So I have been absent here since 2020, a ton has changed for me since then. But lets rewind a bit.
In 2018 I was injured on the job, which kept me at home for the next few years while I tried recuperating and going through surgery.
The surgery was unsuccessful, and I was ultimately declared permanent and had to go through the process to get a service-connected disability pension.
This pension is pretty small, so I realized I was going to need a new career. So I went back to school, re-enrolling at Western Governors University, and pounding out my bachelor's degree in an IT field in 6 months.
I bounced around a few months looking for a job, but everyone was short-changing market rates. So I wound up starting my own business instead.
Initially, this was providing remote computer repair and web design locally to business and residential customers. I landed a pretty cool contract providing IT services for the state fire camps.
Was an interesting and cool experience, but ultimately just not enough money in it since I had to be on-call 24/7 for 6 months straight.
But my actual business took off. Working from home and building it from scratch I managed to net around 25k the first year. It came to a point that I was bottlenecked. So I opened a physical location late last year, and everything went through the roof. I wont go into numbers of my current endeavor, but I have been increasing sales 20% each month, everything was paid for with cash from the previous years profit, and I could never be happier.
I did liquidate most of my hive through this process, a sign I budgeted was 5k more than I anticipated, so it was a good thing I got into this thing.
I will try to think about posting more, but I am literally always working right now. So we will see. I do enjoy this community but posting daily is hard.
If you are on the fence about starting your own thing just do it!