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  1. machinistguy

    Shipping a large order. Need advice

    SPEEDWAY 
    1. Ship w/ Insurance 2. Require a signature so 3PL can't claim they never received it. 3. Explain the above to your customer before hand, and make it clear using a 3PL is at their own risk. The customer is paying you to ship to a location. Once you've successfully delivered it, anything that...
  2. machinistguy

    Building a Manufacturing Conglomerate Progress Thread

    EXECUTION 
    Things aren't great at the moment: 1. Extremely slow summer. 2. Constant stream of unexpected costs and downtime. Almost anything that could break and cost money has happened. We have a technician coming in Thursday to do even more expensive repairs (which means we're paying for the repairs...
  3. machinistguy

    Industrial Businesses Megathread

    IDEA CHAT EXECUTION 
    Lol, I feel the same way about my business. Sometimes I want to throw it all away and do something more "cool" and air conditioned.
  4. machinistguy

    Industrial Businesses Megathread

    IDEA CHAT EXECUTION 
    Mitee-Bite: These guys make small clamps to hold pieces of metal securely. We bought ~$2k worth of them last year and will probably keep buying more and more as we grow. Google says they do $11m+ in revenue. From what I've seen, their clamps have an order of magnitude more holding force than...
  5. machinistguy

    Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas Meetup.

    HOT! MEETUPS 
    I'll be there.
  6. machinistguy

    Opportunities in Food Business Entrepreneurship: Don't Dismiss It.

    NOTABLE! ASSERTION 
    I was actually thinking the other day about how the same fruits and veggies taste so plastic in the US vs Europe, and opportunities in fertilizers that can fix that. Specifically, fertilizers tailored to each fruit, that restores the magnesium, copper, and other mineral imbalances in the soil to...
  7. machinistguy

    How to Transform a Single-Client Company into a Diversified Enterprise – Challenges and Strategies in Industry 4.0

    MARKETING SCALING QUESTION 
    Are you the CEO or the Lead Engineer? When you start out you have to be both, but eventually you have to decide and hire the other. Re: job stability, we deal with a lot of ebbs and flows in our business too. The solution is contract workers, most of which are broke PhD students from the local...
  8. machinistguy

    Educational Resources for Entrepreneurs

    SCALING 
    I've always known my range of knowledge regarding areas of a business were very heavily skewed towards the engineering side. As for knowledge of finance, operations, team building, sales, etc I'm mediocre. My solution starting out was to focus on what I'm good at. Find a product who's...
  9. machinistguy

    Exhausted by the grind?

    MINDSET 
    I've been feeling the same way. My answer was also growth, but not just any growth. I no longer just consider Return on Investment, but also Return on Stress. All decisions and new customers must not only grow the business, but also make it easier to operate. For my particular business, that...
  10. machinistguy

    Most Billionaires Don't Change The World

    SUCCESS! 
    "Changing the world" is less about changing the world as it is about ego. The delusions of grandeur. If they start the next unicorn social media AI company to get the media going off about how they're the next big thing, maybe they'll feel validated. It's a selfish business vs the other path to...
  11. machinistguy

    Building a Physical Products Business Utilising E-commerce & Social Media

    GOLD! HOT! MINDSET 
    Do you not see a future for your stencil business? Have you done a quick estimate of potential market size (#of universities x avg order size/year)? If you don't, you're suffering a massive opportunity cost by putting any effort into it at all. If you do, then you're suffering a massive...
  12. machinistguy

    B2B Customer Relationships Etiquette

    PEOPLE 
    Thanks for the reply. It seems the general consensus is most people are open to crossing the purely professional boundary as long as you keep to basic social rules like being genuine, and the extent of the interaction dependent on personalities meshing, etc and you respect the company's rules...
  13. machinistguy

    B2B Customer Relationships Etiquette

    PEOPLE 
    I was expecting advice about golfing and buying front-row seats to ball games being standard B2B sales behavior, but I got the opposite. This seems key to all interactions. Do you think more positively of the people who asked you for beers? If you had to refer a client to one of the people you...
  14. machinistguy

    B2B Customer Relationships Etiquette

    PEOPLE 
    Our biggest customer is a publicly traded company. We did ~$190k in sales with them last year, and projected $300k this year. The company is the client... but it's really individuals that we work with. The quality control employee, the team lead, the VP CC'ed to half the emails but we only...
  15. machinistguy

    Starting to think I just suck at this...how do I collect proper market research? (Mortgage niche)

    MARKETING 
    I didn't say they weren't smart enough. You're selling a solution that's a deviation from how they've been doing it. Everything you wrote confirms that you need a massive education campaign. You're not looking at it from their perspective. They have a thousand things on their mind, from a big...
  16. machinistguy

    Starting to think I just suck at this...how do I collect proper market research? (Mortgage niche)

    MARKETING 
    Not my area, but I'll give feedback since you asked for it. 1. This sounds like a business that needs high customer education for them to be sold on why they need this solution. If you advertise through FB, do you need a whole funnel? Ads to build awareness, not convert. Then ads to build...
  17. machinistguy

    Random Chat, Thoughts, Posts, and/or Rants Thread

    HOT! CHAT 
    Does anyone have an article or instructions on proper cyber security procedures like "Create a unique, complex password for each account and this is how you manage the different passwords"? I've gotten a bunch of different sign in attempts recently from foreign countries and other US cities.
  18. machinistguy

    Building a Manufacturing Conglomerate Progress Thread

    EXECUTION 
    Delivered the first prototype this week!Some minor finish problems; should be sorted out next week. The client was super happy. Can't wait to get the initial PO for this, it should be a 6fig PO. This is going along really well, I've even moved the goal post. No longer plan to use it as a loss...
  19. machinistguy

    Purchasing a trendy B&M business...

    HOT! INVESTING 
    $500k in profit, $900k in revenue... in 2021? What happened to 2022 and 2023? Is that where you got the $420k revenue number? Then it's going to do $170k this year? Which is a loss of $80k. The business isn't worth $350k, its worth less than zero because it's unprofitable and declining...
  20. machinistguy

    Random Chat, Thoughts, Posts, and/or Rants Thread

    HOT! CHAT 
    That tattoo is officially the trashiest thing I've seen all year. Keepin' it classy internet.

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