Coffee heat rising

Business entrepreneurship

Is My Boss Watching?

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LOL! As if by magic, my excellent chair has been showering paid extra gigs on me this week! Did he read the last few days’ worth of rants and schemes to deep-six the teaching noncareer? Maybe he wants me to stay around.

Tempting enough, really. He is such a nice man! How many people can say that about their bosses? However many you guess, you can be sure many, many fewer academics can say the same about the chairs of their departments. A competent academic administrator who manages to retain his humanity is rarer than feathers on a cat.

At any rate, these little honoraria will help make up, in a tiny way, for the summer’s financial drought. And that’s nice.

Meanwhile, work continues to trickle steadily in the door. One long-time client has a publisher interested in (and the hook out for editors at another, even more prestigious house) a collection of testimonios, memoir-like essays by adult children of Mexican immigrants escaped poverty and ended up as academics and business executives. So far we’ve read two of them, both very interesting and in some places quite moving. And a newer client keeps manufacturing new projects. He seems to like our work, for which I’m duly thrilled and grateful.

If the editorial work keeps coming in, there’s no reason why the teaching endeavors can’t come to an end. You know, I enjoy the students, who are by and large interesting and good people. But the sense of futility aside—why are we jumping them through a hoop that teaches nothing for those who haven’t learned, after 13 years of schooling, how to write short essays or research papers and that is utterly unnecessary for those who have?—the amount of time a comp course requires makes it a huge distraction from the effort to get a business up and running.

Tomorrow, for example, I have to leave here at 6:45 to get to campus by 7:30 a.m. I have a meeting on the campus after class, so it’ll be 10:00 before I get back to the computer. Then I’ll have to turn around and race to a Chamber luncheon in Scottsdale, which will absorb a fair amount of the afternoon. Then we have choir practice in the evening. So that makes a day that begins at 4:00 a.m. (the hour at which I commonly write these blog posts) and ends around 10:00 p.m.

Today’s class starts at noon. That carves a huge chunk out of the middle of my day—obviously, I can work around it, but it breaks one’s concentration, and it means that whatever I’m working on will have to stop and start, and also that Tuesdays and Thursdays can’t be used for lunchtime networking. Thursday I have to give a dog and pony show at my 7:30 breakfast meeting, also in Scottsdale, then fly back into town for a doctor’s appointment, then meet the noon class again, leaving only the afternoon to do any editorial work. I need to go by a client’s office while I’m in Scottsdale but can’t do that and make the doctor’s appointment, too.

It’s not that there’s no time to work on the editorial business, but that a lot more time would be available without the constant interruptions for class meetings. On Thursday, for example, I could have made the doctor’s appointment later in the morning, allowing time to meet the client. Whether I can even get to the doctor’s office by 9:30 remains to be seen. In fact, as I think about it, it looks like I probably should call today and try to change that to a less hectic day…if any such thing exists.

 

The Great Escape: How to Make This Work

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Well, for cryin’ out loud. I just sat down and earned $240 for four hours of work.

Meanwhile, Friday the community college district deposited $486.60 for three weeks of work. Uhm…since they don’t count grading and course prep, that actually was for 18 hours of work, not for the de facto 54 hours of work I’ve put in so far this fall.

Do we need anything more to convince of the rightness of my proposition?

So right. So right is it that I even have an inchoate plan. It goes along these lines:

Create goals to be accomplished by quarters. Within each quarter, establish monthly and weekly to-do’s. This should break down some rather large, broad targets into manageable chunks.

How on earth would this look? Well, let’s look at some inchoate schemes:

Fourth Quarter 2012

• Develop plans.
• Lay groundwork to put plans into action.
• Begin marketing program.
• Begin advertising program.

 Looks pretty easy, but each of those four little bullets represents an amazing amount of work and hustle. The marketing plan alone, for example, entails these tasks:

Focus sharply on two specific networking groups.

• Become actively involved.
• Volunteer for specific roles.
• Revisit regularly to perform these roles.
• Gain recognition.

Develop a “presence” in Arizona business community.

• Local Arizona
• Better Business Bureau
• Rent space at appropriate business or arts fairs.

