was pretty cool. You may want to try shopping from home yourself even without a baby.

 

You see, when we have a rehab going on, I go out and spend time building a material list once all the demo is done. It normally takes an hour or two, but it’s well worth the time. I go room by room and methodically write down everything needed, starting with the lighting and working down to the square footage on the floor. I note switch and outlet covers, registers, doorknobs, trim and everything else necessary. When I get done, I have a master list that saves us from the back and forth trips to Home Depot.

 

While the baby was sleeping in the carrier, once again on my chest, I was able to order the flooring, the finishes (items ranging from toilets to cabinet pulls) and appliances for the entire project.

 

The lack of sleep has not prevented us from doing business, and we’ve had closings to prepare for this week. Now, I’m not going to lie. My eyes have crossed more than once over paperwork. I had a payoff letter, for instance, that I was working on for one of our private money lenders in a flip sale. I typically put all the payoff numbers together for my lender, have them review the document and then send it over to our attorney.

 

We had just closed another deal with this lender, and I copied and pasted some information from the previous letter into the one I was preparing, and I messed up. I left the principle number from the previous deal in the body of the letter. The calculations and the payoff amounts were right, but the whole thing read incorrectly. It wasn’t until after I hit send that I saw the error. I immediately re-sent the letter with the correction, but it was still embarrassing.

 

With that problem averted, I moved on to other things demanding my attention on the rental side of our business. We have some vacancies to fill and also some service calls to attend to. One call was for plumbing and the others, plural, of course had to do with air conditioning since we just had our first hot day of the season.

 

Despite the fact that, as a small business owner, I can’t hit pause when life’s other challenges hit, I know that giving my all to these very different endeavors will pay dividends later that I can only imagine now.

 

And even though it’s hard right now, I am reminded of what Darius Rucker, aka Hootie, said in his well-known county song, “It won’t be like this for long. This phase is going to fly by, so baby just hold on. It won’t be like this for long.”

 

 

And with that in mind, Ashley and I will defiantly treasure this time with our new son while simultaneously keeping our business running.

 

Joe and Ashley English buy houses and mobile homes in Northwest Georgia. For more information or to ask a question, go to www.cashflowwithjoe.com or call Joe at 678-986-6813.

 

 

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