Merry Christmas. Happy New Years. Last week I lost my disability check. No more crazy money. According to MetLife, they can find "no functional limitation in memory, attention, focus, concentration or mood management" and since I exhibit no symptoms of "mania, psychosis, suicidal or homocidal ideations," I'm not disabled. I could go on about how I think they'd reconsider that assessment if they followed me with a hidden camera or implanted my brain with a monitoring device, but whatever.

The moral of the story is Golden Rule has to not only start sustaining itself, it has to start sustaining sustain me.

For the first five months of business I bailed Golden Rule out with my own personal funds. In November we finally turned a small profit, which I put back into the business by purchasing equipment to launch e-commerce. This month we are $1800 in the hole (in other words, we've still got to pay rent, some bills, some advertising expenses, some build-out expenses for or next installation, and those costs aren't reflected below). This month there's no disability check to bail us out.

Our fingers are crossed for a miracle. They've happened to us before.

In the mean time, however, we're busy crunching numbers, calling on all our community resources, holding marketing meetings (thanks Jasmine and Marie), business development meetings (thanks Amanda and Maya), meeting with professionals outside of our organization, and spending a lot of insomniac nights trying to figure out what to do to stay in business.

We're trying to stay positive, we're trying to remind ourselves that we've done some really incredible things in just 7 months. Our monthly transformations of art+fashion+furniture+artifacts are always INCREDIBLE. Our gross sales are INCREDIBLE for any business in this economy, let alone for a business our age and size that deals in predominately second-hand with prices as low as ours.  Most importantly, our customer and consigner and volunteer base is INCREDIBLE, strong and growing.

But the numbers speak loud and clear: "If you're not making money, it's a hobby, not a business."

It's pretty clear that the 80/20 consignment cut days are over effective January 1st. They have to be. There's no other choice.

In addition to that, we're in the brainstorming phase--meaning we haven't formerly evaluated our ideas, we're just putting them out on the table--of thinking about other ways to keep this sinking ship afloat. If you have any ideas we might not have explored, PLEASE share them. Likewise, if you have any insights into the advantages and disadvantages of ours, PLEASE share.

Some strategies we're exploring include but are not limited to the following:

- Limiting the quantity of items accepted from consigners
- Maximizing the quality of items accepted from consigners
- Increasing our overall price-point
- Doing away with our 20% and 40% discounts for "helpful people"
- Doing away with our 20% and 40% end-of-month sales
- Moving towards an intern and/or volunteer-only staffing model
- Charging a processing fee per consigned item
- Having a monthly membership fee for consigners
- Instead of a comission, having a volume-based sales fee from consigners that goes towards business expenses
- Doing a monthly lottery incentive for consigners who do continue to volunteer
- Doing an option for consigner payout at 60/40 cash or 60/20 cash plus 60/40 trade
- Giving volunteers/consigners who work in the shop a small sales commission
- Moving towards a profit-sharing model for volunteers
- Becoming a proper co-op
- Going non-profit
- Seriously cracking down on giving 80/20 unless someone's committing 20-30 hours a month
- Have a 50/50 split with a work one day, get 60/40, work two days, get 70/30, work three days get 80/20 deal
- Having a separate consignment rate for hand-made vs. vintage/antique/used contemporary goods
- Doing some kind of volume-based profit sharing with volunteer consigners after the 60/40 split
- Keeping the current model but "stack functioning" consigner/volunteer commitments during volunteer shifts
- Everything stays the same and Wynde gets another job
- Wynde starts picking for better stuff that will make more money than her dead mom's clothes
- We figure out some balance between volunteer-intern-consigner scheduling for the store
- We stop putting out $400+ a month to promote art that doesn't actually sell
- We start marketing hardcore (see another future post on this)
- We close up shop at the end of June
- We get a business partner

Anyway, that's where we're at. Some of those ideas send chills up my back. Others make me want to vomit. Some are conceptually compelling but logistically challenging. My plan is to look back historically on our sales and work out some retrospective case studies with hypothetical scenarios from above and see if there's a way out of the weeds.

That and I'm meeting with a book keeper and small business adviser, like, ASAP.

So yeah, in full transparency it's been a hell of a December. I hope this offers some perspective to everyone involved with Golden Rule--customers, consigners, volunteers alike--and that you can benefit a bit from the transparency here. This running a business thing isn't a joke, and trying to run a business with a social practice component (i.e. the aspect where we try to nurture aspiring designers and consigners, and to have an underlying mentorship/advocacy model) is even more challenging.

As I write this it is ironic that I'm thinking, "What will so-and-so do without the other 20% of her check?," or, "Will so-and-so have to go out and get another job if he doesn't get the other 20% of his check?" or, "Will so-and-so be able to afford to keep making jewelry if she doesn't get this income?," rather than, "Fuck, how am I going to pay my rent and feed myself. Shit, I'm not far enough along in my recovery to even begin to think about working somewhere other than this safe space I've created."

But in the end, I guess what the therapists have been telling me all along holds true: you have to take care of yourself first.