Volunteer actively for two carefully targeted groups that attract active business people and “old Arizona” elite.

• I’ve already identified those and moved to join them (in one case, to rejoin it).
• These activities will require considerable work, energy, and entrepreneurship.
• Set aside time to handle these projects.

Approach mainline national publishers and literary agents.

• Emphasize textbook publishers, since this is about the only part of the book publishing industry that’s still making a profit.

Develop “product packages.”

• This idea comes from our SBA counselor: lines of closely related services that could be delivered in packages.

Develop a social media campaign.

• LinkedIn
• Yelp
• Angie’s List

Launch a public relations initiative.

• CofC’s newsletter: ask about writing a column.
• PBJ: try to pitch columns to it.
• Send press releases to PBJ and other local rags.
• Track down [friend from long ago]’s magazine and try to get mentioned there.
• Try to get publicity for FaM, too.
• Ask clients to plug CED on social media sites.

Advertise.

• CofC’s radio program: get on it.
• Small local publications and websites.
• Update website!!!

Then we have a few other small schemes:

Improve revenues all the way around.

• Raise rates again.
• Market CED to mainstream publishers and major scholarly & scientific publishers.
• Design “packages” to sell at specific rates.
• Create e-books; market on FaM and Amazon.
• Develop social media campaigns for e-books.

Identify at least two types of subcontractors and establish reasonable pay rates for each of these:

• Interns
• Proven professional editors, writers, and designers

Visualize an organizational plan that will provide a way to handle more work than one person can handle.

• Establish amounts that subcontractors can be paid. For example, reserve project management to Tina and charge enough to make a profit on subcontracting her skills.
• Start lining up work for them.

Create a time management program that will accommodate all of the above.

LOL! That’s just for what remains of 2012. Don’t ask for much, do I?

The Opportunity Cost of Adjunct Teaching

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I just sat down and figured out the opportunity cost of teaching two sections of freshman comp, based on the $60 hourly rate we now know businesses will pay me and my sidekick, a figure we believe to be somewhat below market.

Hang onto your hats, folks…

If I teach two sections of composition—just two!—instead of billing the same number of hours for editorial work, it costs me $11,059 per 16-week semester in lost income.

That’s right. The privilege of earning $4800 in pursuit of your children’s higher education actually impoverishes me by more than 11 grand. In one semester.

Here’s a conservative calculation showing that to be true. Bear in mind that it doesn’t include commute time to campus (that would be six hours a week this semester) or the unpaid time we are asked to donate to departmental meetings and faculty development workshops.

Translation: I spend 96 hours in the classroom during a typical semester with two face-to-face three-credit sessions. My graders billed me $1,311 for plowing through the spring semester’s composition papers; at $10/hour, that suggests it takes 131 hours to read and assess a semester’s worth of postadolescent writing. Course prep for those two sections took me four full days this fall. Assuming I only worked eight hours each of those days (a very modest assumption!), that comes to 32 hours of prep time and website management. Thus the total number of hours consumed by two sections over a 16-week semester is 259. I’m paid $4,800 for all that labor, which, when divided by the number of hours required, works out to $18.53 an hour.

Not great, but not so very bad (as long as you don’t figure in the required and expected freebies).

Except…if I spent that many hours working at my editorial rate of $60 per hour (which, as it develops, is a little low), I would earn $15,540 during those 16 weeks.

Subtract the amount I actually earn, $4,800, from the real value of my time, and you get the opportunity cost: $11,059.

That is more than I’d need to earn all year—in 52 weeks!—to get by without teaching any comp courses.

Reality check! Could I actually do that much editorial work in 16 weeks? Let’s see…

Sixteen hours and eleven minutes a week? Somehow I think I can struggle through it.

If you’ll recall, though, yesterday I figured The Copyeditor’s Desk would need to earn only about $6,000 for me to get by just fine in 2013. Fifteen thousand five hundred and forty bucks is 2.6 times what I absolutely have to earn to pay the bills. So let’s prorate those hours over, say, 50 weeks—give me a two-week vacation, why not? This scenario would have me billing all of five hours and 10 minutes a week to earn enough to live rather comfortably, what with Social Security and a tiny drawdown from savings. Or actually, no drawdown: because Social Security covers almost half my expenses, an income of $15,540 would mean I wouldn’t have to raid retirement savings to live.

