Tom,

You are dead on correct about the value of your personal owner's touch. No one, absolutlely no one can duplicate the value of the owner in any business relationship.  I would never suggest  that you or anyone change that approach and we or any other digital templating process would be foolish not to offer an option to that working owner.  The purpose of my post is to open the conversation to owners who have a number of employees running around and just assume they have a control on the situation and it could well be an illusion.  You and companies like yours should not use subs at all; it would totally change what makes you of value. FULL SPEED AHEAD!!!

Tom,

Li'l ole you?  I saw you post your cable advertising budget or something once.  Looked like my gross revenues for a few months

Max,
I hope you didn't take my post as me being angry. I think your approach is correct for all the shops that want to make that leap to wide area fabrication and supply. There are many markets that need to do just that, or they may not survive.

Chris and Norm, my sales last year was a bit less than 1.5 million, total. For a shop my size, the ratio of overhead labor (me, sales, bookkeeping, about half of my partners time), versus five full time in the shop, plus the other half of my partners time as direct labor, there is not much left over for the business at the end of the year. I'm on the cusp of needing to decide if I'm going to grow enough to hire more employees for the shop, to enable another hire in the sales office, so I can stop working extra hours every dang night, or if I'm going to say "Screw it, I'm good where I am" and try to let an overhead salary go. More work for my partner and myself, but more money in our pockets as well.

Ideally we used to be about three to one with direct labor versus indirect labor. You could make decent money at that. With the increase in demand for different materials, and government demands of paperwork and records keeping, that is impossible to maintain.

Tom, My volumn is very close to yours. I just have a theory about growth. My thought is .. well in business your either growing or shrinking. No such thing as staying in one place. Just doesnt work that way. I am in kind of the same boat as you are. I dont have any desire to stay at this volume. I woul like to grow but it seems to be a hump I just cant figure out how to get over. From this point it will cost allot of money to get bigger. So going to 2mil in sales just isnt feasable due to the cost of the labor. Its like I have to double to make it all work. Well how do you double ??

Sorry,, just babeling

Travis, it seems we have similar problems.
With the economy heading the way it seems to be, it's mighty hard to take a chance at expanding in the office in the hopes of generating more sales.

max,


Glad to see you trying out there. I am excited that you will be coming to the Digital Template shootout the weekend before Coverings