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.
That has given me the desire to add to the things at Quality Corners that make us money and to find some additional things I can do to generate income for our family. The CNC router should be here within the next couple of weeks and that device is fraught with opportunity, but I think it will be wise to keep going with my Linux based machine vision project. An opportunity presented itself for its use the other day in a lunch-time conversation with my friend (and current boss), Jerry Entrikin. He owns a carwash.
I can create the abiility of my vision system to read license plates. He wants to track his customers and their usage of the carwash in a database for marketing purposes. The more specific his knowledge about who buys washes, the better he can run his business. I am thinking about developing an open source program to gather that license plate information for him and put it into a database that will allow him to generate useful reports. I will put cameras into place both to read the license plates and also to capture images of the drivers so that when the same plate comes through, the picture and any other salient information that is entered by the attendant will be required and the customer experience will be much more personalized.