SWOT Day

We’re juggling home office spaces here in Casa Del Brain Jar, trying to find an optimal amount of space to get everything done on my end while also factoring in space for my partner to work from home a few days per week.

It’s interesting to sit down and interact with things from this perspective: the wireless keyboard which proved to be untenable for writing because the Shift key wasn’t reliable may find new life on the second desk; the upgrade from printer to printer/scanner back at the start of the pandemic proves itself to be a prescient decision; my old desk-top, only ever bought as a back-up if the laptops end, starts to show its age as my partner sizes it up as a potential second screen only to discover that it’s a relic of an era before HDMI ports, requiring a VGA connection.

I’m doing up a proper business plan for Brain Jar Press this week, guided through it as part of the New Enterprise training program. It’s a moderately intense experience for an artist who, despite being relatively business minded, still gets away with flying by the seat of my pants an awful lot when it comes to strategy and planning.

One of the tasks is doing an SWOT analysis, breaking down the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to the business model. And while the biggest threat is always illness or incapacity on my part–such are the dangers of being a one-man shop–the real threat lies in the reliance on a single computer that runs the software I need to keep Brain Jar running.

And, because it’s a Mac, that computer will be pricy as heck to replace, which means there’s very limited redundancy in my systems. In an ideal world, I would have been purchasing a back-up desktop with my tax return this year, but then COVID hit and discretionary cash evaporated into the miasma of OH FUCK that settled over our finances.

Which made yesterday an anxious kind of day, all things considered, even if I’m pretty sure I’ve got a work-around if the main laptop gives up the ghost. It’ll be less efficient and likely eat up a lot more time than I’d like, but producing books will still be feasible in the long run.

But I have to admit, I’m eying the cost of a proper desktop that will be feasible for the work I’m doing, and quietly doing math on how many books we need to sell before I can replace the old PC clunker that only gets used for playing very old computer games.