10:26 – Things are kind of peaceful around here. Back during the craziness in August we were routinely shipping four or five kits a day, and some days as many as a dozen. Even though we had plenty of subassemblies queued up, just boxing up and shipping kits kept things kind of hectic. Things have calmed down now. We might ship one or two kits a day, and some days none at all. I think the biggest day we’ve had this month we shipped only three kits.
The good thing about that is that it gives me time to work on the earth science kit, not to mention administrative stuff that I’ve been letting slide. For example, as I was making up kits yesterday I opened our next-to-last case of 100 goggles and noticed that we’re now down to about 150 thermometers. I’d been meaning to re-order, but this morning I finally took the time to get 200 more goggles and 350 more thermometers on order.
I spent some time on the phone yesterday with a guy who teaches an on-line chemistry course at a large community college. He’d been building chemistry kits for students, but said that it had become just too much work. As I said, tell me about it. So, starting with the January 2014 semester, they want to start ordering our chemistry kits, probably 30 kits to start and then 30+ every semester after that. This is starting to become a regular thing, and I’m thinking we might need to shift our focus from only homeschoolers/hobbyists to meet the needs of public and private schools and colleges. I can easily foresee getting to the point where we’re shipping hundreds or even thousands of kits in bulk orders to such institutions.