Free Boss Life by Paul Downs Page B

back, which is slightly unsettling but not unusual. I presume they’re busy with their board meeting. They have ten days to settle up. They’ve made all the previous payments without delay, so I turn my attention to other matters.
    Emma Watson has been talking to the government. The U.S. Department of Commerce is eager to help us. She’s also found that Pennsylvania has its own export assistance program and maintains trade missions in a large number of foreign cities. Both of them contract with a third outfit, the World Trade Center, to provide manpower. Emma makes an appointment with the WTC to come see us. Two guys show and give us three cards each.
    Like everyone who visits us, it takes them a little while to wrap their heads around the concept of a cabinetmaking shop that makes nothing but conference tables. These export guys have been in lots of factories, and ours does not compare to bigger entities. In some areas we are very advanced—our robotic machines and our marketing on the Internet—but in lots of others, we look like what we are: small and undercapitalized. The government guys don’t seem to care about any of that. Their job is to promote exports, and to do that they need American companies to work with. They wax ecstatic about our inevitable triumph on foreign shores, aided by their services. While they are gassing on, I’m looking at them and wondering what their day consists of. How hard do they work? Do they ever wonder if they won’t get paid? (I suspect not, since the guys who print the money are issuing their checks.) Would I ever want a job like theirs, where I put on a suit every morning, do something entirely predictable, and then go home? Where I knew exactly how much money I would make today, tomorrow, and in the future? Would I be happier if my life had more security?
    After the trade guys depart, we contemplate the pile of beautifully printed, expensive brochures that they left. Our first decision is whether to sign up with the federal program, run by the Commerce Department, or the state program, run by Pennsylvania. The local contacts are the same guys we just met with in either case, but the staff in our target countries is not. Emma has no doubt that the feds are the way to go. Her argument: every person on Earth will take a call from the U.S. ambassador, while nobody has heard of the Pennsylvania trade delegate. Go with the people who can open doors. I agree. That decision leads us to the various levels of services offered by the Commerce Department. We settle on something called the Gold Key Matching Service. (Who thought of that name?) For a couple hundred dollars, a Commerce Department office located in our target cities will call around to local merchants to see whether any of them are interested in meeting with us. The process starts with a questionnaire, in which we describe what we make and what kind of foreign business we are after, and continues with a phone interview with the trade rep. I’m still only half committed to the whole idea of exporting, but Emma is enthusiastic, so I agree to sign up for the Gold Key Matching Service. I have to spend money at this point—three hundred dollars—but I feel like that’s not too much to see what happens next.
    On March 9, our new folding tables are ready to ship. I take a number of photographs of one of them, both raised and folded, to add to our Web site. I can’t get a good picture of it under our glaring lights, so I generate a nicer image with a rendering program. I only post renderings of pieces we’ve actually built and always include some shots of the table on our shop floor, even though those are often terrible photos. I want to prove that we actually do the work we show.
    Photos are easy; pricing is hard. What should I charge for this new product? What should I charge for any product? It is a surprisingly difficult question. There are two ways to think about this: first, what is