6-5-2004 - This is a "Mini History" of StereoManuals with details regarding the past six months. For those of you who are interested in our business... either in how we are doing now or our prospects for the future... this is worth your time to read.


For nearly two months, we have not been able to respond to most emails. Today we get back to responding to site visitors and customers after this un-planned, un-expected, un-announced, and extended period of being semi-shut down. Many, many changes were accomplished during the down time. Here are the details.

FIRST, a quick history... As many of you may already know, we have experienced a great deal of growing pains since "accidentally" starting this business in early 2001. It was "intended to be" a part-time business selling a few score or perhaps few hundred popular manuals mostly on eBay and mostly "when and as" we felt like it. BUT many unplanned and unexpected events unfolded in such a way such that "manuals" literally "took over my life."

During the fall of 2001, I put up a small website called StereoManuals.com to supplement our eBay business. Even though it had no lists of available manuals, it was useful (mostly to serve up pictures for our eBay auctions). Approximately October 2002, I made the decision to move our business from almost entirely on eBay to our StereoManuals.com website. Being a "do-it-myself" type guy, a major problem was... I barely knew how to construct a single web page, let alone build a full business commerce site.

We put up the first real site just before Christmas 2002 with lists of some of the available manuals. Google indexed it in January and all (email) hell broke loose on us. Since that October decision, I've kept a work schedule that should have been done by 2-3 people as we've been working at this project of creating a full-time permanent business.

For those who like to read and are interested in such things, there were various pages that have been on this site over the past year or so which were an attempt to help site visitors and customers know what was happening here. All of them have been consolidated into this Collection of Old Pages. 2003 (first half in particular) was a "very tough" period for us. The future was looking quite depressing... like a never-ending story of falling further behind each and every day and no hope of things getting better. MUCH has changed since then, things ARE much better, AND the future is looking brighter! (Thank the Lord).

NOTE: It would have been very easy for us to have made "lots more" sales, AND made "much more money", AND avoided the problems described in the old pages except for these three reasons.

1 - Particularly since the beginning of 2003, our highest priority is to ship product that is the best we can possibly do.

2 - I made a decision to NOT USE flat-rate pricing, instead opting to charge based on the size and complexity of the product. This is a huge benefit to folks buying the many manuals that are only 5-10 pages. I also decided to discount (in most cases) multiple item purchases.

3 - I made a decision to never sell a manual without first providing a description that included at least... total page count, how it would be constructed (binding style, folded pullouts, inserts, etc.), PLUS a guaranteed Overall Quality Rating.

We are NOW in a "MUCH BETTER" position to continue moving forward with the various plans we have made to enhance this business for the benefit of our site visitors and  customers. January through May seems to be the busiest time of the year for our manuals business. During this year's season, many things transpired to both hinder and advance our goals.

Here is an account of the past six months and an explanation for why we've been semi-shut down for the better part of the last two months.

1 - During the second half of 2003 and continuing to now, we have been able to make huge organizational changes regarding the few thousands of manuals we already had plus the 40,000 - 50,000 manuals we acquired in April of 2003. We have also accomplished MUCH regarding the cataloging and descriptive information for the manuals. These changes were not updated on the website for various reasons. More on that below.

2 - Shortly before Christmas 2003, my 78 year old mother was hospitalized for several weeks and required serious surgery. It was looking like she might not make it. But she did and is home and doing much better. However, that hit on our time right at the beginning of the busy season was a serious impairment and caused us to neglect many more customer inquiries than normal.

3 - After getting fully underway again, we experienced some equipment problem delays. But, we got back into our stride and continued to ship a lot of product to many satisfied customers. Sadly, we had "many more" inquiries to which we simply could not respond. For someone (like me) who wants to provide top-notch service to everyone, this continued to be a very depressing situation.
 

4 - About the beginning of spring, I was talking with a friend about how difficult the email situation had been and was asking for advice with some ideas I thought would help. As a result of that conversation, I decided to make a switch from Outlook Express (which I had been using for 10 years) to the full Outlook email client.

