Do you have a sales expense story to tell us, either success or failure, and what you learned from it? What has happened is, especially around Christmas time, doesn't happen anymore. So, that's what I learned from it, is it doesn't happen anymore. Someone will call, and they just want a price on a particular sewing machine. They know that this is the machine that they want because they saw it on the internet, their friends, brothers, nephew has this machine. That's the only machine they're interested in, and the only thing they are interested in is the price. So, they literally could be calling every dealer in the East Coast, and whoever is the cheapest will win. Now, in the line that we carry, there lots of machines in that line that we do not carry. The cost of inventory would be, I'm going to say, staggering. So, at the shows, in a minimal amount of trial and error, but we pick out the particular eight or nine machines, and the rest we just don't. We see them at the show. Maybe if we go to the International Institute, we saw on them there, maybe, something like that. But they want the price, they want it right there. I know that they're going to call 14 other people. So, I have just looked at the retail price of that machine, actually, worked my way backwards as a guess, because sometimes, we didn't have a print out handy of the latest price lists. So, I've sold machines that just should not have been sold for the price that I sold them at. Same result, slightly different reason, again, right around Christmas. I'm thinking about this bill that I need to send out in the next four days, three days, whatever. So, instead of making X on this machine, I make 0.3X, because I will finance the cost of getting that machine in, use the money that they're going to pay me for the machine, and send it to whoever it is, the phone company, electric company, whichever, whoever is knocking down the door that I was worried about. It's simply giving up profits. Also, I was much more interested in establishing a relationship with customers. But on sewing machines, it's a very small subset that are really going to be repeat customers for new units. A decent sewing machine can last generations. So, you really only have one shot at this. What we have done now is, we've reduced our inventory, and if we sell it, we sell it, but we're going to sell it at a price that is not going to come down. Also, the manufacturers have made it easier for the dealers like us, in a sense. This is where they have minimum advertising pricing policies for the internet. So, that's something that helps establish a floor that at least you know. Because various companies are more and less aggressive of policing that policy. The companies that we deal with are aggressive. If they weren't, I don't know if we would switch vendors, if it would be a deal breaker or not, but it's something that they have recognized. It's probably the best for everybody to have a certain value attached to their products as opposed to a $3,000 machine for 40 bucks. It's dropping price, especially, dropping price over the phone, it simply does not happen anymore. There are still machines that I don't know the exact cost, but I'm not going to give you a price, even a real ballpark range of a price, until I know how much it is minus shipping, which is going to be plus or minus $5 or $10. I swear it seems like UPS has a dartboard. We'll order a machine on Tuesday, and then, same machine, same warehouse on a Wednesday, and it'll be 80 cents difference. It's just like, what the hell? It's the same thing, it's coming from the same place, you could've put it on the same truck. That's part of my UPS shipping rant. I could think of more pricing badness. That's probably the one that springs most to mind now. If a customer is really angling for a price, you give them the price, just make sure it's the right price. I think if you try to dance around your right price, maybe they're not going to like it. You don't care, you have to have a price. There are customers that really upfront, before we go any further, how much does it cost. I understand. I've been on a car lot, I understand that want. So, if that's what they want, to give that to them, but don't feel like you need to meet them in any way. They have to meet you. You have what they need. They are a lot more of them than there are of us. Why did you get that the sales management and business ownership? I think saw stars in my eyes on, there was some attractiveness to an unlimited upside is what I honestly thought as opposed to just the salary. The erratic nature of sales is that there is a potential downside to that. Initially, I was approached and I asked for how much capital would it take to initially open up the doors? The number that I was told was small. So, I really didn't think I was putting too much on the line. What it turned out was that number was way too small, and it was only my ignorance that I did not realize that it just wasn't a feasible number. So, once I really was more on the line, I got more into the sales out of necessity. I don't want to say it's sink or swim thing, but I think you learn to empathize with people. I don't think that the hard sale stereotypical door-to-door salesman or maybe even a car salesman approach really works very well anymore in the retail sector. I have certainly, found that to be the case. That if you try to have a can pattern it's going to sound like a can pattern and I think most people see through that