Top Ramen today... Top Sirloin tomorrow

If you are a new business owner working to build your business while supporting your family, then you know what top ramen tastes like.  As a new business owner you are investing a large amount of your time and your money in to making your dream of business ownership a reality.  You are making financial decisions every day that affect your business, but they are also affecting your family.  Operating your own business requires the ability to balance your family budget as well as your business budget.

The higher your personal or family bills are, the harder you will have to work to build your business.  It is for this reason that you need to sit down and calculate your family or personal budget before you start your business and look for ways to reduce your bills to their lowest possible point.  This will remove some of the financial pressure from the startup phase of your business.  While this may be a hard thing to do and to convince your family to do, you need to remember that Top Ramen today, will bring top sirloin tomorrow.

Back in my young married days my husband and I talked about starting our own business.  At the time we were newly married, about a year into it and expecting our first child.  I was working full time as a payroll manager and he was working full time as a contractor.  We were making good money between the two of us and lived in a nice 2 bedroom apartment in Los Angeles.  We wanted to start our own business, but we had a baby on the way and we were not sure if we could handle it financially.

The first thing we decided to do was reduce our monthly bills so that I could stay be a stay at home mom.  This meant that I had to sell my beautiful new car to get out of the monthly payment and purchase a used car with cash.  This was the first step and it was painful to say the least.  I had worked very hard in order to reward myself with that new car and here I was less than 2 years later getting rid of it.  My husband also had to sacrifice.  He had to sell his car and purchase a very used truck that was better suited for construction work.   He also had to give up smoking 2 packs a day and drinking 4 espressos a day. 

We had managed to cut our bills down by roughly 20%, but we were still looking for another big savings before the baby arrived.  The only thing left to reduce was our housing expense.  This meant that we would have to find a cheaper apartment to live in.  The hunt was on for an apartment in the same area for that was at least $100 to $200 less.  As my belly got bigger the search became more frantic.  Finally, in my 9^th month of pregnancy we found an apartment 4 blocks away that was $150 a month cheaper.  We moved into the apartment on my due date.  I do not recommend this to anyone.  It was not a fun experience to say the least.  I was as big as a house, I had to go to the bathroom every 10 minutes, I could not lift anything, I couldn’t bend over to see what was in what box, I was always hungry, the baby was kicking and moving all day, and to top it off it was raining too. 

The point is….we lowered our bills as much as we possibly could in order to become a one income family on our way to being small business owners.  You need to be willing to make adjustments in your personal life in order to create a business life.  When we were finally ready to start our own business we cut our bills down even more.  How is that possible you ask?  We moved again.  We took our little baby girl and moved out of Los Angeles and relocated to a small beach community in Ventura where we rented a 1 bedroom guest house in that backyard of a retired school teacher.  We wanted our own business and we wanted to be able to stay at home with our child. 

On the day we started our business our rent was $450 per month and we operated the business from our garage.  In total I think our bills, personal and business, were $1000 a month.  This was the absolute lowest we could get our bills without being unhappy.  You never want to be unhappy about your sacrifice or it leads to problems in your household.  We ate top ramen, but we knew some day that we would eat top sirloin.

We stayed in that guest house for a few years until we had a second child and hired an employee.  At that point there were just too many bodies in that small space.  While those times were very tight and our family budget was minimal, I have to say that those were some of the best times of my life. We worked hard and we grew our business at a steady pace without putting too much financial pressure on ourselves. 

So what does all of this mean to you as a new business owner?  It means that your family budget directly affects the amount of time and energy that you need to invest in the start-up or expansion of your business.  You need to communicate with your family the need to lower your monthly expenses and cut out the fat from your budget.  You need to explain that the sacrifices you make today will make it easier for you to build your business for tomorrow.  This is a critical step in your quest for establishing or expanding your business.   Everyone in the family must be will to make the sacrifice and understand that you will only be eating top ramen for a little while and you will get top sirloin one day.