Free Boss Life by Paul Downs Page A

price. We need to commit to our middlemen so that they act as our champions. This raises shipping and installation costs, but saves us a lot of time and trouble. I chose one freight broker and one installation broker years ago, and have stuck with them ever since. Our person-to-person relationship is as important as the money in making it work.
    Second: the design. Traditionally, a person moving and assembling furniture is presumed to have specialized tools and some skills. Our clients have neither. Detailed instructions won’t help. Our tables are all different from one another, so a universal instruction book won’t work. We’d need a new one with every project. I tried this a few times, and it took huge amounts of time. The clients ended up calling me for help anyway. I decided to rethink our construction details with ease of assembly as a primary goal. All tables would henceforth consist of components small enough that one person could pick them up and move them, but big enough so that there weren’t too many pieces. The parts would self-align so that they could go together only in the correct position. Hand knobs would join all the pieces together: no tools required. Even an untrained person could see at a glance exactly what to do. We adapted this system to everything that we built. As it turned out, this also speeded up construction considerably. In order to build a table, it needs to be put together and taken apart multiple times. So thinking about assembly from an ignorant client’s point of view had benefits for our sophisticated workers as well.
    Third: the packaging. This must do more than just protect the goods. It has to communicate to everyone on the path from our shop to client. We want to send a different message at different points in the journey. The packaging has to intimidate the warehouse worker, convert the installer from neutral actor to enthusiastic champion of our product, and delight the customer. After a lot of experimentation, we have settled on a two-layer strategy: wrap every part, crate the whole order. Every piece of the table gets wrapped in foam, then in cardboard, and is clearly labeled to show exactly what it is and how to open it. Then all the pieces are bundled into a custom-made crate with wood sides but no top, so that there is no temptation to stack another load on top of it. To the truckers, the shipment looks heavy, strong, and expensive—something that is worthy of extra care. When installers break down the crate, they find nicely packaged, clearly labeled, and easy-to-handle pieces that are a breeze to bring into the client’s premises. We’ve heard numerous times from clients that the installers told them that we made the best table they had ever worked with. Good packaging converts the installers into our ambassadors and puts the client in the right frame of mind.
    Designing tables for easy assembly ended up saving me money, but crating and wrapping is expensive. My shipping manager, Bob Foote, needs a full-time helper to keep up with shop output. It’s interesting to break my whole crew down and see what proportion of the workforce works in the different parts of the operation: out of fourteen workers, four are doing design and sales, six are on the shop floor building the furniture, two are in the finish room applying coatings, and two are handling logistics. In other words, the people doing the woodworking, which is what most people think is our primary activity, are outnumbered by people adding value at other points in the supply chain.
    It takes two days to package all the components of the Company S table and to build custom crates for the oversize top sections. After it ships, I keep my fingers crossed, and the crate arrives safely at the installers, and a day later we hear from them that the install has gone well.
    I send the final invoice, for $7,551, to my contact at Company S, along with care instructions. I don’t hear anything