"Business Ventures"
While working at the cafeteria and driving Ryder trucks, I occasionally helped out with maintenance projects at our apartment building. In about a year, I was offered an apartment manager job for another apartment complex. The owner showed herself to be habitually deceitful in her dealings with the tenants; even asking me to lie in court for her to win a case. I then resigned from that position.
Shortly after that, I was offered the manager job at our apartment building. It was a great job and provided us with fully earned rent plus some extra hour’s income. This job plus my Ryder Truck job, set us up pretty well so I started looking for investments.
My plan in the long term was to earn as much money as I could to be able to help as many people as possible, for when the Big Event occurred.
A friend of ours moved from Bozeman and had a mobile home he wanted to sell. Lori and I bought it to use as a rental. After a few months, I bought another one, that was a bank repo, directly from the bank on payments.
I rented a lot in Covered Wagon Mobile Home Park and had it moved there. The mover shared his experiences he had had over the years with mobile homes and setting them up. I had decided to set it up on my own to save money. One thing he told me, if you ever hear a block crack (meaning cinder blocks that are used when blocking and setting up a mobile home), get out from under the home because it is going to come down quick. His advice had a light on it.
I was jacking up the home when I heard a block crack. I pulled out from under the home just as it began to fall. It hit me on the back of the head on its way to the ground where it sank about foot or so in the mud. Quite the frightening ordeal.
Just then the mover man showed up and saw the disaster. He knew how lucky I had been. He helped me jack the home up out of the mud. We got it blocked and leveled without any more problems.
I had to put new plumbing in the trailer, along with new carpet and other repairs to make it look and feel as much like a real house as I could. It worked, and we rented it right away.
My plan was to find fixer-uppers and I started looking around for more mobile homes to buy. In Missouri, mobile homes were considered tornado food but in Bozeman there were some really nice homes and lots of them.
The realtors in the area had mobile home listings, with mobiles that were already set up on lots, and I went around looking for another mobile home to purchase. While doing so, I was offered a job working mobile homes sales with a Realtor. It went well for a while, but too much shady stuff was going on there, and I decided to go out on my own. I set up my own office to help people sell their mobile homes.
There was a lady in Belgrade that contacted me who had nine mobile homes for sale. I went and met with her and looked over the homes to get an idea of what she wanted to do.
The Chi Alpha paster had been helping me now and then driving Ryder Trucks. He knew my plan to buy mobiles, fix them up, and rent them. He expressed interest in getting involved in my business to build future income for his family, as the ministry didn’t provide a retirement.
We formed our own company and purchased the nine mobile homes, fixed them up, and rented them out. Then we got a call from a man who had six mobile homes for sale. We purchased those and added a few others, one by one, till we had accumulated twenty-six mobile homes that we were renting.
The man who sold us the six mobile homes, soon offered us a lease with option to purchase on his mobile home park, where the six homes were located. I had done most of the work on fixing them up and the rental market was tight, so it was easy to keep all the homes rented.
My real passion was baking, and a commercial location became available for rent on Main Street in Bozeman, across from the High School. Lori and I decided to put in a bakery, offering pastries, donuts, etc. with the intent on offering wholesale products too.
All was well at first, but the Bozeman economy shifted due to the decrease in student population and the laying off of teachers at the University. By the end of the year, it was like the whole town stood still and no one was out going anywhere.
One day I walked out in front of the bakery, looked up and down the street and saw no car in site. I also heard the new Gallatin County Unemployment Office had only one job posting, and I went down to see for myself. Sure enough, they only had one job posting.
My mobiles had gone from fully occupied to fifty percent vacant with half the tenants who were left unemployed. It was a disaster causing me to lose everything in just a few months’ time, along with many other people. We closed the bakery, sold off what we could and decided to head back to the Midwest and start over.