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The person my husband has been working for on his days off from the fire station has moved and is selling his business. The new owner takes over April 1.
The new owner has been an employee alongside my hubby and we know him well - well enough to know hubby can't work for him. There are many reasons, but the principal one is the man is an addict. He's addicted to prescription pain pills. This is not speculation on our part, he admits it, and seems almost proud of it. For example, he told hubby that he met with a potential client (we're talking home remodeling business here) and couldn't remember what he told her or what price he quoted her because he was "messed up on Percocet" at the time of the meeting.
So....our choices are look for another job or open up a business again. Hubby wants to open up another construction company, only this time instead of limiting ourselves just to plumbing he wants to got into general contracting, specializing in home remodeling. Yeah, basically we're opening up a competitive business to the one we're leaving, but there was no non-compete agreement and according to our attorney who is drawing up the papers, there is no legal impediment to us doing what we're doing. We aren't taking any clients with us, we're starting fresh. Most of the subcontractors do want to come with us, because they don't want to work for the new owner either, but again, there's nothing to prevent that.
I'm somewhat excited, because the potential for profit is much higher when you're the general contractor so maybe we can make enough money without him working as many long hours as when he owned the plumbing company. Also, we're not hiring anyone - we'll strictly work with sub-contractors instead of employees which eliminates a lot of the overhead which drove us to shut down the plumbing company - workman's comp insurance, unemployment, taxes, etc.
Still, opening any business is risky. So, keep us in your thoughts and prayers the next few weeks as things get up and rolling. We're forming an LLC, with a partnership agreement with another subcontractor, an electrician that we've known for more than 10 years and worked with many times. If you have horror stories of partnerships that didn't work out, save them - believe me, we've heard them. That's why we're paying for an attorney to draw up the partnership agreement and the LLC papers, so we have everything in writing and hopefully will avoid many pitfalls that other partnerships get into.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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