Thursday 5 March 2015

6 months in and going well

Hard work, determination, creativity and time all play a big part each in making a new small business work.

Sit back on your laurels for 30 seconds and you lose the edge.

Every evening I design, redesign and produce various ideas and requests form customers for their craft needs. Mush of this time is unpaid and unseen by the people that think the stuff we make is just conjoured up and posted..

The mysteries of manufacturing the designs lost in their eagerness waiting for their future creation and the excitement of them to be making something truly unique.

All the above goes on to build a small business when curve balls are thrown into the mix. Machine breakdowns, power cuts, life and family commitments and other demands needing attention have to be juggled into the mix to keep it all moving along

New designs and more ideas along the way have me at the PC making orders "On the fly" as they arrive by email from eBay and our website. Taking copies of existing designs, swapping program windows to fit them into a new panel to cut, making them work and gently nudging little lines and dots of the vectors to ensure what's on the screen comes out of the machine properly cut.

Choosing cutters, speeds, feeds and other necessary technical stuff to make it all come together and look what the customer orders..

Yup....There are cock-ups, time consuming bits, errors even after quadruple checks and then there's the finishing and packing. All takes time.

Postal service problems, couriers, paperwork and all the back-room stuff taken care of by Kay the day after the cutting, more time needed.....never enough though.

We're nothing grand.....but we try that bit harder and simple but expensive machinery keeps up producing the things people want



and all that above.......after the day job  ;-)


Sometimes I wonder why................. But it's our future income when properly retired and will sustain us hopefully until they nail the lid on .....


Rob

No comments:

Post a Comment