5 - I didn't really have time to do this but proceeded anyway expecting it would be a "few days" project. BUT... it turned into a two-week++ project. In addition to implementing various changes so that it would work across several computers on our network, it was imperative that I learn exactly how Outlook worked and how to implement the many and powerful features of this program. I moved approximately 2 GB of email to the new Outlook setup and completely revamped "everything" concerning how email is received, processed, tracked, and archived. The result was an "astounding improvement" in our ability to handle spam, AND organize responses to inquiries from site visitors, AND better track and dispatch our other customer communications.

6 - We immediately began reaping tremendous benefits from those changes. After only a couple weeks, we were completely current with incoming customer inquiries. For the first time ever, we were no longer falling further behind each and every day. We were actually even beginning to address previously neglected customer inquiries. I was feeling quite cheery for the first time in a very long time. BUT THEN... we had a death in the family followed immediately by an operating system failure... <sigh>
 

7 - For several years, I had been running a long-term, "tweaked and highly customized" Windows 98 environment that was quite stable. BUT with the number of applications we regularly run simultaneously, it was always on the verge of system resources depletion and crashing. This was "one of" the reasons (there were several others) why website updates had not been done in a long time. It was simply too much of a hassle to shutdown the many apps in order to run website software. I had been considering a change to either Linux or Windows XP Pro for a long time but had no time to investigate and familiarize myself with those OS's to make a change.

8 - I'm "semi-expert" with computers, but was finding no easy solution to the Windows 98 problem. Since we really needed to change and since we were already "down", I decided to take the hit on our time and rebuild everything from the ground up. This to include a new OS, PLUS rebuild our whole networking environment, PLUS change most of our installed software applications, THEN bring it all up to speed with updates, tweaking and customizations. I knew it would be a big project and would require a steep learning curve. BUT (like the email project), took MUCH LONGER than I ever would have anticipated. A tremendous amount of time has been spent by me in learning the "in's and out's" of Windows XP Pro, but the effort has been worthwhile and is going to payoff big-time. We now have a vastly improved situation with our computers and programs. The stability and overall improved setup is making huge improvements to how we get work done and the efficiency in doing it.
 

9 - Since by now we were already so "miserably behind in current customer communications", I decided to "bite the bullet" and take another "big hit" on my time. At the beginning of 2001, we were deep in the midst of a major home remodeling project plus working on some rental properties. I took what was supposed to be a "small break" and began buying some classic audio gear on eBay that I had only been able to dream about in my youth. You can read more about this elsewhere on our site. Anyway, that "small break" turned into a "buying binge" that in turn, became the genesis of this manuals business. The location of my main computers and networking gear at that time, was in a walls-stripped-out, "wreck-of-a-room" area in the rear-end of our remodeling project.

Over the past three and a half years, we took over the entire garage area for production work and it is much better organized now. But my computer work-space in the house had became more and more of a jumbled-up, stacked-up, messed-up, disaster! So much so, that I could barely find space to write on a piece of paper, open mail, pay bills, etc. This "disaster" had been a major impediment for a long time and HAD TO be fixed. I started this new project with great sadness concerning the additional time away from responding to customer inquiries, but with GREAT JOY regarding "finally" getting this space straightened up.

About a week later, the efforts ended with my work-area looking like a command console at NASA... surrounded by computer screens, etc. It's still a walls-stripped-out room, but now, I can actually reach (without moving from my seat, the CD drives in the multiple computers, the scanner, the printer, the phone, calculators, etc. Now there are no more jumbles of wires, cables, gas lines, etc. strung all over the floor to trip over. I now have a "useable" full-size office desk with "nothing" stacked on it. And perhaps "best of all", I was able to bring in half a truck-load of my classic audio gear which has been mostly inaccessible for a very long time. NOW, I can once again mess around with the reel to reels or run the TV sound though some decent sound equipment. Joy! Joy! I mean... after all, wasn't that how this all got started... the desire to enjoy the sights and sounds of some good looking classic audio gear. It will be enjoyable watching the silver reels spin while catching up on the current email backlog.
 

10 - After all this "time off", I had yet ONE MORE PROJECT that was desperately in need of attention. Our website had been hosted by a company in such a way that it was a "very big hindrance" to improving our operations. StereoManuals.com HAD TO BE MOVED to a different, much better hosting company. The long-planned move had been postponed far too long . Approximately one year prior, I had told my hosting company I wanted to use MS FrontPage, which requires FP extensions to be installed on the server. They moved my site to a different server they had set up for that purpose. But did they tell me I would lose access to site stats, FTP processes and many reasonably necessary features? Did they tell me that a year later, those features would be no closer to being restored? NO!!

