Quiet Promotion

Do not transfer anything anywhere until the agent has the seat held. That is the mistake that costs people, and it is much easier to make when you are excited that you finally found the flight.

The other side of it. We waited eighteen months, mostly by accident because of a job move, and bought in a market where nothing was selling and we were the only offer on the table. We got a reduction and a seller who paid for half the repairs on the survey. So yes, waiting can work, but it worked because we were ready to move fast when it got quiet, not because we predicted the quiet.

Use the quiet weeks rather than trying to fight them. January is when I do deep cleaning, staff training, supplier reviews, photographing the menu for the year, and taking my own holiday. Trying to discount your way out of a seasonal trough mostly trains your regulars to wait for discounts.

Narrow the category, raise the price, shorten the proposal. Volume of applications is not the constraint you think it is.

Dimming the room lights matters as much as the screen, and people usually only do the screen half. Overhead light off, one lamp on, from 10pm.

worth thinking about which one you want to be in three years, because the answer changes what you build. services fund the software beautifully and they also eat exactly the hours you would need to make the software good enough that nobody needs onboarding.

Practical one: split your daytime sleep deliberately rather than failing at one long block. Four hours right after the shift, up and about for a few hours, then two hours before you go back in. A lot of long-term shift workers I know landed on this rather than fighting for an eight hour stretch that daylight will not allow.

Do not reprint 400 menus for this. A small printed insert or a discreet sticker over the two or three affected prices costs about 20 and buys you until March, at which point you reprice everything properly in one go. Customers notice a reprinted menu with everything up far more than they notice two items moving by 60p.

The thresholds are the answer and you are nowhere near them, but here is the structure so you can check it yourself as you grow.

States set an economic nexus threshold based on sales into that state. The most common figure is a hundred thousand dollars, with several of the largest states set considerably higher and a couple of others in between. Some states historically also counted a number of separate transactions, commonly two hundred, as an alternative trigger, and states have been steadily abandoning that test in favour of dollars only. Illinois dropped it at the start of this year and Kentucky is dropping it later in the year, and more will follow.

At thirteen thousand a year total, across fourteen states, no single state is close on dollars. The transaction count test is the only theoretical route to a registration for someone your size, it is per state, and the list of states that still use it keeps shrinking.

The other thing that matters more than any of this at your stage: whether software as a service is even taxable in a given state varies. Some tax it, some do not, some tax it differently depending on how it is delivered.

I had been comparing gross revenue against a wage bill, which is not the same comparison at all. Recalculating.

I had not considered mounting outside the recess. That is exactly where my halo comes from.

Do write a proper agreement about hours, keys, insurance and who owns the client relationship before anyone moves in. Two people I know did this on a handshake and both regretted it.