Closing kurjen

Maybe you noticed, maybe you didn’t, I closed kurjen.

In July my wife and I had a hard conversation. A half dozen projects were “only a week or two away” for months but never quite ready.

The sum of the conversation we had was: if I could make $4,000 of new business before the end of July, we could go another month and hopefully that would be enough time to get more work for August, maybe there would be enough time to fix whatever was wrong. I guessed that more construction owners would be willing to work on their business in the fall and not during the summer. That was our line in the sand.

But then the existing revenue for July evaporated when a project cancelled. It was my fault, I didn’t follow up when I should have and their priorities shifted.

I scrambled for a few days but really, I was done.

My sales cycle was too long, the amount I would need almost doubled. I switched from selling to job hunting.

In September, I started at Henkels & McCoy. It was a really good fit when I left and still is. I’m getting my teeth into some complex projects that line up well with my strengths (not managing sales and technical work at the same time).

Jamon Holmgren told me after I started that it would be a struggle to manage getting work and execution at the same time. Until you have outsource one of those to employees or contractors it would always be a struggle. He would know, he built his business in 2008, the most difficult time to do so in my lifetime.

Could we have gone into more debt to try to save the business? Yes, but even with the debt we accrued, it’s going to be a long time digging out. I lost faith that my offer addressed a real need in the marketplace. Or that there was enough demand to support my business. My standard for confidence in decisions required more evidence than I had. The entrepreneurial optimistic fog had lifted. Instead of making assertions, I asked myself, “how do you really know?”

I am, in many ways, an introvert who learned to be extroverted for work. For the 8 months I was working for myself, my brain didn’t turn off. I networked in person, and attempted to get a funnel going on LI. Except at the beginning when things were going extremely well, I was always thinking about the next deal (or lack thereof).

If I’m more honest with myself, my execution lacked the timeliness that could have turned good clients into repeating clients. I was given an opportunity and buried it in the sand. Even though my customers were understanding, I missed my standard by a mile.

Did they get what they paid for? Yes, eventually.

One of the main problems is that more than half of my clients were given to me by one person. Benjamin Holmgren spent years building a strong network in construction and deserves all the success he has. I never put in this kind of work or developed these relationships prior to going out on my own. Instead of putting the weight of sales on an unpaid friend, I should have built this pipeline myself.

Establishing enough trust for deals large enough to make a business like mine work takes time. Smaller transactions translate to a lower trust requirement and a shorter amount of time. Getting a deal for $500 is doable but I would have needed 250 projects a year to pay the extra taxes, cover healthcare, and maintain the same “take-home” pay.

250 projects means a lot of unique requirements, emails, meetings, file management, invoices, payments etc. $4,000 deals have higher trust requirements but are more manageable as a workload. Instead of 250 customers a year it’s more like 32.

I had a product that I sold 6 times between December ‘24 and March ‘25 for $4,000. My hope was to build my business on that.

Even as I write this, I think I could. But don’t believe everything you think. Just because something seems reasonable, just because I can give justification for why it should work, does not make it so.

If I sold the $4,000 project 3x a month, I was doing well, but I never hit that. I sold smaller projects to make up the difference and got feedback from the market. There was not enough demand in my network or I had not built trust with those people.

I floundered from May to July as even the smaller projects started to dry up. I was so focused on getting new work I struggled both in completing the work I did have.

To try to fix the demand side of my business, I worked through Amy Hoy’s Sales Safari, started reading the Heart of Innovation and read about as much as I could by Cedric Chin about demand. I knew that I couldn’t exactly explain why the people who bought from me did. Not with real certainty. I went to construction events in my area, did online and in person networking, I talked to friends about their businesses and really went in as many directions as I could, essentially throwing stuff at the wall to see if anything stuck.

It didn’t.

What did I learn?

What I’m trying to do here is look for possible outcomes given the circumstances I saw then and notice now.

1. Business was great in spring of 2025, I assumed that business would stay that way and it didn’t. Until you have enough information to be confident in your causal analysis, ideally using xmr charts, you don’t know anything.

   Understanding normal variation for your business and processes is the only way to make decisions confidently. You can know something tacitly without going through this process, but that can take years.

2. In February, I hired a coach to help me get more customers. He was expensive and provided little value because I was not measuring him against anything. I had no specific goal and so we made no progress.

3. Recurring costs cost a lot.

   The lower recurring costs that you have the more flexibility you have. Both personally and for the business. With what I was selling, I could have had minimal overhead, but I added to them with software subscriptions (software for notetaking, LLM, booking, website, email etc.). I didn’t have any heuristic for determining whether I should start a subscription.

4. My failures in communication centered around giving bad news. Communicating well is hard and includes but is not limited to, responding in a timely manner (but not being always available), reading / listening thoroughly, and being clear in your response.

5. When I made the decision to work for myself, it was in part because a good friend looked at my business numbers with me and it was just staring me in the face, I was making more money with my side business than my full time job. I couldn’t answer the question, “Why haven’t you made the jump yet?” Despite my queasy stomach about it, I went for it. Just because I couldn’t explain why I thought it was a bad idea, doesn’t mean that it was.

   Doesn’t that contradict with #1? Not, it’s a paradox. When you don’t have data for an intuition and still have to make a decision, how do you do so? In these low information contexts, just because you don’t’ have a good explanation doesn’t make the intuition wrong.

6. Networking makes me feel like a sleazeball. I don’t like being in rooms where everyone is shouting over each other and when it’s a quieter space it’s still uncomfortable. I went to a networking group for about 6 months and didn’t get any work from it, I enjoyed the people that were there, but I don’t think it was a good use of my time. Even though it was only 1.5 hours a week, there was travel there and back, often coffee before or after.

7. Selling is hard when it takes any explanation to describe what you do. I shifted what I told people I did because it was never crystal clear. Was I a consultant? Did I help construction companies with Excel problems? Charging $4,000 for an Excel guy is absurd. Did I solve estimating for growing construction companies? Well, it turns out that is a very small market and I could never say it straight-faced to someone I’d never met.

   My dad is a mechanic. Everyone he talks to knows two things when he tells them that. They know if they need help from him and know someone describes a problem to them, whether he can help.