15:09 – I’m currently assembling a dozen BK01 biology kits, which’ll leave us with 11 in stock counting the one we sold this morning. I’m just building a dozen because this is the last batch I’ll build upstairs. The components for the kits are currently split between the upstairs and downstairs work areas, but I’m gradually moving everything downstairs except the bottle labeling and filling operations. Space constraints upstairs mean I’ve been doing final assembly on kits in batches of 12 or 15. I have enough room downstairs to do batches of 30 at a time. I also have room to store a lot more finished kits to await shipment.
For now, I’ll continue to ship kits from upstairs, bringing up enough to keep a dozen or so of each in the shipping queue. But I talked to Danny, our mailman, yesterday. During our busy period last autumn, we often shipped half a dozen or more kits a day. That was a pain in the butt, having to make multiple trips from the house out to the street to load them in his truck. And with our sales trajectory this year, we may end up having to ship 25 or more kits on heavy days come July/August/September. So I asked Danny what he thought about pulling down our drive to pick up boxes at the rear, if he was even allowed to do that. He said that was no problem. So I’m going to allocate an area near the back door to stack boxes awaiting shipment.
Hmmm. One of my wholesalers just called to ask if I wanted them to ship my latest order UPS Ground or motor freight. Gulp. She said that by UPS Ground it’d be 11 large boxes, but it’d fit on one pallet. I told her to ship it UPS. I don’t have a forklift, and I’m not the man I once was. Just the thought of hauling a 300-pound pallet from the street down the driveway and into the basement is more than I can handle these days, let alone actually doing it. Of course, back in the days when I used to walk five miles to school (uphill both ways, in the snow) I could have just tossed a 300-pound pallet under each arm and then run a Marathon. Or something like that.
“…UPS Ground or motor freight…”
I get shipments of my wife’s book on pallets because we order 3,000 at a time. You should have went with motor freight. UPS only delivers on a pallet if you use UPS Freight, which is a pain in the butt. Always ask motor freight for a truck with a drop gate and pallet dolly. The guy rolls the pallets right into the garage.
Thanks for that boffo laff, Bob; I ain’t the strapping young warrior I once was, either; more like a dilapidated and derelict piece of rubbish waiting for the knacker’s yahd. Yet we get one-ton pallets of wood pellets for our stove at the house and both me and wife sling those 40-pounders around and she seems to be OK after, but I have to sit down and take a bunch of pills and try to catch my breath and not just keel over onto the damn floor.
Next she wants a wood cookstove out back on the porch, which will also supply heat when the power is out; this means cords of wood to haul and stack and carry in over the course of a winter.
I can see I ain’t long for this world; maybe that’s the general idea….
The real reason is that I don’t want to have too high a profile. Our neighbors all know what we do, but there’s no point in flaunting it. I actually have had one motor freight delivery here. Back in 2007 when I was writing the chemistry book, I ordered some hazardous chemicals from Science Kit because they were having a free shipping promotion. It wasn’t a large amount: 500 mL of nitric acid, 500 g of barium nitrate, 100 mL of 30% hydrogen peroxide, and so on. So imagine my surprise when an 18-wheeler pulls up in front of our house, covered in hazardous-material placards and–get this–a flashing red light on a pole on the front bumper.
The dogs went nuts, of course, and who could blame them? I was just hoping my neighbors didn’t go nuts as well. The guy gets out of the cab and proceeds to put up traffic cones with blinking lights on them to block both lanes of the street. He then opens the trailer, uses a small fork-lift to pick up my pallet, and uses a built-in elevator on the rear of the trailer to lower the fork-lift and pallet to the street. This whole time I’m hoping none of the neighbors are watching this drama. He got the pallet through the garage door, and was going to stop and chat. I hurried him on his way as quickly as I could.
Never again, until I’ve leased a facility or bought a property with a business outbuilding on it.
Nah, RBT, what you want to do is normalize that kind of delivery. Get a pallet of dog biscuits and insist on the hazmat signs, pylons, and flashing lights. Order a pallet of paper towels, same thing. The neighbors might ask just what the hell you’re getting delivered there, but will be turned away by the innocuous answer.
Actually, you’re under no obligation to be honest to the nattering busybodies. Go ahead and order your 300 pounds of thorium pellets and just tell the neighbors they’re dog crap. Er, tell the neighbors the boxes on the pallet are full of dog crap.
Hi Bob, are you making enough profit off your kits to accumulate capital to move to the next stage? That is the difficult thing to do and is often a business killer. The next stage can be defined as a larger location, manufacturing automation, more employees, etc.
I assume that you are making enough to take Barbara on a nice vacation (without her parents!) this year. After the last couple of months, she needs it. And of course, when she wears her fingers to the bone applying labels for the kits.
