Looks like it may be my turn to diversify or die.
In recent years, well over two-thirds of my business has come from retirement homes managed by one company. Because this kind of work is extremely convenient to schedule and perform (no appointments, easy parking, I even have keys to some headends and can drop in at midnight if it suits me), a couple of years ago, I dropped all my Yellow pages advertising and stopped sending out sales letters to my other customers.
Over the last few months, I have submitted system upgrade proposals (broadcast HDTV, Ka DirecTV community antenna, etc) totaling maybe $40,000 to these properties. Over the last decade they have paid me well over a quarter of a million dollars, and have previously made single purchases as large as $30,000.
But I hadn't received any follow-up calls regarding these proposals in the last few weeks, which is strange, because I knew that the residents were figuratively, "chomping at the bit" for new TV services.
Well, today I got a call from one of these properties and was told that they wanted to turn off their SMATV system at the end of April. They said their management company had developed its own SMATV system that would cost a lot less for programming than they were paying 4COM, and wanted to confirm that there was no obstacle to a system shutdown on that date. I have a hunch I will be getting similar calls from half a dozen of their other properties in the near future.
In the short run, I will ramp up my broadcast HDTV add-on marketing to highrise apartments and condos that have VHF MATV systems. That might carry me for a year or two, but the way I design these systems, they are passive filtered systems and so there is very little follow-up service work from them, as compared to headends with strip amplifiers, demod-mod pairs and heterodyne processors, which often generate a thousand dollars or more in annual repair charges.
This will be the third time in my working life that a business I was in declined to the point where it was no longer viable. Around 1980, when I was in the coin operated games business, my largest arcade closed, my most lucrative bar account was bought by someone who had borrowed money from one of my competitors, and the drinking age had crept back up from 18 to 21, cutting down the traffic at my few remaining accounts. It got to the point one summer where I was down to just two accounts: a bar and a summer beach hotel. One evening I drove to the beach hotel to cash out the games, but didn't see its lights as I approached from the distance. As I got closer, I smelled lingering smoke. It had burned to the ground, leaving me with a weekly income of about $50.
A few days later, I met a world class flim flam man at a Howard Johnson's at 3:00 AM and we really hit it off. (It is easy to hit it off with world class flim flam men. That is part of what makes them world class flim flam men). He invited me to come to his place of business to see what kind of business relationship we could work out. I spent two days chasing him around (he was a human whirlwind), when he said. "Can you drive me to the airport? I have to go to Brazil at once!."
As I drove him to the airport, it was the first time I had his undivided attention. He told me of problem after problem that would go unaddressed while he was gone and I suggest some possible alternatives. Then he said, "I have an idea. Why don't you just run all my businesses for me while I'm in Brazil?"
It was an offer I couldn't say no to, because I didn't even have enough money in my pocket for gas to go home. I slept on his office floor for a few days and answered the phone every time it rang. Nearly everyone who called was figuratively or literally threatening to kill him for something. I didn't even know what business he owned that I was running. There was someone being thrown out of the World Trade Center who has subleased an office from "us", and someone else who had been flim-flammed out of over $100,000 in a futures trading scheme, and lesser people showing up at the door with a sheriff to try to collect judgements (fat chance).
The guy's primary business was now becoming making bootleg video games (Pac Man, Defender, etc) using knock-off circuit boards that he had smuggled into the country. I somehow lasted four months in this asylum before I had enough walking around money to go off on my own. I wound up working regularly for some of his customers who also were in legal businesses.
About twelve years later, I had become so close to one of these customers that he was providing over 1/3 of my income. Then, out of the blue one day, he told me that he was selling his business to a competitor, with whom I had some business relations but who would not need my services. The real problem for me was that about another one third of the work I was picking up was coming indirectly from my relationship with this customer, since it put me in contact with other businesses who needed other services I could provide, so basically, I lost two thirds of my income.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I was in western Massachusetts, which eastern Massachusetts doesn't even know exists, but I saw the Washington Sunday Post in the library when ti arrived on Tuesday or Wednesday and a lot of companies were looking for a technician just like me. I answered a few classifieds and was invited to one for an interview. I gave the right answers to the two most important questions for anyone applying for a field service job: Do you have a drivers license, and can you start right away?
Like most companies that need someone to start right away, this company was a disaster. The president and general manager were fighting for control of the company, and three other employees were scheming to be the most powerful, and these people out and out sabotaged each others installations to help themselves look better by comparison. I left after four months and went to work for a competitor of theirs, which was a nice company but they were committed to exiting the antenna business and specializing in fire alarms, and since seniority meant everything to them, I didn't see a path that would allow me to ascend fast enough.
