Oh, I dunno. THink about the complexity of adding just one person. I work for myself. Bookkeeping is fairly simple. I hire someone else, I'm involved in all sorts of accounting problems, tax withholding, insurance, workman's comp and a list that just goes on and on. Simply not worth it, especially when you realize that this is a business spike, one that will pass fairly quickly, so the extra person, and problems, won't be needed.
A temp worker might be nice, but...then it's time to train them.
Charlie Self "Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching." Satchel Paige
Sorry Michael, but it has EVERYTHING to do with it. Especially the cash flor. The business plan for a big corporation is far from that of a one man shop. Evidently you have little or no experience with them or you would understand. I've had my own small business as well as helped start a couple of others. Hiring that first person is a BIG decision and is much more costly that you may think.
I will concede that an answering machine may be a good idea, but since neither you nor I knows how many calls a day Ed gets, we cannot assume he needs to hire someone. I think you have big corporate ideas that are far different that tiny shop marketing.
No, I have a lot of experience with very small companies. What I don't have, apparently, (since KB pointed it out), is nearly enough experience posting my opinion without sounding like an asshole.
You know Michael, you seem to be the only one disturbed by Eds problem. Everyone else, especially those who have been around here for years, understands and is not the least bothered by it. ...lew...
Yeah, I know... But it cuts both ways. If the caller says "I wanna Farquart Model 100!", no problem. If the caller says "I got a 1983 Ferdinan model IV that my brother sneaked home from Brazil. Will a Farquart 100 work or do I need the special 25mm adapter plate? And do I use Grade 8 bolts or will my Craftsman QuickStrip work?"
That's a different phone person altogether. I admit I have no idea on how many of first type of phone calls come in.
Ok! :)
Impossible - all of mine have been removed. Marriage scraped them away a long time ago.
No - you wanted Ed to hire someone to "man" the phone/emails. I'm saying Ed needs to update the Web site, auto-responder (phone-messages, whatever) to let people know that he's behind on fulfillment. And tell them when the expected ship date would be.
I don't think we discussed it - but I'd guess you and I are in complete agreement that once an order is taken, it's of paramount importance to keep your customers informed of progress. I hate ordering into Black Holes. "FonCentral.com" was my last black-hole experience.
You won't be sorry for waiting. I have the TS Aligner Jr. It is a great tool. One of these days, I want to order a set of precision angle blocks from Ed. (I did get a 45 degree block when I got the TS Jr.)
Someone alerted me to this thread. To answer the subject question: I'm right here. Always have been. Always will be! ;-) I should be in the shop but it's probably not a bad idea to address some of these issues to a broad audience. So, here goes...it's gonna be long.
BTW, I'm not picking on you Michael, it just seems like this particular message has the questions that need answering.
I do "pay" someone to answer the phone. It's not just a warm body, or a "grandma" or a neighbor kid. I have someone with extensive experience in woodworking and construction. And, Steve has also spent many hours in the shop helping me make Aligners.
In reality, Steve is the owner of an independent business (shipping and mailing services) that acts as a dealer for my products. He handles all the phone sales. But, there are still some questions that he can't easily answer. For example, the simple "When is my order going to ship?" isn't really so simple. I can tell Steve how many units are going to be done on a certain date, but someone has to check the backlog (a combination of online and phone orders) to determine if a particular person's unit is in that next batch. Now, I don't give Steve access to all my online financial order processing stuff and he doesn't give me access to all his phone order processing stuff. So, we have to get together in order to answer such "simple" questions. Every minute spent in such an activity is a minute that I'm not in the shop making Aligners. It's a minute that has to be added to each of the previous estimates generated in previous sessions with Steve. How much time should I spend doing this?
By the way, you don't want a "grandma" answering the phone. Nothing makes people more angry than to talk to someone who is completely clueless.
