This time of year finds me very busy, closing out a phenomenal 2024 with our biggest- best year to date, in margins and sales. Our little company is growing in ways I could never have imagined and I can only attribute it to hard work and a great team. Most days it feels like herding cats but we come together once a week to hash out all the issues our company has. We have weekly meetings broken into different weekly categories so we can focus on one department at a time. Our technique is not unique, however our ability to adjust and correct direction within 30 days or less might be. Our ship is run tight and when there is a problem we can address it immediately.
We have a weekly meeting dedicated to research & development where we look into new compounds, metals, and processes; working parts to failure until we find a winner. Our team is always open to opportunities for improving our position on finishes, colors, performance, weight advantages, and innovation. We work closely with our vendors making sure we are receiving the quality we need, in order to provide the finest in the world to our highly valued customers. Last year we worked tirelessly on monolithic wheel and race rotor design and development. This year we are testing new braking compounds, looking for improvements in efficiency of friction and color retention. We may find no improvements or only marginal, but we must exhaust every effort until we are convinced there is no better alternative. We could not find the wheel we wanted, so we made it... designed, developed, tested, redesigned and redeveloped... a couple times... to exhaustion even until we had just what we wanted, just how we wanted it.
We dedicate another week to operations, addressing issues or problems within our systems of inventory, fulfillment, purchasing, receiving, quality control and cost control. Ops is where new parts go after R&D to get added to each system for part numbers, vendor part descriptions, pricing vs costs, raw material requirements for manufacturing, and time for production.
Once every three months we take a few minutes to go over warranties. We collect all our data, categorize complaints and parts returned, count them by category to see what our biggest issues are so we can address them. Our current warranty rate is less than 1/2 a percent of our total sales. That means not very many. And that has been our warranty rate the last three years, while sales increase this number stays constant.
New parts have to be marketed to retail, dealers, and distributors... but not always in that order. This is where our marketing meeting would address these issues on new product releases, notifying our distributors and convincing them of the next hot item to hit the market or deciding on a straight to the retail customer release. Making sure our inventory levels will match demand is always a hot topic as well as what inventory is backordered and how long it will be. We hate to sell disappointment. Timing print ads and social media with product availability
Budget and sales, the numbers don't lie. You always have to be looking at the status of sales in reference to your daily and monthly goals. We have to see the numbers and know what those numbers are to achieve them and excel above our expectations. We set an annual budget and check our status quarterly against how we are actually doing. This is important to keep everyone focused and to keep our ship pointed in the right direction. If we see unfavorable weather ahead, we can be much quicker to react. Being able to react and be reactive in a volatile market allows us to set course in the right direction no matter the storm. This is the weekly meeting where we decide when we can hire more help, as long as we keep hitting our monthly goals and the trajectory continues upward we will hire 3 new positions, maybe 4 this year.
Growth is always exciting and growing our team gives us the chance to continue expanding in ways we cannot see today. By keeping all our department heads in these weekly communication meetings that transcend departments, we open the opportunity for complete efficiency and excellent communication.