I then went to a third company that did antenna service. The owner of that company was the angriest, most bitter person I have ever met. She believes that every time a technician fails to successfully complete a job, he deliberately failed so as to antagonize her. She seems to think that somehow, he benefits by failing. This company sends out untrained "technicians" in their own cars, with no tools, no parts inventory, and no description of the work to be performed, and when they fail, her common refrain is, "He f**ked us." "That no good son of a bitch f**ked us"
Every time a customer refuses to pay a bill, which happens more than once a week, she'd write the technician's first name on the invoice in black magic marker, and covers the invoice with an angry diatribe about how the technician fiucked up. Then she docked him for those hours. I only lasted one month at that job.
So I took what little money I has (less than $1,000) and checked into a fleabag motel in which the running toilet flushed itself once every few hours and the cockroaches were as big as me, and I took their Yellow pages and copied out the addresses of 100 apartments, 50 condominiums and 50 hotels and sent out a typed letter that said, "I'd like to service your antenna system" One of those letters went to the desk of a young man who had been hired to manage that property that very day. He thought it was fortuitous that after he received his first call from a resident for service to her TV reception, he gets a piece of mail from someone who could do that for him.
I discovered that condos were more receptive to direct mail than the other classes of customers, and wrote a better sales letter and got eight responses. The rest is history. I then told my former fire alarm employer that I was available if they had any work they couldn't handle in-house, and they told me they had decided to exit the antenna business completely and asked me to make them an offer for their inventory. I made a very modest offer and they jumped on it, but then I told them I didn't have any money, so I'd have to pay them in installments, and they went along with that, and then I told them I couldn't make the first installment unless they let me sell off some of their inventory first and they went along with that.
My business has come a long way since then. In 2000 and 2001, I sold nearly a dozen headends for prices ranging from $5,000 to $30,000 each. I average less than one unpaid invoice a year doing commercial work only.
But now, at age 55, it looks like I'll have to shift careers or emphasis one more time. My connections give me an "in" to furnish security systems, but that equipment changes so fast, whatever I knew a decade ago is useless, and I think the economies of scale require that any such firm have multiple employees. Maybe, I can get one of these properties I have done business with to hire me as a building engineer. As long as I have control over my own time, I might be able to basically cherry-pick satellite and antenna repairs on the side and have more stability than I've had in a long time.
In recent years, well over two-thirds of my business has come from retirement homes managed by one company. Because this kind of work is extremely convenient to schedule and perform (no appointments, easy parking, I even have keys to some headends and can drop in at midnight if it suits me), a couple of years ago, I dropped all my Yellow pages advertising and stopped sending out sales letters to my other customers.
Over the last few months, I have submitted system upgrade proposals (broadcast HDTV, Ka DirecTV community antenna, etc) totaling maybe $40,000 to these properties. Over the last decade they have paid me well over a quarter of a million dollars, and have previously made single purchases as large as $30,000.
But I hadn't received any follow-up calls regarding these proposals in the last few weeks, which is strange, because I knew that the residents were figuratively, "chomping at the bit" for new TV services.
Well, today I got a call from one of these properties and was told that they wanted to turn off their SMATV system at the end of April. They said their management company had developed its own SMATV system that would cost a lot less for programming than they were paying 4COM, and wanted to confirm that there was no obstacle to a system shutdown on that date. I have a hunch I will be getting similar calls from half a dozen of their other properties in the near future.
In the short run, I will ramp up my broadcast HDTV add-on marketing to highrise apartments and condos that have VHF MATV systems. That might carry me for a year or two, but the way I design these systems, they are passive filtered systems and so there is very little follow-up service work from them, as compared to headends with strip amplifiers, demod-mod pairs and heterodyne processors, which often generate a thousand dollars or more in annual repair charges.
This will be the third time in my working life that a business I was in declined to the point where it was no longer viable. Around 1980, when I was in the coin operated games business, my largest arcade closed, my most lucrative bar account was bought by someone who had borrowed money from one of my competitors, and the drinking age had crept back up from 18 to 21, cutting down the traffic at my few remaining accounts. It got to the point one summer where I was down to just two accounts: a bar and a summer beach hotel. One evening I drove to the beach hotel to cash out the games, but didn't see its lights as I approached from the distance. As I got closer, I smelled lingering smoke. It had burned to the ground, leaving me with a weekly income of about $50.
A few days later, I met a world class flim flam man at a Howard Johnson's at 3:00 AM and we really hit it off. (It is easy to hit it off with world class flim flam men. That is part of what makes them world class flim flam men). He invited me to come to his place of business to see what kind of business relationship we could work out. I spent two days chasing him around (he was a human whirlwind), when he said. "Can you drive me to the airport? I have to go to Brazil at once!."