Think of that.

 

More on the Great Escape

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OMG! The searchlights are off, the guards are dozing at their watch stations, and the way is cleared to go over the wall! Spent the better part of today plus the two hours of free time yesterday studying The Numbers, trying to see if my plan to escape from teaching could actually work. This is amazing. I’ve gone over this stuff several times and think I’ve got it right. Check this out:

After I wrote that cri de coeur the other day, bemoaning my hatred of teaching freshman composition and announcing a decision to QUIT IT, I realized I’d never done a budget for the little corporate entity. Its needs always seem to be more modest than its means: whenever I’ve wanted to spend money on the business (sometimes quite a bit of money, as in buying a fancy new iMac), the cash has been there. Within a month or two, whatever is spent replenishes itself. So I haven’t felt much impetus to add still more budgeting headaches to an already crabby-making personal finance routine.

Clearly if I’m going to try to live on what The Copyeditor’s Desk is earning rather than just using it as a reservoir to buy electronics and pay the cell, DSL and web-hosting bills, I’ll need some clue as to how much its overhead is. Quaint idea, no?

So far, in the first eight months of 2012, the S-corp’s overhead has been $10,700. That notwithstanding, it has shown a profit of $7,260.

If I teach two sections of Eng. 235 (Magazine Article Writing) in 2013, I will need to draw a net salary of $6,000 from the corporation. So, already, we see that by the end of the third quarter it has earned enough to cover four quarters of expenses. This assumes the business will perform at the rather sleepy pace we’ve seen in 2012; since I will have a lot more time and energy (and motivation!) to market it more vigorously, 2013 revenues very well may outperform 2012’s.

Now, in this scenario, about $3,840 pours into my personal coffers from the community college, and a small drawdown from retirement savings makes up the difference, providing enough cash to pay the bills when combined with Social Security and a “salary” from The Copyeditor’s Desk. Assuming inflation doesn’t rise unduly next year.

What if I teach NOTHING, yea verily not one course? 🙂

Then I would need to pull more money out of retirement savings. I’m already doing that to cover my share of the mortgage on the house M’hijito and I are copurchasing. In order not to exceed a 4 percent drawdown from savings, the maximum I could withdraw to cover my own living expenses would be $12,785. Actually, though, about $10,785 would be preferable; this would keep the total drawdown (for the mortgage plus my living expenses) safely in the 3 percent range.

Heh heh heh…. That, we might add, is 3 percent of what remains after I’ve raked 20 grand out of savings to buy a new car.

WhoEVER would’ve thunk it?

After much speculating and calculating, here are the numbers for 2013. Except for the teaching income, disbursals will happen quarterly, since revenues do not yet flow into The Copyeditor’s Desk in a steady month-to-month stream. Over three months, though, enough should accumulate to fill the bill. As it were.

How amazing is that?

I gained insight from this exercise. First, it’s costing more to run the S-corp than I realized. Overhead includes contracting pay for a variety of helpers whose functions run from keeping Funny about Money afloat to editorial, design, and project management. Not counting the one-time expense for the iMac, average monthly expenditures so far have been $965 a month; add it in, and that average jumps to $1227 a month. Yipe!

Second, to keep a grip on large expenditures, I’ll need to self-escrow about $200 a month into an emergency  & out-of-the-ordinary savings account, just as I do for my household finances. This will provide for unusually large expenses, for the cost of the annual report to the corporation commission, for tax preparation, for computer repairs, and for the Costco membership, and still leave something for the various little surprises.

Third, the largest contributor to CE Desk’s revenues is editorial work. Funny about Money runs a distant second; it pays for itself, but just barely. In the near future, I’ll need to revisit this issue and decide whether to continue trying to operate the site as a money-making venture or to demonetize it and treat it as a hobby.

By the time fall semester is over—obviously, I can’t walk now, because I’ve signed a contract (but there are now only 12 and a half weeks left!)—there should be enough cash reserves in the corporate bank accounts to easily carry me through 2013, and, if these figures are right, enough cash flow to support me permanently.

