Forrest Gump - 1994: Paramount

As most of you know by now, I’ve been running my own business for over 2 years now. I can safely say (since we don’t have kids) that it has been the singularly most frustrating and rewarding thing we’ve done. I hear they’re more of the same, so business should be extra fun when that time comes.

The business has largely been the reason I’ve decreased my writing frequency and topic quality over the last 3 months, especially. It’s just plain been rough, but there are patterns and cycles based on the calendar and other strange things. Here are a few of them:

• Full moons – we are the furthest thing from superstitious that you can find, but Beautiful and I both agree that people are just plain weird on full moon days. I don’t have any scientific reason for it, but after both of us working in customer service positions of some sort for a combined 18 years, there is a definite connection of weird people stories being escalated on those days.
• February – my saddest month each year, even though my company anniversary day is on Groundhog Day. Sales in February are miserable! I think people get their Christmas credit card statements or just paid their January 15th estimated taxes and have nothing left for working on their online presence.
• June – well, it just so happens to be June, doesn’t it?: our best month! There is something about June that just makes people step into the batter’s box and get things done. Last June, we took a 1-week vacation and still made more than 3x what I needed to at the time to make our household budget work. This month, well, I’ll tell you after this list.
• Jan. 15th, Apr. 15th, Jun. 15th, Sep. 15th – my 4 least favorite days of the year. Those not in the know, those are the days the IRS demands that we pay homage to their tax code based on what we think we will earn the next quarter, plus the actual tax day. The first year, we didn’t pay quite enough and owed a lot in April. The second year, we paid a lot, lot more and still owed money. Last year, we paid a lot, lot, lot more and still owed. So… this year, we’re paying what the CPA recommends and see if we hit the mark this time.

Oh, look! It’s the end of the list.

Back to this month. What a rush! [Read more…]