Actually, pricing is the most difficult thing to figure out for me in our business. I have tried Wal*Mart pricing, I have tried Cadillac pricing and we are somewhere in between for those. Probably too low.
Have you been able to figure out if you are reaching any kind of market saturation for any of your kits? I sell to a highly saturated market (chemical engineering software) with ten suppliers (that I know of) and the cost of change is high for the prospect.
Sounds like you are also running into a supply logistics problem. You might actually want to consider ordering a year’s worth of parts at time. This just in time thing sucks if you ask me. The entire business goes to the dogs when one supplier is having problems. Just ask Ford or GM.
The only parts that we ship out are CDs, CD labels, shipping boxes, special paper for the brochures and brochure covers. I generally keep three months of each in stock along with spare toner cartridges for the laser printers just so I do not get caught empty. And I still get caught empty.
Is that because your software is radically different than whatever the customer is currently using (ie, a training issue) or because of proprietary data formats (ie, a data conversion issue) or because of something else?
If the former, better manuals or videos or maybe a promise of hand-holding could help. If the latter, would you be able to offer a product or a service of converting it over?
One of my first jobs in the consulting biz was helping clients convert from one accounting package to another. Locked-up data was the biggest issue, though training and custom reports and a bunch of other things also worked to lock them in to whatever they had been using.
I’m not worried about growing the business, and I certainly have no intentions of ever having any employees. If it’s necessary at some point, I’ll use piecework, temps, etc.
I don’t think I’ve ever taken a vacation per se. Barbara and I did go up to New England for a week or so in 2000, but that was when we were thinking about moving to New Hampshire, so that was more reconnoitering than vacation. Since then, I’ve taken a day or sometimes two days off a year, but other than that I work seven days a week. I like what I’m doing. I don’t like traveling. In fact, I prefer not to leave the house.
With regard to saturation, I don’t think that’ll happen any time soon. There are probably 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 homeschoolers out there, and more every year. Our niche is science. We started with high school, but will expand down into middle-school, which gives us a presence for 6 of 12 years. Once we fill out our kits line, our potential market will be 50% of all homeschoolers. Call it 1,000,000 a year. If 0.1% of that population buys a kit from us each year, that’s 1,000 kits/year.
I just wish I didn’t have to sleep. I could increase the amount of work I get done by 50%.
Amphetamine, my man. Lovely, lovely amphetamine.
Oh! Oh! I know! Get yourself diagnosed as ADD and they’ll give you a presciption for uppers. How can you beat that?
More broadly and more seriously, I agree with you. I hate to sleep, viewing it as wasted time. I don’t take vacations (I took one with my first wife and one with my second wife. Let’s just say I have no plans to take a vacation ever again.) and prefer to stay home, given my druthers. I don’t plan to retire, partly because my family keeps me too broke to retire but mostly because I enjoy what I do.
Say… I thought that OFD was my cool, older brother, but maybe you are. For that matter, maybe we’re all related — I, too, am 6’3″ and had reddish hair when younger.
Is that because your software is radically different than whatever the customer is currently using (ie, a training issue) or because of proprietary data formats (ie, a data conversion issue) or because of something else?
All of the commercial process simulators have proprietary data formats and incompatible simulation operations. Not to mention different chemical thermodynamic methods.
“…a flashing red light on a pole on the front bumper.”
Naturally with all the excitement, you didn’t think to catch this on video and post it here. With background shots of the mutt going bonkers and people nervously peering through curtains and windows. I’m surprised no one called the fuzz.
Older but mos def not cool OFD plans to take a week in July during his 60th birthday and another week in August for our fifteenth wedding anniversary. We ain’t going fah, though; probably be exploring the northern quarter of the state along our international border (and also doing recon) and some hiking and canoeing and target shooting. Maybe a few nice lunches and dinners in there, assuming we have any damn money when those weeks come up.
I am traveling to Europe in about 6 weeks. Will be gone for three weeks. I get 20 days of vacation a year (18 actual vacation, 2 personal days) and I use every one of those. I enjoy traveling, well actually the destination, I don’t like flying. Not that I am afraid, I just find the entire experience annoying what with the TSA, surly flight attendants, obnoxious ticket agents, rude passengers, and the worst being our own immigration people in the way they treat their own citizens.
“…the worst being our own immigration people in the way they treat their own citizens.”
Roger that; we’ve noticed the same shit when we come back into our own fucking country from O Kanada into our own fucking state. But nary a problem crossing back the other way north. Our Canadian friends tell us it works in reverse for them. I avoid traveling across the border as much as possible for fear of going berserk and leaving corpses on the road and then being hunted down in the nearby forests by door gunners on choppers like I used to ride and do. Be a nice fitting and ironic end for OFD but why tempt fate?