One Pager

One of the things that one of my favorite authors, Robert Shemin, recommends is to write up a personal business plan.  His is all of one page long.  He calls it his One Pager.  I’m openly swiping that phrase for mine, though the title on the page is The Master Plan.

I had been thinking about this for quite some time and finally sat down and wrote it out in detail.  Actually I was working on it at lunch yesterday much as I am writing this today.  It was up on my screen when my boss comes along, plunks himself down in my guest chair and asks “Whatcha got going?”  I told him about the actual work I was working on and that I’d switch back to that after lunch.  I don’t know how good a look he got, but my one pager was almost finished…

Anyway, I included that in the fax I mentioned in my last post to try to give the lender a sense that I have a defined plan that includes a time-line for getting myself out of the mess that becomes apparent when you examine my financial statement.

I hope it helps!

In any event, I now have the plan.  I know what my next steps need to be and what to do after that.  I just need a little OPM (that’s Other People’s Money) to get me started along the path.

Where are The Plans?

[/Vader voice]

For the past ‘seems like forever’ I’ve been working for a big company.  For now I’ll just refer to it as That Big Company.  Or just ‘work.’  At That Big Company I spend my days sitting in front of a computer from 0dark:30 until far too late.  I’m a mechanical designer and CAD draftsman.  There are a couple of patents at the USPTO with my name on them and several more applications on file.  All are from my work for That Big Company.

I’ve been doing this kind of work for the better part of three decades now.

This ties in to The Guilded Cage in that I have the skills and software available even here at home to do fairly decent CAD work. 

Now the software I use at work is not available here at home.  But SolidWorks the company that makes the high end 3D CAD software I use at work also makes a 2D CAD program that you can download for free.  That’s what I’m running here at home.

In that 2D program, DraftSight they call it, you can import bitmap graphics onto what they call a reference layer.  With that you can create a pretty good CAD drawing from a fairly poor quality scanned image.  And it’s scalable.  You can even measure and dimension drawings you create this way.

So that’s what I’ve been working on these past several evenings.  Creating a detailed plan of what I want The Guilded Cage to become.  I’ll be sharing the plans here after we lock in the P&S.

The more I get into it the more potential I see.