u/willi355

Find a way to bring big value and then charge big money. Starting a business is probably the fastest track. Be willing to work your ass off and learn as you go, but go you must.

I noticed that the work I was doing for my employer was saving them millions of dollars and decided to start a business doing it for other companies.

Now I don’t leave the house for less than about $3k. Did a $7k job Monday, $10.1k Tuesday, and a $5k job yesterday. $22k this week in revenue and I didn’t even book Wednesday or Friday. This work will result in 5-10X value to the factories and mines that paid me to do it.

Rinse and repeat. To really accelerate things, once you understand your business model, hire people to do what you used to do - I’m trying to go down this path now. You have to give up some control and know quality will take a hit, but you are literally having other people make you money, paying them a great wage (hopefully) and benefits, and making the clients just as happy as before.

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Yeah, it’s wild how much better the Opus 5.5 model is right now. I used to have Claude on the $20 plan and Codex on $200. That got swapped promptly after the fiasco I had with codex this last week.

I still have the smaller plan with OpenAI since I have a lot of planning and scheduling that I use with my business in ChatGPT, and I want to continue that (for now.). The history there would probably not be as difficult as I think to replace, but I don’t have time for it just yet.

Opus 5.5 was able to fix the shitstorm of a repo that codex has built out of one of my projects in about an hour.

Astra spun its wheels for 14 hours and didn’t get shit accomplished, going in circles trying to get a test that kept failing to pass despite the fact the test was for a function that had already ran and completed its work without errors or problems.

Mine told me it was going to help me “find that bastard” when discussing a complex engine tear down procedure and I was having a hard time finding a stud.

I just wish it were more mainstream. Our local high school, which started a wrestling program in the mid 90’s is still active and last year had more athletes signed up than any other sport.

I made a donation after seeing we had some 90 kids on the team, and when the head coach was thanking me for it, he said wrestling is the only school sport here that has never received a public funding dollar. Most of the sports money goes to football, and exactly $0 of school funds has ever been allocated to the wrestling program.

It’s now the most popular sport and girls wrestling has absolutely exploded in popularity, but they can’t get any funding and have been entirely self funded since the start. Blows my mind.

We run a coffee trailer in a very small town, and we do pretty good on our normal days. Events is where it’s at, though. We do a festival every year where we make in 2 days as much profit as roughly 12 days of normal operating.

It’s hectic and you’re busting ass serving up drinks from early morning until nearly
Midnight, but it sure is nice to see the green show up in the books after.

Makes you appreciate the normal days a bit more too, a more sustainable pace and the relationship building that we really enjoy.

This is what I use too. Strobe makes for a rock solid run speed finder.

Figure out what you’re good at or willing to do that others won’t, and go work for yourself.

Every day as an employee is spent making someone else’s dreams come true.

He's going to love it, one of the most rewarding things you can do. I've been coaching wrestling for the past six years, since my son was old enough and wanted to try it. Some of the kids I started with are in High school now, and seeing them grow is top tier good stuff.

We do what we can. We don't complain much, but we bear way more than I think most people understand. Sometimes it feels a bit like drowning when I think about everything I have to get done and everything that is riding on my shoulders, but what can you do but continue moving forward and putting one foot in front of the other? Great question, by the way!

Also not the sole provider, but the 95% provider and only person working in my one person business.

It’s a lot of weight to bear, knowing if I let things slip, we’re hosed. If I get hurt and can’t work for too long, we’re hosed. We keep a decent cushion of 3-4 months of cash to live on (you have to with the ups and downs of my business), but a slow quarter or two could bring it all to a stop.

Trying to be the absolute best I can at everything is draining. Giving the business time, making the kids games, being a good husband, helping in the community through coaching sports. Everything always feels like it needs more than you can give and you always feel like time is passing too fast.

I see this at a lot of plants that have switched to split bearings in their pillow blocks to make installs / changeouts faster.

Outer race is assembled as two parts, so you always have small seams where they meet. BPFO seems to always show up on these types of bearings.

Don’t forget coil boots. Took mine to a transmission shop, felt like trans was slipping. Coil boots have to be changed when you change spark plugs on these trucks.

Sales is about relationship building. I did some free demo work when I first started out to get that initial trust after showing them what we could do.

Once you’re established and have a good reputation, the free demos become a thing of the past, but it’s a great way to start out and get your foot in the door as a new service provider.

Rule 1 in getting an affordable vehicle is don’t buy a new vehicle.

Unfortunately many don’t play the long game. I see it all the time.

Just last week an established client called for a field balancing job on a critical cooling fan. We scheduled it and they called again an hour later - “we need to cancel the balance job, plant management is just going to run it.”

It grenaded the next morning, resulting in a six figure replacement of the whole assembly and a couple days of downtime at many tens of thousands of dollars per hour in lost production.

Didn’t have the budget for a callout balancing though!

Unfortunately, this is the truth. It all starts at the top.

This is what my business does, so I may be a bit biased, but when I was doing vibration monitoring as an employee at a large-scale mine, the findings were worth millions in avoided downtime each year.

For plants that have high hourly value attached to their production lines, downtime can be very expensive. At that mine, it was between $20k and $40k an hour - there are other mines that are producing 10X that.

If a conveyor motor loses a bearing, it’s a day or two downtime for the production line and lost production that is the real cost, not the cost of the replacement parts and labor. It makes sense if the end-production has any real value that is lost when it is down unexpectedly.

I earned my chops in mining. Can confirm, it provides a great living.

I use it to help summarize data gathered in the field and automate reporting that used to be very time consuming.

Now I have a program that we made that takes all field images, sorts them and renames them, takes the field data, and kicks out a polished report in minutes. I review for about 30 minutes and send it out if there’s no issues.

Reporting used to take me at least two full business days when this was all manual.

Giggity!

Don’t take it personally. You said yourself you’re just starting out, and he’s telling you what you need to work on. Funny enough, the way to get more athletic is by doing exactly what you’re doing. Keep it up and after a season or two you will have improved more than you can imagine.

Have you done any A/B testing of this? I would be interested to see how it performs.

Yes! The concepts in this one reframed the whole game for me.

It's good man. He talks about the stark difference in building wealth between the traditional saving and 401k / retirement path (the slow lane - become a millionaire at 50+) and how much faster you can get there by building leverage over those same years (the fast lane - millionaire in 1-5 years after beginning).

The idea is to basically increase your income stream vs. focusing on saving. The book gives many good, if slightly dated ideas for building your leverage vs. trading your hours for time.