Business Progress In Spite Of Holiday

Violating My Own Low Personal Standards...


Well, the bad news is that the Turbo Pup Pool apparently didn't survive storage last winter. It's developed a small air leak in the top "support ring" which appears to not be easy to find.

That's OK I guess, since a new pool without filter pump and cover costs a whole $54 on E-bay.

I'll probably take another crack at finding the air leak again today, then if I can't find and patch the offending orifice I'll just buy a new pool and have it shipped in this week if I get tired of squirting soapy water while kneeling in wet grass.

The good news on the professional front is that I managed to get off the sofa long enough to write a little PLC program code revision for the KC Bottle Sensor project and forwarded it to my customer in a E-mail just now.

They've finally got enough confidence in the prototype system to give it control of the production line--running at 16,000 bottles per hour--later this week and assuming everything goes as planned we have requests to build another couple of panels for other clients. I'll finally get paid to the point of breaking even on the hundreds of hours spent doing design and R&D to date, and maybe by the end of 2010 we'll actually be MAKING MONEY so I can write the IRS a nice check for 30% or 40% of my blood, sweat, and tears come April 15th.

This week's schedule includes getting four more rebuilt pneumatic valves out the door, in the process clearing the workbenches for another shipment of eight valves to come in the door later in the week.

My customer is super impressed with the performance they're getting out of our rebuilds, and told me that I now have all of their valve rebuild business in the Kansas City plant and they're talking to the corporate office about getting me on the vendor list for their other plants.

The coolest thing about our accomplishment is that we're beating another company that's been doing this sort of thing since 1979. We've got a better price and to date some of my rebuilds are lasting TWICE as long as the competition's product.

The only problem with making a product that lasts six months in rigorous service is that at some point we end up working ourselves out of new work for short periods of time.

Starting a company from scratch again only reminds me to be really pissed off when idiots on TV talk about "jobs" and "working families" and the government's role in creating income opportunities.

From my experience, the only thing government--local, state, and federal--has done for me since last October is take money from my savings account (since I haven't made any profit yet) in the form of "fees" and "licenses" while at the same time wasting my time filling out application forms and quarterly/annual reports and "returns."

How can you "return" something (cash) when nothing was "given" to you in the first place?

Like Ayn Rand writes in "Atlas Shrugged," if the government gets any more generous in their "income redistribution" efforts people like me are just going to go back on permanent vacation...

...sort of the "blood from a turnip" mentality I guess.

Is it just me?