machinistguy
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Well, January truly was a piss poor month in terms of performance, but we still managed to get a good amount done.I was expecting January to be a loss of a couple thousand $, which would be pretty good. It's looking a little worse. The electrical in the shop has decided to mess with everything, so I'm overnighting expensive electrical components. Changing bookkeepers. Marketing performance is doing slightly worse than expected. Our biggest customers new CEO is digging deeper into his new initiative which has cut our revenue from them by half. I'm also planning to hire 3 new employees, 1 part time laborer, 1 marketing, 1 engineering.
Once the engineer is trained, I will no longer have any "in the business" work to do.
We've been at it for long enough that these losses don't stress me out, they're just a fact of life like cold weather. This is definitely a "the best defense is a good offense" moment.
I know it's crazy, but I'm confidently we can get to $1m/month by the end of the year even though we average about $50k/month right now. The biggest factor in manufacturing was generating enough gross profit to escape the fixed costs, kind of like terminal velocity, and we're there.
We've revamped our value offer based on advice from Alex Hormozi's book, and increased the cutoff for free shipping. Average order is up from $79 to $95 and cost of customer acquisition went down by 40%, so we're much more profitable (minus the insane maintenance shitshow that was January followed by this winter storm that's stopping us from fulfilling orders). We spent $5k just on electrical, had other problems, couldn't fulfill a $15k order we lost that revenue, etc..
Re: employees. I have the two ideal candidates for the marketing role and engineering role. They're both so much more expensive than anybody else I have so far. I'm 100% sure about the marketing guy, it'll be a good partnership. Idk about the engineer, not sure if my hesitation is due to the person or the situation. Both will take a 3-5 months to really start producing value for us, with great returns, the question is can I front both at the same time? Thinking I might have to get a loan if I decide to hire both.
Also we got an amazing new marketing campaign 90% done... and my marketing girl is stuck in another city because she left for the weekend and her flights back to DFW keep getting cancelled.
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