Mwa ha ha! I’m outta this place!

Life Is Short. Eternity Is Long.

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So another attention-getting life-shaker just happened. M’hijito called to report that his dad was going in for an angioplasty Thursday evening. Forthwith, though, they decided he needed a quadruple bypass and scheduled him into an operating room the first crack out of the box Friday.

Needless to say, my son was (and remains) alarmed. To say nothing about how ex-DH and his present wife must be feeling. Apparently the surgery went well. But it’s disturbing. Very disturbing.

For one thing, no one expected XDH ever to be anything other than extremely long-lived and healthy. His mother is still living—she’s pushing 100, and the only physical issues she has are macular degeneration that has made her blind and a lifelong hearing problem that has left her stone deaf. Her father lived to the age of 96, quite well all the way to the end. XDH is only 72, same age as SDXB, who underwent the same experience a couple of years ago. Whether XDH recovers as quickly and as completely remains to be seen: he’s nowhere near as fit as SDXB—never has been a fan of strenuous exercise—but he sure does enjoy good food and wine. And he has some pesty ailments that do not afflict SDXB, two of them potentially life-threatening over the long haul.

We are nearing the end of our journey, we who are on the leading edge of the baby boom. Most bypass veterans survive at least five years; the 15-year survival rate is about 55 percent. That, of course, means 45 percent reach the end before then.

And y’know…the perspective from here sure is different from what it was, even five or ten years ago!

Yesterday I shocked a few readers by proposing to spend an outrageous amount on some overpriced dishes. And by admitting this was a want, not a need…but still persisting in a plan to diddle away money on the junk, anyway.

It’s an apparent about-face, of course. This scheme contradicts everything I’ve advocated at Funny about Money. But it’s a manifestation of a new line of thinking that’s been ticking away in the back of my mind ever since that Mayo doc suggested that the current bellyache could very well be a symptom of a cancer that will carry me away in about six months. Should it really be that.

As I was driving away from that meeting, a haunting thought came to mind, one I haven’t been able to shove back under the rug:

I am making myself miserable trying to preserve capital so that I can support myself during some future time when I expect to be miserable.

Over and over, the same question returns: WTF am I doing????? Making myself miserable so I can be miserable? What is that?

I hate teaching freshman comp with every fiber of my being. After I’d taught two sections a semester (just two sections!) for about four years in graduate school, I walked away with the Ph.D. in hand and this vow in my heart: “I will go on welfare before I ever teach composition again.”

And now here I am, approaching the end of my life, and I am on welfare—collecting Social Security. And I’m spending these last few reasonably viable years doing just that: teaching freshman comp.

I loathe it more than I can express. It’s such a waste of time and energy, such a pointless exercise, and so intensely frustrating that it makes you feel every moment you spend on it is simply wasted. And wasted in ways that are not fun. This is not playing World of Warcraft here. It’s not diddling away your time in front of a movie screen. It’s far from playing with New Yorker jigsaw puzzles. It is hard goddamn work, and it is stupefyingly underpaid.

Time wasted: students’ and instructors’.

• The students have been over all this ground many, many times. We misapprehend when we assume they can’t write a simple sentence or a coherent paragraph, and they can’t formulate a topic for a diddly little 750-word essay because they were never taught this stuff. Trust me: they have been told this stuff. Time and time again. Among the fine young nimrods who couldn’t even begin to come up with a focused idea for the next 102 essay were two students who have been in my 101 classes…and I know I taught the 101s how to focus an essay topic. You wanna know something? If they haven’t learned this grade-school stuff after thirteen years of K-12 education, they are never going to learn it. It is an utter waste of their time to make them spend another year going over the same old stuff they’ve ignored all their lives.

• The instructor spends hour after hour, many of them unpaid hours, devising original and engaging strategies to instill grade-school knowledge and skills into young adults, to no avail. Many more hours are pointlessly spent reading, commenting upon, and assessing piles of student papers equivalent in mass to Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. All of that person’s time, all of that person’s effort, and all of that person’s creativity are just wasted.

So why am I doing this?

