A little over a year ago my wife quit her job to focus on her home-based business. This move was incredibly beneficial for our family life, freed up tons of spare time, while also being financially solid.
In this three-part series, I’ll relate how we got started on the path to building the business, the massive benefits of having a home-based business for our family, and the basics of why it was successful.
How my wife got started
Five years ago, my little Victoria turned one year old. It is Korean tradition to set up a table laden with decor that represents the best wishes for the baby. This table is called a dolsang, or “1st birthday table”. Long woven string signifies a long life, dates in a bowl are for wishing for lots of future children, and traditional decor items like mother-of-pearl boxes represent Korean culture. The baby would wear a hanbok, which is a traditional Korean outfit. Generally, you would rent this stuff rather than buy it, since you only would use it whenever you had a kid turning one, so not super often.
A dolsang 1st birthday table using traditional Korean decor
When we rented this decor for Victoria’s 1st birthday, it came wrapped in shabby newspaper and torn cardboard boxes. It was tricky to set up the backdrop (it involved lots and lots of packing tape). The pickup and drop-off location was in a random parking lot.
Renting this stuff had a lot of annoying elements to it. Still, it cost us $250 for a 24 hour rental period. My wife looked at this situation and thought that she could do a much better job at this. The idea was to put together a decor set and earn passive income by renting it out, while improving on all the things that annoyed us about our daughter’s table rental.
At the time, we were actively looking to start a home-based business. This looked like a great opportunity. A large fraction of the earnings was passive, since it would be a rental business. There was certainly a need for it with 100,000 Koreans living in the Toronto area. It could scale well, since we can rent out several kits at a time, and can train others to prepare the kits. It would be entirely within our control since we would build it from the ground up. Finally, it would be difficult for people to enter into this business, because you would need to speak Korean, have connections with suppliers in Korea, and have connections in the Korean community.
The COVID-19 pandemic forces our hand
For the next three years, my wife and a partner built the business from the ground up. They started with a single set, and as word of mouth got out, bought another one, and then another. Soon they were renting out 2-3 sets per week.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
The business kept growing, but slowly. The difficulty was that my wife and her business partner couldn’t get together as often because of the virus, and eventually it was just my wife who was doing most of the work. Six months after the pandemic started, we decided to purchase the business outright from the partner. Full ownership gave my wife impetus to make the business great. It was a good move.
Throughout, my wife was working a full-time job at the Korean consulate in Toronto. This sucked up 45 hours a week (work plus commuting). We had a growing family, with two little kids running around. To add to her already busy life, my wife was working on her business, which was growing rapidly.
My oldest was in kindergarten at the time. School alternated from in-person to online, and back again. My younger daughter’s daycare also had periodic shutdowns due to other kids in the class getting infected with COVID. With both my wife and I working full-time jobs, it was becoming an unsustainable situation with COVID disrupting our routine every few weeks. My wife’s job, her growing business, plus raising children at the same time was a little much.
So my wife quit her job. It turned out to be awesome.
To be continued…
In the next post I will review the massive benefits of running a home-based business for a growing family.