When You Buy a Glorified Job, Not a Business

And when those. Or when that has happened, it has been a painful, you know, couple of weeks or a couple of months. And I would love to alleviate that pain by having one to two more people than we need and like really filling those people with knowledge so that if and when inevitably a person leaves, we're not hurting so bad. So that's like a pro con.

Like I'm staff stable. That's great. I certainly wasn't before, but, you know, room to improve there and then really what I'm my major couple, major focuses in 24. I've barely scratched the surface of what I can do sales wise.

So just like getting that out in front of people, you know, really capitalizing on the fact that this particular product is not easy to buy, there's not a lot of people making it and the people who are making it, you know, my competitors frankly have a service issue, customer service issue that, you know, I feel is our strong suit. Right. I answer the phone, I answer email, that's gone an…

I didn't realize that such low hanging fruit is such an opportunity, you know. So my focus is figuring out like, okay, what is truly the highest and best use of my effort and time, which of course is like the entire crux of business. You know, there's nothing innovative here, but when you're surviving, you're not doing those things.

You know, when you're like, dare I say, thriving, which I still feel like I borderline that every day, but you know, then you really need to like be protective of your time. So focusing on that and then also too kind of like what we were talking about earlier, not all growth is created equal. And I fell victim to that.

And I know that. And so I'm in this real time exercise right now of figuring out, okay, I have X number of people. What can we actually do? I don't know, I. This whole thing has been like an in real time experiment.

And I don't think I'm close to the ceiling of what we physically can produce relative to the people that we have. And so I'm just selling my little buns off to see where that XY axis is of profitability. In the meantime, our material cost, fortunately, with rising interest rates and stuff, has gone down, down, down, it's still going down.

So again, real time, like, okay, can I really produce 300 countertops with only six heads at a reduced material cost of X? And what does that profit look like? You know, I have what I feel are pretty stinking attractive and promising numbers that I don't feel are unrealistic. But now it's time to prove it.

There's a lot of optimism in your tone. That's pretty exciting, Tato. And are you paying yourself yet?

Oh yeah, that I make a measly wage of fifteen hundred dollars a month. So yes and no. I have chosen to do that because like I said, I Live extremely lean. And all the profit that we made in 23, we did, we did end up processing a profit.

Even though the first, at least quarter, if not first half was at a pretty drastic loss, we did end up posting a profit and I took all of that and reinvested back into growth. So kind of a second round of buying equipment, except for this was revenue producing equipment. More molds, more machinery to produce more product.