Because I’m scared? I am. I’m scared unto paralysis by the prospect of living to advanced old age, utterly alone, and not having enough to provide even halfway decent dotage care for myself.

But of course, there’s no guarantee—or even great likelihood—that I will live into decrepitude. None at all.

The real reason I live like an anchorite, trying to scrabble together enough to barely live on so that I can avoid drawing down a very modest 4 percent of retirement savings, is that I’m in the habit of crimping my life for no other reason than to admire the bottom line in a spreadsheet.

In a word, I’m a tightwad.

I allow my life to be constrained to the point of entropy because I don’t want to spend any of my precious dollars. And yes: I am making myself miserable at a joke of a “job” (which is what adjunct teaching is: a cruel, exploitive joke) so that I can live on something well under $30,000 a year so that I won’t have to spend any part of $550,000 sitting in brokerage accounts and mutual funds, which are merrily averaging 6 percent to 8 percent per annum. For chrissake, the big IRA earned ten grand last month! That’s well over half, in one month, of what I earn in an entire year of making myself miserable in the classroom.

This returns us to that question: WTF am I doing?

Maybe I abuse the whole idea of money. Maybe my ex- is right: Money is to be spent. Not admired.

Hence, dear readers, the impulse to spend a little something on myself. On a want, not a need.

Yesterday, more or less in response to Remy’s and Frugal Scholar’s and Mrs. POP’s surprised comments, this whole train of thought came into sharper focus for me. And I realized: I have simply got to stop teaching composition. As endeavors go, it is just too crushing. It’s interfering with my life and blocking me from being able to build a business that I actually do like and that does not feel futile.

But how?

Well, the train of thought continues.

About 18 months ago, a friend in a business group suggested, with a straight face, that I quit teaching altogether for a year or at least for a semester and spend all the time thereby rescued on developing and marketing my editorial enterprise. Naturally, I smiled; murmured sure, sure; and went on about my misbegotten business. I was dead certain that I couldn’t earn enough at editing and ghostwriting alone to make put food on the table.

Recent developments, however, suggest that is no longer true. With a very minimal amount of marketing, a small but steady stream of commerce has come our way.

If I were not distracted with teaching—if I were not preoccupied with wasting the remaining hours of my life—but instead spent those hours on making my business visible to the kinds of people who would hire us and on persuading said people that they need us more than they need whole-wheat bread and sex, we would have more work than Tina and I could handle together. I don’t think that’s a “maybe.” I think that’s an “absolutely so.”

But even if it were a “maybe,” the truth is, at what we’ve learned is the fair rate for our services, I would not have to work anything like full time to earn enough to make up for the absence of teaching income.

Let’s say, for example, I keep the magazine writing courses, which are easy to prep, easy to teach, relatively low in enrollment, and mounted 100 percent online. I dump the spring and fall comp courses. And during the summer, when more skilled and motivated students show up, I teach one composition section. In that scenario, assuming blog income stays steady and my one regular customer keeps paying me to read detective novels(!), I would have to earn only $700 a month to make up the loss of the composition income.

At $60 an hour, $700 represents 11.67 hours of work. A month.

A single customer routinely gives us more work than that.

And does it or does it not bring us back to the eternal question: WTF am I doing?

Before the end of this semester (only 13 weeks to go!), I am going to tell my honored chair that I would like to keep the magazine writing course but drop the spring comp courses. And I will ask him if he would be kind enough to allow me to teach one or maybe two comp sections in the summer. Then I’m going to work on building The Copyeditor’s Desk:

• Attend at least two CofC meetings a month.
• Take full advantage of all the Chamber’s many marketing and advertising opportunities.
• Volunteer with charitable groups that are favored by the local movers & shakers. Get to know these folks.
• Join the Better Business Bureau.
• Join Local Arizona, a coalition of locally owned businesses.
• Start an advertising & PR campaign.
• Step up the communication with former clients.
• Approach major textbook publishers for project management contracts.
• Approach genre publishers in an attempt to get more of them to pay us to read light fiction.

And if that doesn’t generate seven hundred bucks a month? Welp…$700 a month is 2 percent of retirement savings. Somehow I think I can afford it.

