Finding Your Next Gig In Your Garage – Part I
February 10th, 2010It’s darn hard being a glass half-full kind of guy these days. Last March the jobless ranks swelled to 13.2 million, pushing the unemployment rate to 8.5%.
Some of those folks will land on their feet in the same industry. Others will re-invent themselves. And still others will head for … their garages.
Recessions have birthed myriad entrepreneurs. Following is the first of three in upstate New York who have used bumps in the road as motivation to back out the Buick and set up shop within walking distance of their mailboxes.
Tim Gardner, 55, St. Lawrence Valley Roasters, Lisbon, N.Y.
For many of us, coffee and the morning paper is part of the daily routine. Gardner, recently retired from a job working with the mentally disabled, had home-roasted his own coffee for several years. He figured he could do the same for a few customers. After a lot of reading, “I eventually started understanding the coffee roasting business and what was involved,” he says. “I talked it over with my wife, and she agreed that I could use the workshop in our garage.”
In June 2008, Gardner borrowed $10,000 from the bank using an unsecured line of credit and got another $20,000 from a local economic development agency in October. The plan: sell coffee to retail customers via his Web site and his wife’s gift shop, and wholesale it to regional gift shops, natural food stores and coffee shops.
Then came the hiccups–like getting a handle on expenses. “I didn’t follow my business plan and purchased too much coffee,” he admits. “I thought having more would help me sell more.” (Gardner recouped part of those losses by peddling his overstock on eBay.) Nor did he properly account for the costs of packaging, utilities and his own time–all of which made pricing his coffee that much harder: “I more or less made up prices with no real basis to start from,” he admits.
Harder still, other start-up costs to outfit the garage were higher than anticipated. A new electrical entrance, to handle the additional power requirements, ran $1,500; adding running water sopped up an additional $1,200; and the duct work used to vent the roaster increased drastically in price because Gardner made some incorrect assumptions about what a vent actually meant.
“State code required a commercial vent system that doubled the price from the residential vent systems for fireplaces that I was familiar with,” he says. “I went from my estimate of $1,000 to over $2,000.” He also ended up buying a different roaster than he originally projected–another $1,000 out the door.
All worth it, he says: “The best part of self-employment is not having to fix problems caused by others’ poor decisions. I can work when I want, try things that I want and learn from my own screw-ups.”
Thanks to some local press, customers are lining up. Several new restaurants and Potsdam College, a local state university with just under 5,000 students, sell St. Lawrence River Valley Roasters exclusively. While the company isn’t churning out enough to live on, it is growing and self-sustaining. For now, Gardner quips, “as long as I am willing to work for free, I get good coffee out of it.”
For more information, visit forbes.com.