Ode to the Dave Clark 5
OK, so, commenter B on the last post.
His last comment / reply raises an issue I can’t let go, both because it is at the crux of the argument, and because the point he is missing is at the core of what I was saying about X (not *my* X, but X in general) and yet he appears completely blind to it, so maybe I didn’t explain it clearly last time.
I’ve put his last comment, unedited, in green text.
An actual cat engraving vs. a theoretical flux capacitator. No contest. “Yeah, I could totally bang models, while your girl has all kinds of flaxs.” Well, she’s real and the models exist in your imagination.
So you adhere to the any output beats no output model do you?
Dozens of people avidly updating twitter / fuckbook beats the guy considering writing a novel or blog but who hasn’t got around to it?
I’m not saying it doesn’t, on some levels, but those levels are the ones concerned only with page impressions and footfall and user’s eyeballs
Three customers lined up is great. Until money changes hands, it’s the theoretical flux capacitator from above. How long did it take to get those customers lined up? How many more are out there available to you? Until money changes hands, it’s the flux capacitator. You need some cheap way to test. Like maybe using someone else’s kit, renting by the hour.
You’re preaching to the choir re the money changing hands and it ain’t real until it does, and I explicitly talk about that in the post too.
How long did it take, I dunno, no time at all, because it came up in conversation, and they all started reaching for their wallets…
How many more like them are there out there? I don’t know, but there only has to be “enough” to make a living.
You seem obsessed with me needing some cheap way to test, like renting someone else’s kit, and studiously ignoring what I am saying, that doing that will teach you things, but not the things you neeed to know, because the two things are not similar enough…. NONE of the three potential customers of mine would even consider giving me a penny under those circumstances.
If your 3 customers are willing to wait for you to make up your mind about buying X, they’re willing to wait a week for China (probably.) They’re meeting their needs SOMEHOW right now.
No, you seem to have a blind spot about this, the two things are *not* comparable merely because they both involve a delay, you are doing *exactly* what I talk about, seeing the big picture, and *completely* missing all the fine details, all of which make it a total fuck up from the big picture perspective.
24 hour turnaround from a shop running $250K kit? No fucking problem. How about multimillion $ kit? Just so’s you don’t think I’m bullshitting you, the place I used to work in would do that, and they were running a cutter that cost a couple of mil, plus benders, plus the welders and sanders and a third party painter across the street. For another example, I can think of at least 3 places within an hour’s drive of me running EOSINT M280 laser sintering machines in cobalt chromium/wax 3D printers and furnaces for casting, whose whole model is 24 hour global turnaround. Orders come in in the morning, by evening they are on the plane going to Japan/wherever. Maybe Israel is more advanced than the UK in that sense, but I doubt it.
You make the same assumption as above again.
I hope you add enough value to justify the proposition, and the best way to test is to rent kit for a bit.
And you trot out the same core theorem that you won’t let go of, that I must test small scale, despite the fact I have been explaining such tests cannot test the things you need to know, because it is not the same, so let me explain some more.
For starters, you don’t know what “24 hour turnaround” means, maybe you are just young, and you are using the new marketing shit speak, but 24 hour turn around most certainly does NOT mean whose whole model is 24 hour global turnaround. Orders come in in the morning, by evening they are on the plane going to Japan/wherever because what YOU are talking about is from the SELLERS p.o.v…
When I, and older guys, talk about 24 hour turn around, and incidentally it is what I do in my non-day job as it were, is that 24 hours after the CUSTOMER pulls the trigger on the job it is all completed, signed, sealed, delivered, installed, up and running, service resumed, and indeed if necessary shipped to THEIR customer.
For my X, this is one of the reasons they want to throw money at me, at present all they can get is *your* version of 24 hour turnaround, which is useless, so they simply do without, by the time your version of 24 hour turnaround is done and the job eventually arrives the proverbial boat has been missed.
It’s not about being willing to wait a week for china either, because that’s cheaper, quite apart from the unacceptable delays, there are two other vital factors, again, *far* more common than people like you assume.
One of these is proprietary information, copy paste, there is your proprietary information, gone and copied and no longer your own, and for many people, their proprietary information and designs and so on *are* their business, they cannot even conceive of letting that data out of their sight and control, a total non starter, and nobody, not even the locals with 250k shift production facilities, are prepared to have the customer hand over a USB stick, plug it in machine, do production run, remove USB stick and hand back to customer, wipe machine memory in front of customer.
One of the other issues is materials quality control, not everything in the world is cast 10mm acrylic, not all pieces of wood or leather or cloth or so on are the same, not even close, and I’m talking about taking two random pieces out of a pile of apparently identical pieces in the stores, so it isn’t just selection of materials but also quite often orientation of materials prior to cutting, none of this is on offer either locally or abroad.
*NONE* of these things are amenable to “testing”, there is no way to test them, do them, or do not do them.