There are ways for people to contact me. But, if they expect me to spend all my time waiting by the phone for their call then they are likely to be disappointed. They are also likely to be disappointed if they think I have all day to play phone tag. I answer all the email I get but keep in mind that I wade through more than 200 spam messages per day. These are the ones that get through the spam filters. Hundreds more get stuffed into the spam folder. That's the price of having an email address that is advertised. Sometimes a person will unknowingly make their message look like spam with common bogus subject lines. I try to catch these but I'm not always successful. Occasionally a message from " snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com" with the subject of "Hi..." or "Important message for ejb" gets deleted when it's really from some guy with a serious inquiry using his girlfriends email account. Sorry.
When I sit down to read email, I'm pretty much deciding that the next two or three hours are not going to be spent working in the shop. That's how long it takes to just scan through all the mail and delete the spam. Then I have to answer the real messages. Some are easy and some require a lot of work. I almost never get through all of them every day. Very often I skip messages which require more than the most simple answers and end up spending huge portions of my weekends getting caught up.
I hope that someday you have the opportunity to run a small business!
I really wish that I could have 1000 lbs of raw material arrive about six weeks before an unanticipated jump in demand without having to pay for it! I wish that I could afford to keep $10K worth of finished goods in inventory at all times. I really wish that qualified hard working individuals who need no training and can be trusted with my tools and machinery would just show up on my doorstep ready to work and not expect to be paid until after the finished goods are shipped.
In reality, the raw materials get ordered *after* the jump in demand has occured. These orders have lead times, minimum quantities, and require payment. Often the payment is due long before the finished goods are ready to ship. I have also found it difficult to maintain a large inventory of finished goods and make monthly payments for utilities, labor, facilities, machinery, tooling, etc. Does anybody out there want to tie up $10K of their own money in TS-Aligners? I can guarantee that they will sell. I can't guarantee how long it will take. And, you're not going to get a huge return on your money. I don't want to borrow your money, thanks to a bad machine deal and the economy I'm already up to my eyeballs in debt! No, I want you to pay me for them. I hold the money and you hold the inventory. Deal? Didn't think so.
Do you get the point? "Cash flow", "debt load", and "manufacturing capacity" have everything to do with it. I don't have infinite supplies of money. I have a lot of payments to make every month. I don't get any free labor from anybody - especially not the highly skilled. Even my labor doesn't come for free. I've found it necessary to eat, clothe myself, and sleep under a roof.
I've always had someone to answer the phone. In the early days (back in 1991) I had the 800 number forwarded to my cell phone. When that got to be too much I hired an answering service. But, it wasn't good enough to have just a warm body answer the phone. It had to be someone who understood the products enough to answer questions. So, about eight years ago I started contracting dealers to do the job. But, they don't answer the phone 24 hours per day. A lot of East Coast people try to call "first thing in the morning" and are outraged that nobody answers (or they get an answering machine). Well, 9:00am Eastern Time is 7:00am Mountain Time (two hours before Steve opens). West coast people who try to call after 4:00pm might also get disappointed and think that we never answer the phone.
Nope. But there will always be people who think that every business is a big business with unlimited funding, hoards of resources, and an infinite supply of talented, skilled, qualified, motivated, and honest workers. These people won't be satisfied with anything less than 24 hour per day service and instant in-stock delivery of everything all the time. They have never run a business and will never understand what it takes to do it well enough to survive the hard times that we have been going through. They have a "labor mentality" complete with the idea that business owners are all rich and greedy - always looking for ways to cheat people and make more money.
I'm not in the business of instant gratification and probably never will be. These people will have to settle for the mass produced "made in China" items sold by the big mail order dealers (who actually do fit their "labor mentality" much more closely). The people who want a high quality product which is engineered to work as advertised and made by skilled hands might just have to wait if they manage to place their order during peak demand. I'm not going to compromise quality so that I can ship junk products and make a buck from people who demand instant gratification. I would rather not do business than to sink to that level. And, I've done the outsourcing thing and won't do it again. It's expensive and there is no motivation for quality.