instantly and it becomes a source of distrust as opposed to actually trying to close a sale. It's something that can keep you from closing the sale. That's really interesting that you say that because a lot of other people that we've interviewed already have mentioned that sort of thing. They've mentioned not only just passion but believing what you're selling. That's important. I think as a small business owner, if you don't believe in what you're selling, it shouldn't be in your store. You have rented that space and really what are you doing? Honestly, I'm not passionate about vacuums or sewing machines, but I believe that we are selling the best that is out there and there are reasons that I believe that to be the case and I try to stay up with the industry as much as I possibly can. Then it's a matter of conveying that to a potential customer as to why this is not just a good machine but maybe the best machine in the world, is going to be more than what they want to spend. So okay, in that price range then this is a good machine for you and this is why. I would imagine not knowing, I'm pretty ignorant about everything except what I do, that most industries, there is a good choice or a better than normal choice in almost every price range. It would be nice if you're in an industry or location where you can get by just selling the very tippy top. I'm not sure how frequently that situation comes about where people can specialize in being a Lamborghini dealer and just give up on everyone that wants a Chevy or a Ford. Maybe that's what Elon Musk is trying to do. Now, he needs more money. Well, yeah. So now, they're going to have a car for $50,000 or whatever it is. I think with the Internet now especially the Americans to a fault I think this is a problem with the American consumer is that they have become completely price conscious and not necessarily value conscious. So, if the least expensive thing that you offer is on the upper end of average, then I think a lot of people simply aren't even going to be interested in walking in. Once they walk in and you tell them, "Yeah, we have things in that price range that you asked about on the phone." Then they can compare that to the more expensive or the higher-quality things in the store. But I'm not talking about loss leaders, I think there are things that are just simply, you won't make a lot of money on and you don't necessarily care too much if you sell them because you can't make a living selling them, but sometimes that is just the best choice for a particular person. Everyone has situations where if all we sold was that, I don't think that's a defeat if somebody goes out of here with a vacuum and I've made $15 on the sale. They've spent the same amount of money that they would someplace else, but they've gotten something that's going to last them longer and when they come back for another vacuum they know where we are. They're also more likely to come to us for any other service that we do. So, there is some money on the backend potentially and just everything that goes along with having that customer as opposed to not having that customer. Without sounding too cliche, I hope, but just because this particular day the customer is not paying your house payment does not mean that it was not a successful situation from my advantage point. I mean, that typically we don't lose customers and the cost of customer acquisition, we don't spend a lot of marketing. So, in some sense, it's low. But in another sense, it's very high because it's relatively rare, and once we get you, I want to keep you because you have friends and you do have needs. What we sell is fairly you pick what is product. Almost everyone is going to have something other than a broom in their house to somehow keep the house clean. How do you measure and keep track of items sold? Can you give some examples? Two things, on the small incidental like the vacuum bags, the filters, the distributor actually does that for us on their site. So, we can just look up and that's where you're dealing with the larger numbers of things. So, I'm not sure business-wise because again, the outlay in dollars is not that big, but I have a general sense I might not know that we sold 38 packs of this bag in the last three months, but I know that we've sold more than 20 and we sold less than 75. So, if for some reason I had to order three months worth of bags, I would ballpark it, be able to just off top of my head if there's like a totally destroyed and hacked. But that's the only instance where we're dealing with numbers that honestly it's simpler for me to just have a sheet of paper, it's a notebook, and I can keep track of how many month-by-month of the vacuums by manufacturer that we sold. You just have this manufacturer he just write down the particular models for that month. Then the next page it's going to be 2016, and 2015, 2014. It's a way of projecting. Sales month to month, if you're going year on year for us, it's very erratic, but you can group them together and come up with a decent idea looking at, how much are we going to make on sewing machines in the next three-four months? Or I would pretty much go quarters. So, this quarter and the next six months, and then that six months as you say, this is the goal for the next six months because last year this is what we did. Again, our personal situation has changed, it's been in great state of flux in the past couple years, but generally what I would try to do is get better results