Congrats! Your first commercial release?
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For the business, March is going really well so far: several service visits, a couple new customers, and lots of parts sales. Got an unexpected lead on some machine parts, and it dovetailed perfectly with a customer request maybe 3 weeks ago for exactly those items. Best part is that they're really big and I don't have the space or the means to deal with them back at the the shop, and the timing allow me to take them straight from one customer to the next. As a bonus, schedule-wise there's a service visit about an hour from the delivery location thus much of the travel expense is taken care of. Considering all three places are about 450 miles from here, this looks to be going about as well as I could hope for.
The importance of the extra income next month is that we're having a sizable solar electric system installed once the ground thaws and dries out a bit, maybe mid- or late-April. Without borrowing money it was looking a bit tight, but this gives us some relief from the anxiety. Borrowing is cheap right now, but still. As an independent contractor without a reliable guarantee of income, we're trying to do as much as we can without using a lender.
On the electricity side of things, the system should generate enough annually to make us net-contributors to the power grid. Once that's done, we're going to attack the LP gas usage. Can hardly wait to watch the meter literally spin backwards for the first time.