There's more to say but I'll stop here. I'm late for getting back to the shop.
Thanks, Ed Bennett snipped-for-privacy@ts-aligner.com
snip of description of challenges of running a small business...
Ed, It's been pointed out to me that my OP came off as arrogant. They were right, I was wrong. I apologize for my tone. It _was_ pretty ugly.
Where we differ, I think, is that I (who _have_ run a small business for most of my life), believe that having a person who is knowledgable about the business manning the phones, (the first and most important line of communication with the public), is as integral a part of the cost of doing business as the cost of a roof over my head and food for my kids.
I believe that if I can't afford that, then I must adjust my pricing to reflect it's cost.
When I said that "cash flow, etc" had nothing to do with it, it was from that viewpoint: that certain items _must_ be factored into the retail price of a product, and for me a phone person is that important.
Since you mentioned several attempts at filling that need, I suspect you feel pretty much the same way, and would like to improve the situation if you could. If so;
You mentioned Steve's hours. Couldn't that be handled by a recording during his "off" times, indicating to callers when the appropriate time is to call? I don't know, but it seems like it would help people understand precisely that you're _not_ a big multinationalconglomerate and have a small staff appropriate to the size of your company.
Finally, I get a real sense from everyone here that you're one of the few people left who believes so much in his product that you're putting in an ungodly amount of your own hours on the making of it. And, congrats, you're selling them pretty much about as quickly as you can make them, so how much is it costing you for _you_ to be doing the front-line communication? Again, I really do know about the pains of growing small businesses, and one of the lessons I learned was that every minute I put in doing things like answering phones and (really) cleaning the bathrooms was time I wasn't putting into getting more business and filling orders for the business I had.
Everybody gets to run his business the way he sees fit, and I'm _all_ for you being hugely successful. I see things a bit differently than you, I guess, vive la differance.
I just got jerky-kneed when I saw one of your customers looking for you _here._ Sorry I came off as a poopy-head.
This is not a big deal, but if I hadn't have gotten a reply to my email when I did, over a week-and-a-half after I sent the email, I would have cancelled the PayPal order, if that's possible.
I did try calling, twice on your 800 line, and twice on your direct line. I called during your normal business hours. The attempts were spaced hours apart. All four times the phone just rang, and rang...They were not picked up by either a person or an answering machine. This lack of response made me worry that I had spent a significant part of my limited woodworking budget on a product no longer being made. Moreover it brought up worries about what would happen if I have a question about using your product, assuming that I would recieve your product. Your website says something along the lines of: Most PayPal orders are shipped next day. If this changes, the website should be changed, or, at the least, you should have an informative message on an answering machine. That's just my opinion, of course.
Michael, I don't think you were a "poopy-head." I felt and still feel the same way as you did. A customer who sent money and has not received a product in a reasonable amount of time should not have to what amounts to opening a window and yelling out to find out what's going on.
Yes, there are a lot of problems running a small business especially if it has a growth spurt. But, at some point one has to decide if they're running a business or a hobby.
Something as simple as preparing a standardized response to "where is my aligner" queries would be helpful. Hit reply, paste in the response, and hit send is a lot better than hand typing or no reply at all. Business loans are an accepted way of handling cash flow problems.
It would serve Ed well to contact his local Small Business Administration people for advice. Many SBAs have a roster of volunteer retired business people who will help analyze problems and develop strategies.
A growth spurt and a spurt in sales are not necessarily the same thing. It is up to the business owner to decide which he's got. Ed did.
Sometimes. Sometimes not. You don't know his financial structure.
In his spare time. Might be an idea there, when he catches up, which he said he was on the way to doing.
Part of Ed's problem is his commitment, almost an over-commitment, to quality. That makes it damned near impossible to find someone willing to commit the same level of work to his goals. Be grateful, if you ever buy a TS-Aligner. It works, it works easily, it works well, and it will work for your great grandchildren unless you drop the parts on concrete.
Charlie Self "All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure." Mark Twain
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