Week ending April 19th, 2019

This week, I had my monthly meeting with Curtis McHale. Over three years ago, I joined a mastermind group he was starting and met with other business owners weekly to discuss what was going well or what needed improvement, and to hold each other accountable to our own goals. Eventually, I switched from the weekly group format to a monthly one-on-one with Curtis. Now, during our monthly meetings we discuss the projects, new clients, problems I may be facing, and big picture ideas that shape the direction of the business. We have been focusing a lot on improving the number of billable hours I accomplish in the month and setting wise goals for maintaining long-term profitability.

Another thing that was taken care of this week was finishing up my personal tax paperwork. It’s always an exciting and stressful time to find out my year-end taxes owing total, as someone who’s self employed. I save taxes every time I pay myself throughout the year and hope that my calculations work out so that I don’t owe more than I saved. Even with a few months of lower sales, the numbers worked out, and I was very relieved. Corporate taxes aren’t due for a few more months, and then I will go through a similar situation hoping I saved enough taxes over there, yay!

Friday was a statutory holiday up here in Canada, so this was a shorter week, but I also did some improvements to the Teach For Canada site. The client wanted us to limit how many times, during a time period, that a learning community could contact a teacher during each phase of the application process. I had to modify the Laravel controllers to pass along values in two different places and then change the Vue.js component to use those values and check if someone still had available requests. I wish that the system had been built so that the front end and back end validation of whether an action can happen were based on the same methods and values, but the original developers decided to go a different direction, making extra work for me.

This weekend our kids are gone to my parents for two days so my wife and I are going to see multiple movies in theatre, go to a concert, and eat out a lot. WooHoo!