Somehow, I think I can afford to have a life.

Images:

Still Life with a Skull. Philippe de Champaigne. Public domain.
Proto-composition paper: shamelessly ripped off the Web.

Quit the Day Job? How’s about PART of the Day Job?

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The two-year small-business development program for which I’ve applied—and it now looks like we have a fair chance of acceptance—has a four-month “boot camp” period in the fall, requiring a once-weekly meeting that conflicts with one of my afternoon courses. Adjunct teaching can’t be called a “day job” by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s the closest thing to it that I have on my plate just now. Of the three enterprises at which I labor, the part-time teaching job brings in the most cash on a quasi-regular basis.

We will not know until just before the semester starts whether the AAAME program will accept The Copyeditor’s Desk. If we don’t get in, I sure don’t want to forego that munificent $2,400 paid over four months. 🙄 However, I didn’t feel I could wait until the day before class begins to tell the departmental chair, who has been very generous with me, that I’m walking out on a section.

So, I made up my mind to quit part of the day job: to drop the afternoon class that would overlap the AAAME meetings. It’s not like I don’t have $2,400 in my long-term survival savings account, after all.

Actually, over the past couple of months, enough work has come in to The Copyeditor’s Desk that the business could pay me that much next fall without doing itself any harm. Matter of fact, it owes me a little over $3,000 in the form of a loan for start-up capitalization, made way back in two thousand and aught-ten. So I could simply withdraw the equivalent of my net pay, which doesn’t come anywhere near $2,400, as a tax-free loan repayment.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Well. When I went to meet with the chair, he suggested that instead of dropping the third course altogether, I pick up an early-morning Tuesday-Thursday section. That would hedge my bets, and I wouldn’t have to draw down funds from the business to cover base living expenses.

Unenthusiastically, I agreed to this; then realized that at 7:30 every Thursday morning, I’m supposed to be in Scottsdale! It would be counterproductive to enroll in a business development program that’s supposed to be showing you how to market your company while, at the same time, dropping out of one’s main networking group, eh?

So he countered that I should take on a Monday-Wednesday section, at the same ungodly hour.

Ugh. I sure don’t relish traipsing to campus at 6:45 in the morning. Nor do I especially welcome a “full” course load (which it ain’t , but it’s the most the junior college district will allow adjuncts to teach) while I’m devoting a minimum of 16 hours a week to the AAAME project and hustling business and, with any luck at all, actually doing business.

On the other hand…

We do not know that we will continue to get the kind of work we’ve seen this summer. It’s a never-rains-but-it-pours sort of business: you can go for months without seeing a single assignment, and then all of a sudden a bevy of nice jobs lands on your desk. There’s no guarantee that we’ll get any work this fall, to say nothing of enough to keep the wolf from the door.

And, if we do get enough work that I actually could pay myself a little salary and take a little dividend…think of that! Another three to five thousand dollars of income would mean I could live almost like a normal human being!

That would be refreshing.

Even the unholy hour presents an advantage: it will force me to get up, get dressed, leave the house, and meet some live human beings before the real workday starts. Right now, the weekly Scottsdale Business Association meeting is the only thing that makes me do that. Since I routinely get up at 4 or 5 a.m., I often roll out of the sack, walk the two steps across the hall, and plop into a chair in front of the computer. There I will sit, all. day. long, often without getting up to so much as bathe and brush my teeth. I’m getting so little exercise that my back and hips have started to hurt from sitting in a desk chair for hours on end without moving.

Later in the semester, when the mornings cool off a bit, I could throw my hiking boots in the car and stop by the mountain preserve on the way home, getting in a mile of walking before parking myself in front of the monitor. This would help a great deal with the aching joints and the avoirdupois.

As unpleasant as it sounds, having to get up and get going at that hour will actually be a good thing.

Sooo…. Now I’m scheduled to teach a 101 section at 7:30 in the morning Mondays & Wednesdays, a 102 section at noon Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the magazine-writing course online in the second half of the semester. It’s far from ideal—my dream is to quit the “day job” (such as it is) altogether—but it has some things to recommend it.

I guess.

🙁