The Evergreen path

In my last post I mentioned Evergreen Sewing. It’s my new sewing machine repair and resale business.

That post was from the day I registered the LLC. Things have gotten very busy in the seventeen or so days since then. For starters, I expect I’ll finish the first (and largest) part of my certification by the end of this week. That’ll be exciting. I may earn a burrito as a reward (because I know how to party).

In the intervening days I’ve also gotten the ball rolling for a business accountant/bookkeeper, and a graphic designer to create a logo. This upcoming week (aside from finishing certification 🤞) I’ll be meeting with that accountant, the graphic designer, and a potential partner store to act as a pickup/dropoff location so I don’t have randos showing up at my home. I’ll finally need to sort out and record inventory on Odoo, as well as create an initial service order process there since the final machine in my certification practicum will be from my first! paying! customer! Oh, and I need to go to the credit union to get Evergreen’s banking set up and squared away. Then create various online accounts (Stripe, Square, Venmo, Paypal) so I can actually accept money.

These are the most immediate tasks, but I also will need to get the business plan details out of my head and onto the page (finally) and start brainstorming the initial marketing campaign. And make the real website. And figure out how I’ll sell the refurbed machines that are building up. And start tracking the benefit corp requirements, since Evergreen’s registered as a benefit LLC. And, and, and… There is no lack of things to do in this household right now.

All of this is leading up to, hopefully, the softest of launches in early January, with the hard launch for…February? I think?

One step in the process may have happened today, or at least started. Sunday is my administrivia day, and often I spend a large portion of the morning reading, filing, and closing the browser tabs that are backlogged during the week. As I was doing that today, I found multiple open tabs related to the tech and/or open source worlds and…I just closed them unread.

This techxit strategy thing, as good as I’m sure it eventually will be for my mental health, is currently causing a massive identity crisis. Who am I if I’m no longer doing the things for which I’m well known and have earned respect over these many years? How will I see my friends if I’m not traveling the world to present at conferences? Are people going to forget me because I’m no longer “useful” to them? And what in the hell am I doing leaving tech right after publishing a (humblebrag) Very Good Book? A book that isn’t selling hardly at all (from what little I can tell) and could use a LOT work to promote? Am I just walking away from everything? Really?

This has all been a massive drag on getting any forward momentum on Evergreen. Closing those tabs today show that while I can still stay informed (RSS feeds are faboo), I have given myself permission not to care about every little thing in the open source world. I told myself that before, but now my brain finally may have started believing it, since closing those tabs unread actually felt good. With each one, a little cognitive burden fell from the stack to lie abandoned on the wayside.

I still have a lot of questions to resolve in that massive identity crisis, but seeing some progress there is, as usually’s the case, motivating. And, of course, it’s ever so helpful to free up a little bit more mental space for the all too real challenge of starting a business in a totally different industry.