Calm before the storm

Becky and I have been relaxing and taking it slow the last few days. There are some major decisions that we have been trying to tackle as we prepare to hit the road once again and leave Texas possibly for good.

One of our biggest decisions has been related to our business. We found out from our major product supplier that the dollar is slipping fast against foreign currency and brass (our product's primary material) has doubled in cost over the past few months... On top of that, the US Post Office raised it's rates and redefined their package classifications so that our shipping costs have just about doubled too - especially on small packages. Small packages used to cost $0.63 for us to ship and now they cost $1.13 (a $.050 increase). While that does not sound like much, when you sell a product that costs only $4.00 including shipping & packaging, it's a fairly large expense increase. With our supplier expecting costs to continue to increase over the next few months, we could see the end of our small busniess in less than 6 months if we don't make some serious changes...

Last night we made the decision to stop offering free shipping. It was a very hard decision for us because it simplified the on-line transactions and gave us a bit of an edge over our competetors. The next few weeks will tell us if that was a good decision or not. So far it seems that we are getting about the same number of on-line orders each day as usual. Dropping the free shipping not only offsets the increase in cost for shipping but it gives us the income that was normally spent on postage. We opted to leave our prices the same that they have been since we started our business back in 1998. If our costs increase again, we will have to raise our prices to stay in business. With the potential increase in our product costs on the horizon I secured the remaining inventory from our supplier (the largest inventory purchase we have ever made). That should carry us through the Summer and give us a little extra cash to play with in the near future. We'll have to see what happens this fall...

We're looking at starting another (or actually several other) small businesses that are independent of what happens in the world economy. I have the perfect business idea and have already tested the market with a successful trial. I just need to focus my energy on it now and spend the next few months building up product and websites to target my market. With some hard work we'll be able to offset the slow decline in our other business and set ourselves up with a more stable long term income.