So to put a lid on all these projects, I spent a few more days of this extended "vacation time" and investigated several hosting companies that looked promising. I decided to follow Fred Langa's lead and moved the site to TRK Hosting. Was it painless and easy? OF COURSE NOT... there were problems in making the move. (Does this seem to be a pattern?) Our site, as currently setup, contains approximately "7000" hyperlinks. Because I didn't know better at the time, each and every hyperlink was hard-coded with "absolute URL's" instead of "relative URL's. Moving forward with our plans of major site expansion would be extremely difficult with this situation. So in the interest of getting all this crap done once and for all, I decided to fix them all plus fix a few hundred other glitches in the site that I was aware of.

I started this project with some "find and replace" procedures that ended up being a HUGE MESS! When I first looked at the site on the new servers, more than half the hyperlinks pointed to files ON MY HARD DRIVE. This thoroughly disgusting situation was remedied by manually correcting nearly 4000 of the links until it was sufficiently fixed to use "proper" find and replace procedures. I now know how it happened, so let's (all together now) pray that NEVER happens again... meanwhile, kick another 3-4 days down the drain.

The site switch was completed two days ago and you are being served by it now. So far, I am extremely pleased. This move (along with all the other changes) is going to allow us to "finally" begin making massive changes to our website and hopefully keep it constantly and 100% up to date at all times from now on. We expect those coming site changes to provide great time savings for us and a greatly improved interface for our customers.

Since about mid-2001, we have invested a (not so) small fortune in acquiring original manuals and other classic audio literature. Over this same period of time, I have invested an estimated 5-6 work-years of my life (toughest endeavor I ever got involved with). All this (plus the operational expenses involved to doing this startup) has had a significant impact on our income.

We hope many of you appreciate this site and what we having been trying to accomplish. We hope that most of you enjoy the decidedly "different flavor" we have here as opposed to most commercial sites. AND finally, we hope "you care" if we make it and survive to serve you for many years into the future. Assuming we do "make it", the site will develop into a tremendous resource for audio fans and will be many, many times larger than now.

So for all you out there who have not totally given up on us, start saving up your spare change and write us about your literature wants and needs. We surely could use ALL THE MONEY YOU CAN SPARE! We'll keep our eyes open watching for "yours"..... Thanks for reading.

Rick Stout,
Owner, StereoManuals.com

P.S. (Might as well call this 11 and 12)... Two more things while I'm here. Last week someone broke into my garage and stole a running laptop computer that had "all" our financial records and all of our personal information. In a panic, I immediately began to block, shut down and change financial accounts, etc. Within just a few hours we discovered the computer, port replicator and power supply laying in a flowerbed a few houses up the street. This was an exceedingly weird situation.

Because the laptop battery is in bad condition, the computer probably shut down within a minute or so of when they pulled the power plug. They would not have been able to restart it without a power outlet. I was able to ascertain with certainty that the program with all personal information had not been opened AND none of the financial records had been accessed. But too late to just be a minor hassle. We had already begun the process of shutting down accounts, so add another couple of days fixing this to the list above. I think I'll NEVER have a laptop again that is not "at least" pass-worded in the BIOS nor have sensitive information in files that is not "at least" pass-worded and more likely, encrypted. I guess it was a good learning experience. Security is more important than easy accessibility.

As if all the above has not been enough, the city has a contracting crew replacing sewer lines in our neighborhood. The street directly in front of the house is torn up for over a hundred yards and will be for half of this summer. Can anybody say..... parking and access hassle?

(6-7-2004 inserted note: Well, I guess I couldn't quite get started back to customer communications yet. I had to take care of just a few more things. One was, I decided to fix a "few thousand" various glitches in our website coding and get rid of many "inconsistencies". This will be a big time-saver going forward. A second one was... #2 daughter's van broke down out of town. Several trips to here and there, a tow job, several more trips here and there, and a complete ignition system replacement later... NOW (Monday evening), I'm starting. Who will the  "lucky" first person be...