Oh Hey There

It's been a minute! The last time I wrote was almost a year ago. In my defense, I (proverbially) jumped out the plane and started building my parachute. Or you could say I am Ship of Theseusing a larger ship as my current little two-man (!) fishing boat of a team hauls it at full speed. To put things in context, the elevator pitch of my life since last writing (Aug 2023) has been:

• Leave NYC (by car) for good on the day of the September 2023 New York floods after a tough breakup
• Watch my sister get married (yay!!!!)
• Hire my first full-time analyst Gabriel (Oct 2023)
• Live in Atlanta AirBNB for a month and a half to test the waters. Smash my toe (with a lifting rack), heal, get a bad throat infection after a terrible date. Leave Nov 2023
• Go to a wedding in South Bend
• Go to a wedding in Nola
• Live in Austin AirBNB for two months (with Xmas travel) to test the waters. Leave late Jan 2024.
• Injure my left shoulder
• Drive 17 hours in the snow back to Atlanta (I saw at least 9 fully on-their-side overturned tractor trailers no joke), lease a cheap and nice Decatur townhouse 6min walk from my brother and sister-in-law, minutes from hip downtown Decatur
• Get really into Golf
• Get moderately into scratch DJing
• Get really into meal prep & cooking (slow cookers what's up)
• Get more into exploring my faith (Christianity) and start searching for good churches near me. Also did Alpha which is cool, especially for big doubters.
• Officially brand my consultancy as Sapp Capital Advisors
• Travel to South America for 3 weeks (Buenos Aires, Patagonia, Lima)
• Travel to Central Europe for a week, then immediately West Virginia & Frio Valley Texas for July 4th week with the family
• Rehab my left shoulder

Nice Non-Business Things

I've been golfing a lot, mostly because my brother (also in Atlanta) is obsessed with golf. We've been playing once or twice a week all year. My game's not so great yet, but I'm having a blast and do slowly improve. I'll need to go to a golf coach sometime soon. Also, I joined a few Meetups in Atlanta and the best one (and only one I stuck with) is the Atlanta Knitwits. So I've picked up crochet! We were actually just in a photoshoot for Laine magazine, you can expect to see us in the Winter edition!

Business Things

Things are going great with my consultancy, Sapp Capital Advisors. The chief contributor to my earnings is consulting hours. Both my analyst Gabriel and I work on an hourly rate for our clients. We have clients of all shapes and sizes that are continually demanding more of our time and growing in number. Some clients are global, highly sophisticated funds and others are upstart local shops and yet others are mid-range. Our main value proposition is:

1. Highly specialized skillset, able to model any real estate private equity / hedge fund / development / family office / etc. scenario of any scale (hyper-focused on one development vs. hundreds of operating properties with nuanced assumptions)
2. Insane attention to detail (think Investment Banking + Private Equity standards on steroids)
3. On-call responsiveness, able to drop into fire-drills and work over weekends and vacations
4. Pay as you go, hire us exactly as much as you need us no commitments or anything like that

This works well for people and the demand is there. Our rates both keep going up. Gabriel is hardworking and honest, it's been a pleasure working with him. He's definitely in the pressure cooker right now, but he's doing great. Last month, he fully broke even on hours billed. This month (July 2024), he's already earned 171% of his total salary + benefits and there's still a few days left in the month with a healthy backlog of assignments. As it stands, our productivity stack includes: email, Teams, Loom (GET ON THE LOOM TRAIN), and Trello.

My priorities are to keep this demand growing while training Gabriel to reach my level of skill in Excel ASAP. I'd really love to hire another analyst, but I need Gabriel to grow a bit more (his rate of improvement has been great thus far) before I can make another hire. A new employee will mean many hours of daily training, and I want to make sure I have the capacity to handle that + training Gabriel + billing my own hours + coding DemographIQ.

The Moonshot Goal

On the potentially life-changing software side, DemographIQ is going great. I'm pretty close to an MVP. But that'll happen when it happens, it does get held up a good bit whenever my clients need urgent help. Which has been the case for the past few months, so I really get to squeeze it in over weekends and stuff. I ended up building my own server so now my web hosting costs are just the electricity, and I don't need to deal with AWS anymore. I honestly hate working with cloud infrastructure, it's a total mess and way overpriced.

Anyways, DemographIQ could be a success or a total flop, who knows. It's just important to me that I push ahead with the idea, proceed with launch and marketing, and follow through with the plan. I'm certainly a bit exhausted and set myself back a few months with some inevitable goose chases. Namely, wasting a few months launching my site on AWS only to scratch my head at the ludicrous $300/month bill for a potato of a website. And fully creating my own custom code for tokenized reporting and authentication, rather than piggybacking off some existing library. Oh well, at least extremely talented generative AI coding tools came into existence right as I became an entrepreneur, that was a lucky stroke!

What's Next?

If DemographIQ launches by year end, that would be amazing. It's hard to code all weekend after a crazy week, yet that's what I'm mostly stuck with. I also want to recommit to practicing scratch DJing every day. On the consulting side, I'm actually earning more money than I want to (I need more time for DemographIQ). So, my goal is to keep training Gabriel so he can take some of that work for me. Then, train another analyst so we can keep growing our reach. Ultimately, I'd like to build a strong and reliable team that is just as skilled as I am with building these freaky Excel models.

I have enough goals to keep me busy, but after all this I think I should also start posting my Excel models on the internet along with video guides of how to use them. I think that would be good both for content marketing and also would serve as beneficial training material for future employees. But let's get DemographIQ to $5k MRR before I mess with that stuff too much.

Until Next Time

Hedonic adaptation is the real deal. When I first was self-employed (and working remotely for the first time ever), every day felt so magical. I was walking around during working hours, taking in the sunlight and coding in cool coffee shops. I still do all that stuff, but now I entirely take it for granted. It's crazy how quickly I forget how nice my new lifestyle is and get lost in the daily stresses of deliverables. It's been a blessing to travel so much this year and see new parts of the world, dust off my Portuguese and Spanish, make new friends, develop new hobbies and reconnect with God. Sometimes I need to re-center myself whenever I'm feeling overwhelmed by the demands of my businesses. Things are going great, although a bit crazy right now. It feels like everything is going to be alright.