New company, new career

[Molynoox]

That is a good point, plus the good pension scheme so maybe there is a potential market in the retired population. Those redundancies had to happen as we transition from ICE to electric motors.

Indeed
My experience of the redundancies over the last 15 years in automotive is that they have been entirely driven by the shift of expertise from high cost to low cost countries and not really anything to do with the change in technology.
Moving away from places like France, Germany, US and UK and into places like Romania, Bulgaria and India. Lots of skilled people in those places at less than half the cost and no real impact as the vast majority of work is done over conference call now and not location specific at all.
The only exception I can think of is software becoming the dominant skill set and thus accounting for the majority of engineering spend on a project.

But you are right about ICE when it comes to the car manufacturers, its a bigger thing for them (we were a tier1 supplier and it didn't really matter to us what happened with the drivetrain)

Martin

 

[Spectric]

Things have changed down your way, I remember the change from Ford tractors to Fiat-Agri, they closed the American Troy plant and eventually shut down the product development in Basildon so another loss of skilled jobs. Where I live now it is farming, either sheep or tourist and hospitality with no high paid skilled jobs but not a bad place to retire to.

 

[mwinfrance]

I would have to market it too. Or put it on Etsy, Shopify etc I suppose.

Why use them, put your own site up and use stripe or paypal ( the latter I would not normally advise, because they have a nasty habit of holding onto merchants money for all sorts of spurious reasons, but YMMV ) "buy now" type buttons.Easy to integrate them, and their "take" is smaller, also cutesy show your competitors to your shop's visitors.You can add another " whatever " sales section to your existent site ( nav included ) easily and sell items from that part via stripe or paypal buttons.

 

[MikeJhn]

It was much easier for me when I was in France there where local markets every day of the week and week-ends during the holiday season, what sold extremely well where bandsaw box's, never took a stall myself, but sold then through the cosmetic and clothes stalls, it was beneficial to them as it brought punters too the stall wondering how they where made, it always seemed the green and red flock interiors sold better than the blue.

 

[Molynoox]

Why use them, put your own site up and use stripe or paypal ( the latter I would not normally advise, because they have a nasty habit of holding onto merchants money for all sorts of spurious reasons, but YMMV ) "buy now" type buttons.Easy to integrate them, and their "take" is smaller, also cutesy show your competitors to your shop's visitors.You can add another " whatever " sales section to your existent site ( nav included ) easily and sell items from that part via stripe or paypal buttons.

That's an easy one; because they have a ready made sales funnel whereas I would have to create my own. I know from recent experience that driving traffic to your site is hard and also not something I have any particular skills with.

Martin

 

[mwinfrance]

They take a big bite though, and their "sales funnel" also shows similar things to whatever you have to anyone looking for your products.SEO isn't that hard ( despite what the SEO "specialists claim ) You can do your own without it costing you a penny.Buying ads in social platforms is definitely not something to do..1000 views = 10 click through = 1 or 2 buyers if you are lucky. Linking to your own site from your own posts about what you do and are selling via social media ( particularly instagram, tiktok, pinterest etc and making things that are interesting primarily to the feminine audience on each of those ( they are different demographics in each platform ) is the way to drive traffic. The "skill" is to be different with your presentation and products ( unique if possible ) and to research your demographic(s).

Run more than one site and interlink them, ignore what Google and SEO "experts" say about that being a bad idea, that is only to get you to buy ads on SERPs and or pay a so called SEO expert to buy ads or links on other sites for you..frequently that means they'll spam on your behalf, which is not what you want.

 

[BucksDad]

Well we are another month on Martin - how goes it?

 

[Molynoox]

A month already? Jeez
It's not going great. I did have another enquiry, they already have planning permission and wanted me to build an annex with bathroom and kitchen. I quoted them and they seemed said thanks and haven't got back to me yet so I need to chase.
One enquiry has gone very quiet.
The other one, that's seems really keen to use me, has found out he doesn't have permitted development rights on his site so he is now going through the planning process.
He is keeping me in the loop but no idea how long that will take.

In the meantime I'm still building them for the landscaping company, here is one I finished last week:

Also, we visited a previous site today to fix a tile and I took some pics of the garden room which we built in the summer, it's looking really nice now

Thanks for asking
martin

 

[BucksDad]

Sorry to hear slow progress - here's hoping for some more enquiries with some easier garden offices and no planning required.

That gym garden room is insane

What material / supplier was used for the fascias?

 

[Torx]

Could you not offer to sort the planning process (where required) as part of your price, to avoid hold ups?

 

[Molynoox]

Sorry to hear slow progress - here's hoping for some more enquiries with some easier garden offices and no planning required.

That gym garden room is insane

What material / supplier was used for the fascias?

Yeah it's a beauty. It has a sedum roof too. And a sauna.

The fascias are metal sheets, installed by a specialist. It was a guy local to billericay. I can get his number if you like.

Martin

 

[Molynoox]

Could you not offer to sort the planning process (where required) as part of your price, to avoid hold ups?

The guy is pretty switched on I think he is doing it as fast as I would. I have supplied him with drawings to help out, and helped with the wording.

 

[Molynoox]

Update:
I won my first garden room and started building it on 14th Aug!
The customers are really nice people and the project is a really fun one. It's a nice big garden room with three rooms, two sets of bifolds for the study and craft rooms and an extra shed / storage area. The site is in Burnham and its a really nice location with lots of spcae for parking and materials. It's basically a dream project for a first one!

I'm having a great time and I'm actually looking forward to work every day. I'm really enjoying putting a smile on the customers face and I'm going above and beyond to get the quality as high as possible.