As I drove him to the airport, it was the first time I had his undivided attention. He told me of problem after problem that would go unaddressed while he was gone and I suggest some possible alternatives. Then he said, "I have an idea. Why don't you just run all my businesses for me while I'm in Brazil?"
It was an offer I couldn't say no to, because I didn't even have enough money in my pocket for gas to go home. I slept on his office floor for a few days and answered the phone every time it rang. Nearly everyone who called was figuratively or literally threatening to kill him for something. I didn't even know what business he owned that I was running. There was someone being thrown out of the World Trade Center who has subleased an office from "us", and someone else who had been flim-flammed out of over $100,000 in a futures trading scheme, and lesser people showing up at the door with a sheriff to try to collect judgements (fat chance).
The guy's primary business was now becoming making bootleg video games (Pac Man, Defender, etc) using knock-off circuit boards that he had smuggled into the country. I somehow lasted four months in this asylum before I had enough walking around money to go off on my own. I wound up working regularly for some of his customers who also were in legal businesses.
About twelve years later, I had become so close to one of these customers that he was providing over 1/3 of my income. Then, out of the blue one day, he told me that he was selling his business to a competitor, with whom I had some business relations but who would not need my services. The real problem for me was that about another one third of the work I was picking up was coming indirectly from my relationship with this customer, since it put me in contact with other businesses who needed other services I could provide, so basically, I lost two thirds of my income.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I was in western Massachusetts, which eastern Massachusetts doesn't even know exists, but I saw the Washington Sunday Post in the library when ti arrived on Tuesday or Wednesday and a lot of companies were looking for a technician just like me. I answered a few classifieds and was invited to one for an interview. I gave the right answers to the two most important questions for anyone applying for a field service job: Do you have a drivers license, and can you start right away?
Like most companies that need someone to start right away, this company was a disaster. The president and general manager were fighting for control of the company, and three other employees were scheming to be the most powerful, and these people out and out sabotaged each others installations to help themselves look better by comparison. I left after four months and went to work for a competitor of theirs, which was a nice company but they were committed to exiting the antenna business and specializing in fire alarms, and since seniority meant everything to them, I didn't see a path that would allow me to ascend fast enough.
I then went to a third company that did antenna service. The owner of that company was the angriest, most bitter person I have ever met. She believes that every time a technician fails to successfully complete a job, he deliberately failed so as to antagonize her. She seems to think that somehow, he benefits by failing. This company sends out untrained "technicians" in their own cars, with no tools, no parts inventory, and no description of the work to be performed, and when they fail, her common refrain is, "He f**ked us." "That no good son of a bitch f**ked us"
Every time a customer refuses to pay a bill, which happens more than once a week, she'd write the technician's first name on the invoice in black magic marker, and covers the invoice with an angry diatribe about how the technician fiucked up. Then she docked him for those hours. I only lasted one month at that job.
So I took what little money I has (less than $1,000) and checked into a fleabag motel in which the running toilet flushed itself once every few hours and the cockroaches were as big as me, and I took their Yellow pages and copied out the addresses of 100 apartments, 50 condominiums and 50 hotels and sent out a typed letter that said, "I'd like to service your antenna system" One of those letters went to the desk of a young man who had been hired to manage that property that very day. He thought it was fortuitous that after he received his first call from a resident for service to her TV reception, he gets a piece of mail from someone who could do that for him.
I discovered that condos were more receptive to direct mail than the other classes of customers, and wrote a better sales letter and got eight responses. The rest is history. I then told my former fire alarm employer that I was available if they had any work they couldn't handle in-house, and they told me they had decided to exit the antenna business completely and asked me to make them an offer for their inventory. I made a very modest offer and they jumped on it, but then I told them I didn't have any money, so I'd have to pay them in installments, and they went along with that, and then I told them I couldn't make the first installment unless they let me sell off some of their inventory first and they went along with that.
My business has come a long way since then. In 2000 and 2001, I sold nearly a dozen headends for prices ranging from $5,000 to $30,000 each. I average less than one unpaid invoice a year doing commercial work only.
But now, at age 55, it looks like I'll have to shift careers or emphasis one more time. My connections give me an "in" to furnish security systems, but that equipment changes so fast, whatever I knew a decade ago is useless, and I think the economies of scale require that any such firm have multiple employees. Maybe, I can get one of these properties I have done business with to hire me as a building engineer. As long as I have control over my own time, I might be able to basically cherry-pick satellite and antenna repairs on the side and have more stability than I've had in a long time.
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I had my primary customer a single account buying over 90 grand a year from me go from 30 employees in the department to just 5
