Home sick today, working on things from the couch, and I got thinking about risk. Figured I would write some of it down.
For context: I started this company in 2020 and I am still a student. Everything under it was built around a degree, with my own cash and my own credit, and no investor has ever been involved. That shapes how I think about all of this, because when it is your money, you cannot be reckless and you cannot be timid either.
It is not really about diversifying
The usual advice is to have more than one thing going. That is only half of it. Three businesses that all go quiet in the same week are one business with extra paperwork.
What actually matters is that they go quiet for different reasons. Landscaping is our main source of cash and runs from spring until the ground freezes. Ecommerce runs on its own calendar and tends to pick up right as the ground freezes. Compute runs around the clock and does not care what month it is. Software comes in bursts, including the bespoke work we do quietly for a few local businesses.
When one is dry, another usually is not. That was the plan, and it is the main reason the company is still here.
Nothing failed, it just took years
I do not have a failure story. I have a slow story, which I think is more useful.
Ecommerce was built on credit and lost money for years before it turned. Today it is profitable, with a real product line and a resale side to it. It got there because landscaping was covering the bills the whole time, so it had the years it needed instead of dying at eighteen months.
That is what having more than one line is really for. Not surviving a bad quarter. Being able to wait.
Keep things warm, not hot
The idea I would keep if I could only keep one: every line here can be switched off and switched back on, with everything left in place.
We flipped ecommerce on recently to cover some costs and did about a thousand dollars in a week off inventory that was already sitting on the shelf. The listings existed, the accounts were open, the stock was there. It had been sitting at almost no cost, ready. Turning it on was a decision, not a project.
That only works because there is no fixed cost underneath it. No warehouse lease, no payroll. If there were, it could not be paused and it could not be restarted in a day.
The best example is the one we say no to. When the ground freezes, every landscaper plows snow. We do not, because plowing means buying trucks and plows that sit idle nine months a year. We would rather let landscaping go quiet for the winter and let the other lines carry it than take on that kind of fixed cost.
Have something you can turn into cash
Being spread out and being liquid are different things.
Hardware, inventory, and money people owe you all look fine on paper and none of it helps in a tight week, because none of it is cash. So part of the setup is holding things that can become cash quickly. Metals, hardware, crypto, stock. When it has mattered, those are what have carried us.
Right now we are selling off dated computer hardware and surplus gear into the business purely for liquidity. Not because anything is wrong. Because cash you have is worth more than value you might have.
I will leave it there on that topic. The point is just that this gets decided ahead of time, not in the moment.
The computer part
I am a computer guy at my core, and that turns out to be the biggest reason overhead stays low.
Every website we run, the storefront, the checkout, the login system, the scrapers, the dashboards, and the internal tools for invoices, expenses, cost of goods, and customer emails are all ours. Built in house. Each one is a monthly subscription or a hire that most small operators pay for and we do not.
A subscription looks small. Fifteen of them is a real number every month, forever. So when money gets tight, the move is quick: cancel it, build a replacement in a few days, keep working. Most of our internal tooling exists because of exactly that.
Same with hardware. The compute side runs on secondhand cards and miners we rebuilt and tuned ourselves, which turns a big purchase into a small running cost.
The rule: build the boring stuff, buy the hard stuff. Nobody should rebuild payment processing. But invoicing, inventory, monitoring, email, the plumbing every business needs and every vendor overcharges for, that is worth owning.
The part none of that covers
Every line here runs through one person. My time and my health are the single point of failure that no amount of spreading out protects against. I would rather say that than pretend otherwise.
The honest answer to how one student runs four lines of business is that I do not do it alone anymore. AI agents share the load. Earlier this week, while I was working from my phone, several of them were pushing code to different projects at once. I do not ask them what to build. I tell them, and I correct them when they drift. It feels less like using a tool and more like running a small crew.
It does not remove the single point of failure. It widens it. That is about the most I can honestly say.
Anyway
Risk management is not avoiding risk. A business with no risk in it is a job with worse hours.
It is picking which risks to hold and making sure none of them can end you on their own. Keep fixed cost low so a slow stretch is survivable. Keep something liquid so a tight week is a decision, not a crisis. Build things that can wait, because most of them will have to.
Six years, still a student, no outside money, four lines running. Nothing clever about it. Just deliberate.
Gunnar
Founder, Tofte Ventures LLC