Looking at the date of the previous post it is quite clear that I have been neglecting my duties here, so let me catch folks up on what has been happening.

September was devoted to taking a look at everything that had been made since April and formalizing a business plan.  This included creating long lists of business related things that needed to be done and putting due dates on them.  It was a bit of an intense month but by the end of it there was a clear plan of action.

October has been taken up with learning lots of things regarding the business of running a small business.  A large part of this included jousting with bureaucracy.  However the result is that all of the appropriate paperwork has been filed with governmental agencies from the IRS through the Secretary of State and the city of Seattle.  Now due to all my hard work I have the privilege of filing taxes with an additional 2 agencies one quarterly and one annually.  Additionally because of all that paperwork I am the proud owner of Podforge LLC.    The month really was a whirlwind of learning as there is quite a lot of work to running a business, and if it is worth doing it is worth doing to the best of my ability.

I have determined however that heat treating is not the indecipherable black art of knife making.  Nope I firmly believe that that title is held by  “Double Entry Bookkeeping”.  Honestly I find it easier to comprehend the micro-structure transformations of steel than to try and decipher if a debit increases or decreases the balance of a particular account.  Sigh, I expect a few months of running the books will help increase my understanding.

Now lets talk about the future and what is going to be happening this month.  Currently I’m in the process of planning which shows to attend next year, a website redesign (don’t worry the blog address won’t change so people using feed-readers won’t be broken), knife show table display design, and attempting to get a couple actual knife projects completed.

Longer term it looks like the business plan now includes me working toward my Master Smith stamp from the ABS, so if all goes well I will be attending the Blade show next year with knives to stand for a Journeyman Smith stamp.

I’ll do my best to be better about posting as projects get worked on.  Also there should be more content on the site starting to show up in early December.