The fall back position for these people is they are either doing without entirely, or doing it themselves by hand and it takes forever entirely, there is no middle ground.
Ah but, people like you will say, why don’t they just buy their own fucking X if that is all it takes, but the fact is, they do not want to, they do not want to branch out on new equipment, new skills, new this or that, and for many of them, where would they put it, because it absolutely *cannot* go in their existing premises, either because they simply do not have concrete street level flooring with double wide access, or because it would totally destroy the whole ethos and ambience of the shop, and so on.
Indeed, this is where, in my night job as I call it, most of my work comes from, people with computer problems,and whether it is a business or a personal computer, they all contain private and proprietary data, and to these customers you simply cannot overstate the importance of;
1/ knowing that literally only 1 guy is ever going to even physically touch their machine, let alone go anywhere near their private and proprietary data.
2/ knowing that they can have it done just they way they like it, not the default factory reset, etc, you know there are a *lot* of people out there who will pay me an hourly rate to do things like migrate their data with windows easy transfer, even if they could figure out how to do it themselves
3/ knowing it is a 24 hour turnaround, as in proper 24 hour turnaround, not the shit you were calling 24 hour turnaround
B, please do not think this is me having a personal attack on you, but, you do exemplify, almost perfectly, things I have talked about so often in the past, for example I have talked about the one thing businesses CANNOT track and monitor, no matter how high tech they get, is how many people just walk past the shop, would never go in, and why.
There is a *lot* more of that out there than anyone in mainstream business would have you believe.
There are few more competitive and more cut-throat and less profitable enterprises that anyone can go into than building fucking PC’s, I still sell hand built to order PC’s, why? Because I offer things nobody else can, much less will…. I also make a profit per PC that the likes of dell or crapple can only dream about.
If you’re sat there thinking WTF is he on about, there is nothing that one asshole can do that dell or lenovo or whoever cannot do bigger faster better, then by definition you are missing the point, and my class of customers, *completely*.
They, as a group, do not even exist on your radar, and you, by definition, do not exist on theirs.
Again, not something you can “test”, you either cater to them, or you don’t, it’s binary, there is no almost or nearly good enough or close enough.
By the time these people come to *my* door, they have deliberately walked past every other commercial door out there, and I can sit here and say yeah dude, I have a kick-ass website for that, and though I say so myself, I think I do, and my marketing budget, it’s zero.
Word of mouth.
There are *enough* people out there that do not fit “your” definition of commerce and customers that they meet enough of other similar people that it generates enough work for me.
The gap I discussed between the macro view and the larger picture, it is a fucking chasm, and yes, it is full of people who want 500 bucks worth of work on a 250 buck laptop for 20 bucks labour with a 3 year warranty, but, that chasm is so big, there are lots of other people in there too, people who will discuss a set of components with me, order and pay for them themselves, and ship them to me, and pay me 250 bucks to build that machine, and they get an attention to detail and level of skill that the monkey assemblers at dell etc can only dream of, and again, if you think *anybody* can build a PC that well, you don’t understand what a PC could and should be, when silence and performance and reliability come first, component selection was dictated by air flow through the case, as in the route of the air flow and besides, to them, it’s worth the 250, because they know 100% it turns up in their place, plug in, and it just works, perfectly, nothing to set up or tweak or anything else.
If you have ever owned a *proper* tailor made suit you’ll get where I am coming from.
The modern high street tailor made shit with laser cut cloth and fancy sewing machines, it’s a 2 dollar crack whore compared to the bespoke hot teen virgin made just for you.
Because people don’t understand X
Because people don’t understand you can’t do macro *or* the big picture.
Because people don’t understand what “service” means.
I don’t think for a moment your views are what they are because you are in Israel, and I won’t make any cheap jokes about your view being different if you were in Palestine, because you would probably have the same views in Italy, or the US, or China.
But, I have spoken before about how those views you have were once utterly alien in all those places, what the USA did 70 bloody years ago, long before computers or cnc or mig or anything else, building liberty ships in 2 to 3 weeks from laying the first piece to launching, *that* was fucking service.
Your “24 hour production turnaround” in an environment where being brutally honest you just make sure the tool changers are full of sharp tools, and the materials bins are full of material, and the swarf bins are emptied, and a job comes in and basically effectively just gets added to the fucking queue for the office laser printer…… really, you think there is *anything* even fucking *remotely* impressive about that, that reeks of “service” or “customer care” in anything even approaching what those words used to mean as standard?
Yeah, in a world where “WE always answer the phone within 3 rings”, means it gets answered by a fucking machine, please select 1 for assholes, 2 for cunts, and 999 lines to deal with sales and orders, and not one single option to deal with problems or complaints….
But, please don’t get side tracked thinking this is about me, or *my* X, or B, it’s the broader picture, and where all those things fit in, or don’t.
Whether I personally do or do not end up buying *my* X, it doesn’t change *anything* out there, and that is what we all should be aware of, and dealing with, the reality out there.
