Money-Making Terrarium

Stuffed Crepes

So my DH is recovering from a bug and is not well. It is New Year's day and everything on our little island is closed (big Hawaii vs Georgia game!). What to make for dinner that will be gentle and yet good? My grandfather's crepes: totally from my pantry, totally yummy, and pretty easy once you get the hang of it. The crepes are standard, and we filled them with a sour cream mixture, but you can really do whatever you want----veggies, cheese, fruits....totally elemental!

Crepe: 1 egg, well beaten 1 cup flour Enough cold water to make a thin batter

Filling: 1 cup sour creme 3 tbsp honey 1 tsp cinnamon

On top: Warm some frozen berries from the fridge on your back burner

Mix together with a whisk, aiming for the consistency of skim milk. Heat a large, non-stick (I am not normally a fan of the non-stick but you really need one for this) pan on medium heat. Pour a 1/2 cup of the batter on the hot pan and swirl to coat. How to know when it is done? The edges will curl up and the middle will be dry to the touch.

Add your filling---I place 2 or 3 lines of it in the crepe, with 1 inch in between, and leave the part that will be the end of the crepe empty, otherwise, you run the risk of it squishing out. Roll the crepe over and over and onto the pan. Top with a bit of berries!

My recovering poor hubby enjoyed these and came completely from my elemental pantry....

Hawaii and Supplier Doofusness and the Office Last Night

A complicated post is coming so hold on.

We have moved to Hawaii.  There is a lot behind the story but I will give the 50-thousand foot view:  outsourced production, built better systems, souped up the website to an awesome level, sold our house (the first person who walked in put an asking-price offer and we closed in 30 days---I will share those secrets later), vaccinated our pets, and moved.  We are on the most wild and beautiful of all the islands and are very very fortunate.  But more on this trip later...

Next, "Where's my gift basket, dude?"

Talked with a supplier this morning.  She called our main number today and left a message for me saying "we've got our shit together now, so please come back to us" and left her home number.  We have been slowly moving our orders to a different supplier because we could never get an order status, get orders confirmed in a timely manner, an accurate invoice, or even a return email or phone call.  Their email address was tied to their DSL account (e.g., "supplierx@crappydslprovider.com").  She explained to me that the latest in her stream of "corrupt" front office staff was now in jail for stealing from the company, and that now, she has rehired an old employee and to please "talk to her with any of your special needs---she is very competent", yeah, right.

She then went on to tell me that if this one didn't work out, she may be done with the business.  This is a business that has been around for hundreds of years, been passed down from old fart to old fart (I use old fart here as a mentality, not as a chronological reference), and has a solid following as they do a unique thing that is hard to find.  A tough supplier to replace, but one we've had to---but this chick tells me this shit about closing down if this person she just hired doesn't work out coupled with "we've got it together now, so please come back, and oh yeah by the way I will check all your orders myself by hand" is not quite where I want to put my business. 

The owner of the business is bed-ridden and has to trust the people she hires.  She gets a courier to bring papers up and down the hill from her home to the office 3x a week.  Oy vey.....I am already tired and now have to stop. 

Did you see the Office last night?  I am waiting for my gift basket from this doofus.....meanwhile, I am going to count my money that I made yesterday in my pajamas while I shopped for a half-million-dollar home in Hawaii with my beautiful, younger-than-me, husband and drive around in my Jeep getting Starbucks and expensive sunglasses.  Bragging?  Hell no!  I came into this world with a handful of dog-poop and a spool of cheap thread (and was beaten often and told I was stupid, ugly and would amount to nothing) and was asked to make a life worth living out of it.  I look forward to sharing my unique knowledge and showing you how I did it so you can too....

What we did this week....

I promised myself that by this time this week last week's major headache would be solved.  And I think it is.  I have set up a production schedule, with assignments and due dates.  Seems straightforward, but of course, I have to do it all online with a SQL server backend so I can see the same data that someone "on the ground" at the production facility can see.   We are not a company that was built on forms drafted in triplicate and filed somewhere.  We depend upon data and it has been a week for serious data crunching.

