Zebra Heating & Air Conditioning

I haven't had much of a chance to post this last week between work and homework. Oh yeah, and setting up our new business, Zebra Heat & Air!

Chris has talked for years about starting his own company. It gets frustrating to sell a job, watch someone else put it in (half the time wrong or sloppily), another someone else make all of the profit off of it, and then not even get paid a commission for selling the job in the first place. There's just not much incentive to sell a job for someone else.

So, he's talked for years, but has never taken the contractors test so that he can get out there and do something about it. I've gotten him the books to study, and in fact just had to reorder one of them because the new books come out every three years, and guess what?

Right after he quit asshole (I'd love to put all kinds of mean and nasty stuff on here, so I figured I'd better not even get started), he got one job which turned into a slightly bigger job, and then Sandie & Mike's a/c finally died, so he'll be putting theirs in this weekend. So I decided (being the wonderful wife that I am) that I'd nudge him a little bit, and opened a small business checking account in Zebra's name. I've also put in a call to get some insurance coverage, and I'm getting ready to start working on some business cards. I've already set up the company in QB and started tracking costs and profits - and so far we have a profit. A bigger one this week than the last several checks he's gotten from asshole.

We are certainly not at the point of him working full time on his own yet, but if he will finally get started, he can go ahead and get a job from someone else, and work on his own customers evenings and weekends until it gets big enough that we don't need him to work for someone else anymore.

Oh, on the contractor's license thing, he plans on taking the test within the next 30 days. Unfortunately, it's a very difficult test, and it takes most people 3 tries to pass it (at $200 or more a pop), so until such time as he does pass the test, he is subbing under someone else's license.

See the little zebra I found - isn't he cute? Chris kinda rolled his eyes at me, but I couldn't find any stripes for the business cards, so I just tried the little guy to see.