Business Planning

So with SORT OF a break today (only one student paper that I missed on the server and only two or three that students are trying to faze past me late), I decided to knock off the community college servitude and spend a few hours focusing on exactly where The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc., is gonna go in 2012. As part of our scheme to make a living off this thing, Tina and I need to get together and write a 2012 business plan.

I think we each need to articulate some specific goals, both in terms of what we think this business can do for our careers and our personal lives and of how much we need to earn. She’s apparently knocked out with the Bug today and incommunicada. But here are my goals:

2012:

• Cut back teaching load to 2 & 2
• Gross $26,250 to $36,870 from blogging and editorial work combined

Not unreasonable, eh? Well, we’ll see.

2013

• Quit teaching altogether
• Earn enough from blogging and editorial work to meet all my living expenses after covering business expenses.

 We need to calculate how much we need, combined, to draw out of this business. In Tina’s silence, I did use today’s relative peace to figure out how much I think I need. It’s a range, actually: from the bare minimum I need to cover my present expenses to what I really would like to have to make my life ever so slightly less miserable. In the latter category, I want (but probably don’t need) a regular pool service (once-a-week maintenance), a handyman on call to for honey-do’s, and Gerardo to show up two to four times a month instead of just once a month.

Those services, which almost seem within reason, boost my annual living expenses by about $10,600 a year.

gaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!

Don’t believe me? Here are the actual living, breathing figures:

Jeez. Fifty or sixty grand to live here in the Funny Farm without sinking into the Slough of Despond. Amazing.

“Business expenses” don’t actually run $400 a month right now, though they may once we start joining up the various chambers and networking groups we should belong to. In fact, the S-corp needs a new iMac or MiniMac+large screen right now (±$2000), and I think it’s reasonable to expect that various hardware and software updates will represent a regularly recurring expense.

I can’t even express (without risking a breakdown!) the amount of time I spent just today on repair and yard tasks around this place. I need someone who knows what he’s doing to come here and do this shitwork!!!!!!!!!!!!! And that’s th’truth!

Okay, I need a husband. But I’m not gonna get one of those in the near (or distant) future, so I’m going to have to hire the rough equivalent in the form of Gerardo the Lawn Dude Extraordinaire and Jack the WonderHandyman.

Moving on.

So, how exactly do we think Little Me is going to earn these spectacular figures? Right now FaM earns around $1,800 a year on Adsense (though the cavalry recently galloped over the ridge, so there’s hope).

Eighteen-hundred dollars being negligible, we move further on. Teaching nets about $12,725 a year and Social Security returns $12,252, for a munificent more or less reliable (if irregular) income of $24,978 a year.

God help us.

This means that the S-corporation is going to have to earn some serious dollars in 2012 if Yours Truly is not to sink beneath the waves.

Let’s try to keep calm here.

I hate teaching, and I especially hate teaching freshman comp. Therefore in my Ideal Universe I would teach nothing at all.

Here is what the S-corporation (i.e., Funny about Money + The Copyeditor’s Desk) would have to earn if I declined to teach any community college courses:

[emits maniacal laughter]

You understand, $35,875 is more than I earned when I started teaching full-time at The Great Desert University, and $46,496 is one helluvalot more than I was earning at the time I escaped teaching into a quasi-administrative position.

Oh well. This is 20whateveritis. Moving on.

Now, if I were to teach two sections a semester, the net proceeds would ALMOST cover my share of the upside-down mortgage on the Downtown House, which inflates as each year passes. So, what happens if I do that?

Left is HAVE to earn; right is WANT to earn.

Okay, 2 & 2 isn’t intolerable, especially if the online course makes every semester, which so far it has done. It would mean I’d have to drag out to campus to meet only one class, and if I begged appealingly enough, His Chairmanship might grant me a once- or twice-a-week section.

What we’re seeing in the bottom line here is the amount I would need for the S-corp (FaM + The Copyeditor’s Desk) to earn over 12 months. Really, $27,000 to $37,000 is not far out of line, as we’ll see in a few minutes.

The maximum number of courses I’m allowed to teach is (theoretically) three a semester. And, one might add, that’s more than quite enough. How much would the S-corp have to make if I were teaching a miserable 3 & 3?

Okay, so, not counting the amount that Tina needs to earn to keep food on the table for her and the Kidlet and to keep the Kidlet covered by healthcare insurance (Tina has given up on trying to cover herself), just for me alone The Copyeditor’s Desk will have to earn between $21,432 and $32,052, assuming I grind my way through three sections a semester.

