Late September, 2008

As I write this, Bear Stearns is long down the tubes, Lehman is gone, Merrill Lynch has sought a buyer, and AIG can’t pay claims because it invested too much of its money in backing up opaque mortgage securities. So the stock market indexes, like the Dow and the S & P, have been getting rocked up and down. More of interest to us, of course, is the Stompbox Index. This somewhat arcane market indicator is derived from a complex algorithm (that I invented, having failed math in junior high) that incorporates:

Volume of new builders on the Forum + Orders to Small Bear + Number of new businesses offering custom builds

all processed through the furry, hyperactive, bearish cerebrum.

The SI has risen like gangbusters for the last several years, and seems quite salubrious in the face of major economic and political turmoil. If I weren’t scared for the health of the overall economy, I’d be extremely pleased. Judy and I hope—and not just for business reasons--that you are all healthy, working, and continuing to make good music.

I am finally out of MOVE! mode for the first time in more than six weeks. To recap, for those who haven’t followed my earlier posts, I lost my sub-lease because the owner of the premises wanted the space back to rebuild, so I had to seek and furbish a new Cave very quickly. Fortunately, the local Real Estate market cooperated; I have about double my previous space at something like the rent I was paying. I’m in an industrial neighborhood and no longer get to walk to the shop, but all-in-all, that’s a small price to pay.

I’m exhausted, but satisfied that I managed this project successfully. I realized that I’d been so completely focused on the million things that had to be done that I had blocked out the rest of the world. Following the weekend when we actually left the former shop, it felt really weird to be able to give attention to other parts of my life and business. Fortunately, I had a lot of help and support. Judy kept me fed and focused. My staff (now five full-time people) handled the day-to-day while I was finding new quarters and beginning to get it set up. And we did not ourselves do the packing; that would have meant a fairly lengthy shutdown, so I chose to hire movers, have them pack, and keep the downtime to a bare minimum.

Perhaps surprisingly, the most difficult part of the move wasn’t even finding space or getting the stuff from one place to the other; it was noodging Verizon into installing DSL. As in many urban areas whose underground structures date to the late 19th century, some of Brooklyn’s telephone conduits are completely full. It is not uncommon here to request DSL, have the order-taking person on the phone tell you that it is available, and then shortly thereafter get a form letter telling you that Verizon can’t provide it because of capacity limitations. I got the service, but it took four technician visits with the associated all-day wait, (I’m sorreee…the technician may arrive any time between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.) as well as everything I had learned about telephone plant and coordination while I was working for British Telecom’s New York outpost.

So we are in the door and shipping again, having taken only a day to do a minimum of unpacking and setting things temporarily on shelves. I will be giving a lot of my time in coming weeks to straightening things out physically and making the layout as efficient as possible. Then I go back to work on internal operations issues in order to cut turnaround time and reduce errors. It will all happen…Notice that the shopping cart no longer gives errors with complex quantity breaks? I had just finished that job when the building owner gave notice. The move was a necessary and untimely detour, but I would have had to do it at some point in the next year in any case.

Now that I can remove my nose from the grindstone, however briefly, I want to acknowledge the unhappy thread at the Stompbox Forum that related to our service problems. I did not respond at the time, partly because it has always been my practice to keep my furry head down, and focused on business. Then, too, I did not think that there was anything I could do, quickly enough, to turn the service issues around and reduce the unhappiness level. To all of you who posted: Both those who complained and those who wrote supporting us had their good reasons for their comments. I am sorry that the nature of the subject matter had some good people snapping at each other, which would not have happened if SBE had been serving everyone better. I have been and am addressing the service problems, I hope systematically.

I have always taken a fairly conservative approach to growing SBE. That has cost me some business and some customers at various points, because I did not have the people or facilities to respond timely during periods of heavy growth. The upside of this choice, and there surely is one, is that we are financially healthy; we are well able to survive an economic slowdown like the one that seems to be happening currently. Please remember that I have made a lot of promises in the last nine years, and I think I have kept most of them. We will be a few weeks yet getting fully reorganized, but you will start seeing the results fairly soon.

Until this recent economic shockwave hit, I was going full-tilt with expanding the Stock List. I hope to continue to add goodies, but I feel the need to be a little cautious with expanding in a bear (!) market. Similarly, I hope to follow up on the kit for the Bear Boost Plus by getting a board made for the Tremulous Bear. A surprising number of people have gone to the trouble of doing the perfboard version of that, and I would like to encourage more builds. I’m working on a board layout that incorporates the Alpha right-angle pots and the new bottom-plate mounted battery drawer, and I hope to have something to give to the foundry before New Year’s.

The issue of industry transition to surface-mount parts raised its ugly head recently when I attempted to re-order those popular ECQ-B capacitors from Digikey. As I called up part numbers, I kept seeing messages saying that the product would be discontinued. So I called and got the bad news: Panasonic is no longer making them. I did what I had to do and bought all I could, so I will be able to supply small lots for some time yet. Of course, I will be looking at alternates for the longer-term.

Our trip to Israel this summer was wonderful, and we have been giving some thought to where to go next. It may be Alaska, because Judy wants to see some (real) bears. Then, too, we have discussed going to Messe Frankfurt rather than NAMM in ’09, and combining that with visits to Vienna and Budapest, from which cities Judy’s family came. Of course, we will let you know our plans.

However the presidential election turns out, Judy and I hope that the coming year brings us, and all of you, some economic good news, good music and peace.

Regards