Now we are around the bend. All the doors are in and they only need to be adjusted. We then need apply the molding the stops and all the hardware. We have to finish by tomorrow, I can't go back on sat. and have no intentions of returning Monday, but I will if I have to. I hope by getting there early tomorrow we'll be able to finish, it will take focus.
c66 is slated for install starting on Monday. Sondu and a out of hall of famer "Gagan" are going to lead that up. I need to go there and install the vanity while those guys are installing the wall unit. maybe do that Monday and Tuesday.
b64 is also slated for install on wed. that will be me and Andy. We need to get some detail dimensions for a69 which is down cape sometime early in the week, and we are tentatively scheduled for work on Friday down there. Where we'll install a door frame and surrounding casings. Esteban will start fabricating the parts for that next week and then the door after that.
Next week is going to be jamming for the staff and myself. I'm happy for the c66 guys they will probably have a good time installing the C client.
On top of all this I'm trying to get all my year end stuff done for the acountant. So I hace to reveiw the chart of accouunts sometime and make year end adjustments, which takes time.

C62 install is going as well as expected still not around the bend yet. Standard type of problems like few inches of snow on the front steps and my saws keep blowing the breaker in the garage. The client being very demanding, is stressing me out, one false move and my good relations are over. This is a high stress job, it's in a furnished house so that adds to the complications, we could easily take out a lamp or side table, and then never be asked to return and lose what little profit we make. That being said they are very nice and are letting us use their garage as a make shift shop. They just gave me a book to read, how thoughtful. You see that is one thing that the c clients have, they can very nice and offer us drinks, books, and use of their kitchen, sometimes it is the small things like that that make it worth it on a otherwise challenging job.

we are starting our install at c62. just shaking hands with the place right now. I'm nervous about this one the client is very demenading and many things could go wrong. there are lots of variables to consider on a job like this. I'l let you know how it goes.
On another note we are gearing for install c66, we are checking and double checking our attack and we have a very organized approach. It's a good size and thusly a good test of our ability, It's a good goal to be done in one week 100% finihsed.

today I'm going to buy more lumber. I'm going up to Highland hardwoods which is great buisness by the way if you're looking for wood. I'll be picking up today 12/4 mahogany for job a69 two 8' doors 2.25" thick, 8/4 poplar for three more doors, 5/4 quarter sawn red oak, 4/4 flat sawn white oak, and 4/4 soft maple. I go myself today because of the importance of getting good material. typically a materail pick-up is done by a staff member. Today is different with all these different wood species and the needed dimensions, I better go to make sure it's correct. besides the staff is busy doing their work, and don't need the interruption. All of the oak is for some stair treads which I hope to do more of.

Friday I had good luck using contact cement with that veneer, it appears that that is the thing to do. Saturday I went to apply the veneer to the door and discovered that the new door was the wrong size. The lumber company ordered the wrong door. There's always something going wrong. There is always incompetence everywhere you look. To do well you always need to double check everything triple check everything.

We had our normal staff meeting today which was led by Andre'. He did a good job, he had his own input to add to my notes, when the employees add there own input than the meeting is a success in my opinion. I have to write some notes just to give the guys something to say and something to talk about. We let the employees do the meetings so they get a chance to speak in front of other people, and we reward those who do. being an effective work group which is what we are striving for means that the leadership role is shared among us.

Over the weekend I made some more material tags for work that we do in house, standard type of work, we are calling it push work. this is work that is always the same no matter what the job. The farm team is usually the one to get this work done. We currently have 9 standard types of work and we will adding to that list as time permits.

here are some of my favorite cabinets that we've built and installed recently

Our first trainging day on becoming an open book company. Here we are discussing the various flows that exist in the shop. We started out the meeting by talking about the basics of accounting, those being the balance sheet and profit and loss statement. We then focused heavily on our own cash flow chart and how it relates directly to the job priority, and the installation scheduals. They'll more of these training days over the next year, each one focusing on different parts of accounting so when we are an open book company the staff will know how to read the data and how to understand it.

veneering was still a disaster, i think something is wrong with the backer of the veneer it looks funny. I'm going to try contact cement tomorrow. if that doesn't work them I'm screwed. the only thing that I'm worried about is the edge where the cement might show or squeeze out and stain the wood. I'll let you know how it goes. We've been re-assembling the upper cabinets for c66 today and are now ready to attach the face frames and then the beading. I've got some concerns about the crown molding for that cabinet. We are trying something that we haven't done in a while. And no-one on the current team has ever put in. It's a built up crown of four pieces. two of them are straight MDF parts pre assembled at shop, and then two moldings one over and one under. It should give the cabinet a taller presence then it really is. It poses some challenges from an installers point of view. One it's a lot of work. trimming this cabinet is not going to be easy, especially since it's pre-finished, there is also alot of trim when you add up the crown and base.