Gasp!

Things are desperate, but not as desperate as they seem.

The 2012 goal (for me alone, pending word from The Kid) is to drop back to teaching 2&2 and to earn gross $28,247 to $38,867 from The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc.

Adsense is paying about $1800 a year (on average, $150 a month…and oh, yes, dear Google, what you are paying is not enough for me to give a fig if you take offense at my revealing these numbers). IMHO, the total amount CED is earning must be replaced with an amount that will add up to the totals needed to support me, my dog, and my home.

Let us assume Google does not notice I have blurted out the amount its exploitive service actually earns for a PR 4 site, and that this amount continues to flow in. Here’s what this would look like if I taught nothing, if I taught two sections a semester, and if I taught three sections a semester, with the number of $60 hours I would have to work to make ends meet in each scenario:

Hmmm. Really? REALLY????

What kind of workloads would be involved in cranking enough to live on, in these different scenarios—not teaching at all, teaching just two sections a semester, and laboring under three grossly underpaid sections a semester?

Hoooowww many hours would I actually have to WORK under which conditions?

This is where things get interesting….

When you teach three sections a semester, even though the community college district pretends you’re not working half-time and therefore are ineligible for any benefits, you’re actually putting in about 60% of a 40-hour week: right around 24 hours a week. Two-and-two amounts to about 50% FTE, or 20 hours a week.

Let’s recall, too, that some days ago we posited that for each billable hour of our $60 time, we must put in an equivalent hour on marketing.

With those factoids in mind, here’s what we come up with in contemplating what we really would like to have by way of living a moderately comfortable life here at the Funny Farm and what we absolutely positively have to get in order to survive (want to earn and have to earn):

This is kinda interesting: the fewer hours I teach, the more I earn.

Well. Of course. If you’re earning three times as much per hour, you should in theory have to work a third as many hours to make the same amount of money.

Teaching three sections a semester and earning the bare minimum needed to support myself and keep me in my home, I would be working 61 hours a week. As a practical matter, that is about what I’m working right now, and earning nowhere near enough to make ends meet.

But if I were to shuck off all the teaching and substitute those hours with decently paying work, I would earn enough to live reasonably well. The fly in that ointment, of course, is that I have no idea whether I can get enough editorial work to take up the slack.

Still…eleven to fifteen hours a week doesn’t seem far out of reason. Especially if I’m spending an equivalent number of hours in marketing.

So. It’s entirely possible that the only way I’ll ever get the workload down to a manageable 45 or so hours a week will be to quit teaching and generate a reasonable number of $60 hours in editorial work.

What if I quit writing Funny about Money, which in a light week takes up about 7 hours of my time and in a more realistic week consumes about 21 hours?

Well, $1800 a year divided by my $60 an hour earning potential = the equivalent of 30 hours of editorial time spent on blogging. Divide that by 50 weeks (I figure I deserve 2 weeks of vacation time in a year) and you find that I could earn the same amount by adding .6 hours a week to the editorial work. Let’s round that up to one whole hour. Then what would the workload look like?

Which is to say that if I were to quit teaching and quit blogging, I could make ends meet by working less than half the number of hours I put in as we speak.

Isn’t that interesting?

Well, I like to blog. But I will allow that it takes up an awful lot of time.

It has to be added, though, that recently Adsense has not been the sole source of this site’s revenues. In September ad income generated enough to cover that insane mortgage payment, and this month it came very close. Plus I have two e-books in the wings, and I’m told one can earn a little from those, given some decent marketing.

So, I’m thinking FaM needs to remain part of the 2012 business plan. I’m going to give it until the end of next summer (when I don’t expect to be teaching and so will have more time to devote to marketing and Copyeditor’s Desk work). If I can get at least two e-books on the market, and if sales of ad space and appropriate, relatively inoffensive paid links come through, the site may earn enough to justify the time it takes. If not, by the end of August I’ll have to decide whether to continue the folly or not.

Meanwhile, the goal is to drop the teaching load to 2&2 in 2012 and to nothing in 2013. The strategies are to emphasize sales of ad space and inconspicuous paid links on the website, to publish at least two and preferably three e-books by August 2012, and to market the editorial business vigorously to other business through a networking campaign, ads in local law and medical journals, and some strategically placed ads.

You know… If all that’s required to make a living on this is 12 to 15 hours of marketing a week and 12 to 15 hours of copyediting, Tina and I working together should be able to make this business fly.

In theory.