"In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." –John 16:33

Day: May 11, 2005

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Questions about business

Christian struggled yesterday with his math–not with the complexity, but with the tedium of doing the Singapore “Mental Math”. I think we might be in the middle of end-of-the-year-itis. The big push to finish everything up is going on right now with the next big milestone being the research reports. It will all be over soon and all they will be doing for the summer is Mavis Beacon and less than half of their normal piano practice. We need to start looking for some summer craft and gardening projects.

Ron Voorhees, our partner in Quality Corners, gave us a call yesterday that has me thinking that we might have an uphill battle in keeping our current level of business. One of the biggest owners of our principle customer came into our business last Friday. He had a long talk with Ron and was very favorably impressed with our operation. Word got back to him yesterday through the grapevine, the this man had given a talk to the people in the business to whom we sell. Several of them had been trying to figure out a way to do the manufacturing for themselves instead of buying from us. We think the talk stalled them a little, but it certainly gave us a reality check. We need to make these parts as efficiently as possible with the understanding that we could lose the business at any moment.

UPDATE — I got a call from Dad this morning that Ron got called to a meeting with our big customer on Friday to discuss the prices of our products and our relationship with them as a supplier. I called Ron to talk about it a little. It is impossible to know what they really want out of the meeting, but we believe that it is probably not a bad sign right this moment. We are going to go into the meeting without any expectations, but with the hope that we can negotiate a little bit longer term arrangement than the week to week arrangement we have now. If we can have confidence that we will have the business for a little longer, we can make the commitment to invest in more equipment which, over time will drive our costs and the price of our products down. This should allow us to get more marketshare with our other customers which will, in turn, give us more economies of scale to drive our costs and prices even lower. We hope that is what this is about.

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