http://www.effectiveinventory.com/articles.html

The production costs of a good auto detailing DVD are through the roof though. You’re talking tens of thousands of dollars to do anything decent. You need a super expensive car, a lot of supplies, a detailing bay with A+ lighting, a pro quality HD camera, a pro detailer who can talk to the camera, someone to edit it all, somewhere to produce the dvd, etc etc…and you still have inventory if you distribute a physical copy, which we would in addition to selling it online. With detailing you have to have perfect lighting and perfect camera work to be able to see the minor imperfections you’re working on and how much you improve them. It’s much more complex than it initially sounds. Our pro-detailers who write for us are continuously working to improve their garages, and one in particular may have a brand new one being built with the capabilities of really doing it right. When that happens we’ll revisit the idea of shooting a DVD.

Much more realistic for us is the continued growth and success of SportsLizard and LockerPulse, which obviously have no inventory.

No warehouse/inventory/shipping/lead times/etc.. Oh, and if its a digital product you’re talking 96% profit (only cc fees and hosting and other little bs expenses).

I’m still waiting for your car detailing DVD!

Adam Holland

@Tim – I think I understand better now, with the large leaps required it’s not so easy to slowly transition up – it’s got to be done slowly or not at all. As for turning customers away, could you perhaps charge more until you’ve got the right number of customers? That’s what most business books tell us to do, but I know that if the market is price sensitive it can be a fine balancing act.

@Nev – very concise!

@Adam – $10 – $30k eh? So how did you go from nothing to the first supplier? Was it a different deal then, or were you paying consumer prices, or was it just a certain supplier who didn’t have crazy restrictions?

Clearly though, we can “control” things a little more than Tim could. He had a lot of labor to deal with, a lot more customer service nightmares I’m sure, and probably way more insurance/liability type of stuff with the service side of his business.

PS – I hate banks and just about every thing about the way they operate when it comes to handling small business. Yo government, want to start to fix the economy and encourage business growth? Give us more tax breaks, and give us banks that understand how businesses started after WWII operate. I don’t care if it’s through better SBA programs or something different, just less red tape and more logic. I’m not asking for you to throw money at any new venture (that’s a bad idea), but if someone like us comes along that has shown large growth for years and is profitable in a crappy economy, it seems counterproductive not to give us access to gobs of capital that we can use to grow and create jobs. We might not always want it, but for it not to be there is a joke. /end rant

In any case, as you can see our growth was impossible to make incremental, it was large leaps which took years to recoup from and there was just nothing we could do. Factor in incredibly poorly estimated taxes and other unforeseen expenses the new location was a disaster from a financial standpoint. We also had to play the continually bank game, spending an alarming amount of our time showing the banks that we were making progress, we were making money and paying our bills, but that wasn’t enough, they wanted to know we were moving forward in a direction to continue to be able to pay our bills – so counterproductive and frustrating all so a mid-level bank employee can justify their inflated salary.