EATING OUR OWN COOKING

When we took back Froghair, we decided that Curtis would not quit his full-time job to come on board until we had $60,000 in the bank as a buffer. We felt that a three-month buffer was a safety net we would be comfortable with and that it would take the pressure off in case we had any kind of a hiccup.

To begin with, we were working Froghair as a fifth priority. I was taking time off to hike in the Himalayas after selling CastleWave, and Curtis had other priorities. We had a part-time college student named Shane who was helping us. In August 2010, we sat down and defined our zig number 1. After looking at our expenses, we determined and wrote down our financial target number, which was that we needed to net $25,000 a month in order to be profitable. We were both dedicated to putting 65 percent of our resources toward this effort.

Other than Shane, we did not hire any employees until we hit this target, so the three of us were doing everything. We had a lot of motivation to reach our goal of becoming profitable before January 1, 2011. We also set a goal to have five new, high-profile brands in place. On December 1, 2010, we officially hit this goal one month ahead of schedule. In November we posted $382,600 of sales with $51,195 in net profit. Now, having hit that target, we celebrated and then turned our skis so we could zag in the other direction. That next step was to begin hiring and adding additional resources, as I’ll discuss in the next chapter.