by at the same time shrinking the marketing budget. At this point, we really haven't been doing much marketing in the customer basis chain. We're reestablishing a baseline now. So, the year over year numbers have not been really good barometer until recently. Now, we're back on the upward track again, and so the 2017 numbers are helpful for 2018, and I think 2018 will be helpful to 2019. But, for instance, 2014 were not very helpful. Well, looking at 2013, it wasn't helpful for 2014, and just because. Speaking from an owner perspective, from a sales manager perspective, other reps have bigger companies because you're selling their products. Do you prefer the face to face? Do you prefer, I mean, it seems like if they're not even calling anymore, I mean, what's an email? What I found inconvenient because I'm not down here all the time. What I didn't like about the face to face was if they're just driving through and they detour us on their way to or from Pittsburgh, and so they stop in, I didn't know that they were coming, there might be other customers in the store, and honestly I don't care if they don't want me to be able to stage, order their product in or put their product on the front, in the prime real estate in the store. They want to walk in and see what we're actually doing to market their stuff, maybe. I think that's crap. We're either selling it or we're not. If you don't think we're selling enough, tell us you're not selling, but if they come by and maybe they're only coming by every six months, maybe not even that frequently and I'm not here, or they come in and just happens to be a time where I'm personally busy with customers, and so we can't interact. I haven't had any time to think about what I really want to ask them or to complain about this issue that we're finding not necessarily with the product, but sometimes with a company, where it's difficult to put that in an email and make it sound like you're not just venting, or if you're actually saying, "Look, we're having all kinds of issues with the freaking shipping department." That what we order, it's being shipped, but they're shipping it in four times as many boxes as they have to, and so we're paying three times much shipping. You get that in an email, maybe they forward it to some supervisor in the shipping department, maybe they don't, but what's going to happen? But if you talk to them personally, especially face to face, let them now then when you see them at the show, if nothing's happened, then it's a whole different dynamic. There's a lot of stuff. I don't like wasting time. There's a lot of stuff that is fine, I think, on a phone, and a lot has to do with the rep themselves. We had a great relationship with a rep that the only time I would ever see them was at the National Show, and he didn't go to every show. He was there because it was cross-country for him. He was there maybe 30 percent of the time, but he was always extremely knowledgeable about what was coming up, knew the product line inside and out, and he's not ripping them apart and fixing them every day like we are. That's honestly, it's not super common for the reps to know as in-depth as he did, and everything that was going on in terms of sales, in terms of upcoming things, we would know about. He was just very good at contacting us. Now, things happen in same company, but we haven't had a decent rep in probably three or four years, and things can happen and I won't know about this issue, or this product, or this. On products, I'll get an email, but not from the rep, just a blast from the whole company. But if they're having an issue with a particular part on a particular unit, we might run into it twice in four or five months, but they'll run into it every day, and I don't know that it's any kind of an issue. I just think that's coincidence until the third or fourth one comes in, because we're only dealing with maybe a couple dozen of these things, they're dealing with thousands, but we haven't gotten the heads up, so we're telling our customers something that just is not true. Maybe they even have a fix that I don't know about, and that instead of ordering a part, you do this, kind of, and whatever. In general, the relationship with the companies has become, its diminished significantly. The only exception is with the folks that started off doing it well, phone only, and they're still doing it well, phone only. Everyone else just without exception. There's one that was at the top of the game back then and they're top of the game now. Everything else has gotten worse. Every single company that we deal with. There are a couple of very small companies that we started good relationships with, what I'll call good in the past two years, but they are very small distributors, basically like a mom and pop thing. They have a niche product, but they're the ones that have it, and we like it, and we go see them. But other than that, any kind of mass, let's just say, any company that has more than dozens of employees or at least dozens of employees, it has gotten much worse in the past 10 years. I think that employee training is a huge thing. It's just the quality of people, honestly, that I think that are entering into sales. I think that just that's my impression. That they just are not knowledgeable about what they are selling, whether it's 50-50 their fault and their employer's fault, or 80-20, one way or the other, I don't know. But in general, competence is becoming more and more rare.
