Liam

One big challenge of running a trade business is finding a balance between not absorbing other people’s sense of urgency and being accessible enough to maintain good faith and trust. In the last few years, I’ve had first-time experiences of being disrespected. Some experiences opened my eyes to how I’d been disrespected in the past but I was too young to realize it. For example, people paying me a year late for a job I did with no down payment. That’s something that happened a lot, but was easy to accept while I had a reliable income working on campus as a student, or at the coffee shop, or for a painting company. I made exceptions for friends here and there, but that became harder to do when money wasn’t coming in as frequently anymore post lock-down. I asked for advice from business owners along the way and stopped listing my materials to the penny on invoices by advice of a bank manager in Beverly. I raised my rates every couple of years by advice from my own clients. I’ve learned a...