Here are a few pictures:

The picture above was taken at the end of day 5 (the starting point on day 1 was just grass) - quite ridiculous pace compared to my own build which took me about 6 months

Here it is at the end of week two or day 10:

Anyway, I was planning on doing a build thread on here but there would be too much duplication with the Instagram stuff I'm posting in parallel. Here is the link to that if anybody is interested. Mods can remove if it breaks any rules.

Martin

 

[HOJ]

Result, onward and upwards

 

[Jester129]

Fantastic news! Well done for persisting. Hopefully this job will bring in more work when they show off their new palace in the garden to friends and neighbours.

 

[Molynoox]

Hopefully

 

[NormanB]

Hi all,

two parts to this post:
1. guidance on posting on this forum
2. quick overview of my new career path

Guidance on posting
I have started up a garden room company and I have not mentioned it on this forum up to now as I didn't want to be seen as trying to 'advertise', and also there wasn't any point mentioning it. It's just not the reason I am on the forum, so I've simply avoided any reference of it up until now.

In a recent thread somebody asked me to link the source of some images I provided but it was from my own website so I wasn't sure what to do. Is it OK to do this sort of linking? As I stated already, I am not interested in using this forum to advertise, but there are times when managing the overlap between the two worlds gets difficult / confusing.

Further background on my career change (for those that are interested)
I have worked in automotive engineering for the last 20 years until sometime in 2020 when I was made redundant as our UK offices were pretty much shutting down (cheaper engineering resources were being preferred from other countries). So I decided to take some time off, figure out what I wanted to do and then plan out the next 20 years

It turns out that we needed a garden room so I designed and built one. I spent probably a full year researching the topic before even starting, and then having built it I decided that it could be quite a fun thing to do as a career. There is a build thread on this forum. I had to think long and hard about what I wanted to do - the options were to drift back into engineering or to start something totally new. The things missing from my old career were as follows (straight off the top of my head):
-that feeling of being a small cog in a large machine
-that disconnection from the end user / end product
-I suppose one of the biggest things I didn't like was having to 'sell' every idea - having to explain concepts to people and convince them of the benefits to get them on board etc was a big part of the job (10-20% of the effort) and not something which felt very 'value added' even though I totally understand why its necessary .

I figured that having my own company meant I could evaluate the options and make the decisions myself - that appealed to me quite a bit, although I fully appreciate there are also massive downsides to having all that responsibility too the grass is always greener eh?

So anyway, over the last few months I have built a website, created some additional 'standard' garden room designs, done a bit of advertising and generally tried to get myself setup. There are lots of new things to learn, such as tax, employment, insurance etc and every day is a learning day. Compared to my old job I could describe the feeling as being out in the ocean in a small rowing boat searching for new land?... something of a weird metaphor but I'm going with it.

Well, anyway, that's all I will say for now - if anybody has any advice for me as a small startup I would love to hear it. And of course, it would be good to get some clarity over my other question above so that I'm not breaking any forum rules, I will mostly be keeping my two worlds completely separate anyway.

thanks
Martin

I sincerely wish you all the best for your exciting new venture.

As an engineer (fortunately now retired) I identify with much of what you say.

Just to caveat what I about to offer next ‘free advice is worth exactly what you pay for it’.

My thoughts are:

1. Unless you are taking on employees this is not a ‘scaleable’ business’.
2. On your own - it is a combination of margins, your capacity for work and your productivity.

You really need a clear idea of how many ‘widgets’ you are capable of producing per annum and what investment is needed in tooling (and jigs) to materially improve on that - and conduct an investment appraisal on that.

Good luck.

 

[BucksDad]

Congrats @Molynoox. I saw the post on Instagram appear before you posted on here and figured you must have got one The update you posted today with the soffit is

I know you posted in my build thread but I didn't reply - I'm still working on my workshop ,albeit slowly. However very soon I will be fitting the PIR - can you post a close up of your PIR jig or link to the design as it seemed to work well for you? I should really update my thread as well!

 

[Molynoox]

Congrats @Molynoox. I saw the post on Instagram appear before you posted on here and figured you must have got one The update you posted today with the soffit is

I know you posted in my build thread but I didn't reply - I'm still working on my workshop ,albeit slowly. However very soon I will be fitting the PIR - can you post a close up of your PIR jig or link to the design as it seemed to work well for you? I should really update my thread as well!

yeah cheers James, got one at last
that soffit turned out really nice, I spent a long time trying to figure out how to vent it and not look horrid, I couldn't use my normal cedar battens strategy because the cladding is Cedral cement board so anything natural timber wouldn't go, and I didn't want to use painted battens as the entire build is cement board or composite so I felt like timber would let the side down a bit on the longevity, and just wouldn't look right.
I thought about using button fixes on all the battens and then clipping them into place, but it would have cost me £180 in button fixes, and probably a day labour to add them all. anyway, its worked out great as it is

On the PIR, yes, that was a big upgrade having that jig, everything came out exactly to size and just as importantly the edges are all 90 degrees to the faces - that's often what causes problems with the accuracy and fit, if the edge isn't perfectly 90 / flat / straight then it just doesn't fit into the cavity nicely. Its much faster to cut as well, no marking out, and no need to follow a line. If you are interested I will do an instagram post on it, I thought about doing one but figured nobody was interested I also have plans for a mark2 version that's adjustable and quicker to use, might do some work on that today.

Martin

 

[Molynoox]

I decided to do the post about the PIR jig in the end, here it is.

Martin