|
|
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.
| Overhaul of Email operations |
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>
| Operating System failure and overhaul project |
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.
| The physical operating environment in our home and work space |
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.
| Moving StereoManuals.com website to a decent hosting company |
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...
|