On a similar note, we have a need for sales forecasting in order to order the right amount of stuff every month.  Duh.  Pretty simple, I know.  My lovely spouse is wonderful at crunching numbers.  We downloaded and installed Crystal Reports IX.  Long, tedious process.  We come to find out that we cannot actually view the nice reports online, but have to 1)Open Crystal Reports, 2) Run the reports we want, 3) email them to someone.  What happens if I forget to do this?  What happens if they finally put me in an asylum somewhere?  How will my staff get the reports they need?  Oh yeah, and it cost $600. 

Crysal reports has web services---but you have to dig into the SDK and install, at the very minimum, a .DLL on the server.  Ours is a shared server and our hosting provider won't let us install that paticular component----the reason:  a bad rep for being unstable and crashing servers if the query sent to it is even midly malformed.  Good enough.  We don't want that blood on our hands anyway.

So he---duh---just took the same queries and put them into a plain ol' ASP page.  Easy enough.  Within a day we had the reports we needed and they can be viewed from my outpost I am creating for myself in the future on a small island in the Pacific.....this is what I am planning for now.  So, why, would I buy that piece of software?  I am not sure still what the ROI is-----

I did things like make sure our door has a sign, that my staffers are set up on a really cool piece of software called Employee Task Chaser (www.VeritaskSoftware.com).  We had developed a dumbed-down version of this during our last holiday, because we quickly found that if we were not available, things did not get done in a planned, organized way.  My version was OK, but this little piece of software is very useful and a critical tool.

And now I realize I may have given my competitors an edge.  I'll be quiet now.

My Head Hurts!

I should have started this blog a long time ago.  I've been very busy creating a business that gives me freedom and flexibility in my life and allows me to be super creative---from an artistic standpoint to a problem-solving standpoint.  It has been an arduous trip, though, I must say, but 4 years into it, I think I have it licked.  Fuckin' finally. (Can I say that in a blog????)

My mother-in-law (MIL for short) is a therapist.  A great one, and so I get free therapy whenever I want it.  Fridays are her days off, so I spent time with her this morning talking through my current anxieties.  There are many---if you own a small business, you know of what I speak.  If you are looking to own a small business, you may have heard all the horror stories---long hours, no money, tremendous uncertainty, etc.  Don't discount them like I did:  they are true.   That is the bad news.

The good news:  you can control your environment.  And so this is what MIL coached me through this morning---how to use my ability to control my environment to make my anxieties disappear---or at least to control them.  Let me walk you through where we are in this business:

We make a product.  We sell it online.  The product is very hands-on and complicated, and I've written many many programs to run it all (I have a light IT background from the .com days), but one aspect of the physical assembly process is going PAINSTAKINGLY SLOWWWWW.  I mean really slow, and I am losing money on a particular project because of it.  Up until recently, our sales were quite small, and the slowness did not really matter.  The lack of systems to monitor the assembly process and reward/punish good/bad behavior do not exist.  It is a small group still and we all know each other well, and a lot of trust is there.  But still, I am a business person and I would like to see them speed it along. 

This has been causing a lot of anxiety lately---I know in the back of my mind that it is a dark zone---an area of my business that happily "just happens" without much interference.  It is the sausage factory element---I don't want to know what goes in, just plate it up.  But because we are in a phase of new growth - and fast growth - I have to know how the sausage is made, who made it and how long it took them.  Very basic for most companies.  For us----for me----it is a real challenge that has been keeping me up at night.  Not the challenge, but the greyness of it all.

It makes me feel crazy---"am I being too anal about it all?  Why should I care as long as it gets done?  It is a SMALL business anyway, so you're doing pretty good and just leave it alone. " Is what I am thinking---but what MIL and I talked about today hit the nail on the head:  it is MY CRAZINESS about these kinds of things that has allowed me to create a healthy happy business in a very short time that can, now, run without me, mostly.  We talked about embracing this craziness and using it - it is a gift, not a liability.  That no one else can see the things that need correcting is irrelevant:  my gift is being able to make corrections to my Money-Making Terrarium (AHA!  A blog name!!!!) in real-time and allay my worries and fears. 

That is what I learned today.