No heat today when we came into work today, that’s always great. We couldn’t get the furnace to fire over, had to get the landlord’s guy’s to do it. I feel like the biggest chump when it comes to this shop space. It’s nice space, and it cost a fortune to move here but man the roof leaks like a siv and the heat doesn’t work. It’s always shutting off and the whole shop cools down to like 40 degrees.
On another topic I was told that the veneer that we bought was not actually messed up at all. And I shouldn’t have any trouble gluing it up with white glue. So I’ve tried again and we shall see, I did make an effort to use substantially less glue as I’m thinking that I applied to much before and that caused the bubble-up. So in a few hours we’ll know when I take the clamps off.

The birth of unit 4
I discovered another problem with the c66 job. It falls squarely on my shoulders because it’s a design flaw. The boxes were built to spec. I wrote the specs. Luckily it’s only four boxes that need to be taken apart and reassemble with larger top pieces, maybe the back panels have been wasted, or least stored until reused. What can we learn from this, I think I’ll introduce the fourth member of the unit family “unit 4” consisting of two sides and one top. In its assembly instructions it will say to leave the parts unassembled until face frame is ready, and then glue the sides to the frame before attaching the top.
On Friday we’ll be having our first open book training session. In an effort to discover the possible benefits of being an open book business we’ll take an inside look into cash flow, and together try to solve the problems of managing it. You need to have worked here for at least one year to attend. It’s proprietary information that we’ll be discussing and discretion is hoped for.

one thing that I do wonder about is wether or no people prefer the interior of the cabinets to be painted or pre-finished maple. This is regarding a tall pantry type of cabinet in a kitchen or wet bar setting.

We’ve made some mistakes with the cabinets in the shop. The music cabinet doesn’t look so good from the top with L scribes. We’ll never do that again. L scribes are hideous from the end. Always we need some kind panel for them to die into. We ended up making pieces to fit in and around the L-scribes. One thing that we are doing is spending more time preparing the cabinet for install than just going to install with not really knowing if it’s all going to fit together. We made a mistake when we made the side panels for c66. It was a design mistake where I wasn’t drawing in real space and then dimensioned off that. So our panels came out ¼ bigger on either side of a window. We decided to go forward and try to take out the difference at the top, but when we clamped the panels to the cabinet we forgot to make that adjustment, so now the panels we’ll easily be seen that they are off. What’s really important here is the rating of the job “c”. if it was an “a” rating then we would have made new panels. As a business operator you've got to know how to call it.

I met with some clients today for several hours talking about their project. I reminded me of a question that some one posed to me recently, someone influential to me. They asked "do you like doing the marketing?" Good question, but I wasn't sure how to answer it. On one hand I really hate it. On the other I have to love it. I don’t like not liking it because that would make the classic entrepreneur unable to really move forward because of his or hers love for what they do and in ability to let go . I don’t want to limit what I can do with my time here because I can’t let go. I want to continue to work but as a hobby, working on my house. These are my goals, to delegate more work and become more of a project manager delegate in 08. It’s more than just a slogan it’s a strategic growth move. I did enjoy meeting with these people, I remember them enjoying me I was making them laugh at themselves and me, I was able to connect with them through laughter. This couple is younger than I am, that is a first, and these folks really look up to me and my ideas and suggestions, that sometimes is hard to comprehend, I guess it’s all part of getting older and having experience.

Monday morning, gotta love it, and a rainy one at that. We had our staff meeitng today, some say that monday morning is a bad time to have it because people's minds aren't going to be on the job. There is porobally some truth to that, I think it is important to make sure that everyone has a clear idea of what the company is trying to achieve in this upcoming week. Today Esetaban ran the meeting, so it's $200.00 cash to Eseteban for that, anyone who volenteers to run my staff meeting gets $200.00 fast cash. Its a good thing to get these guys to run the staff meetings. One of the best parts of working on team is that we share leadership. Some really good things cvame from todays staff meeting. We talked about how anyone can pull the plug on production. That means any person who sees something wrong with a part a defect or something of the such has the power to say hey this one needs to be fixed it's not right. I wish all my people new when to say when and that they would stop what they are doing and fix problems as they see them and not wait until it is further down the line. We had to let one of our staff people go last week, now we are down to a four man team. The person we let go is going to be better off it, he has more skills than what we were using him for. I had to let him go becasue of money, we are in a cash flow slump right now, and something needed to be done. Cutting employees is not the best way to deal with that, but it is the most effective. I wieghed all the options before deciding to cut him lose, I looked at all the possible angles, I did what I think to be the best thing. We are fortunate enough to have a past employee coming back to work for us in two weeks, asnd we needed to to prepare for that in a cash flow sense. I let this employee down in the softess manner that I could, and hopefully he'll do work on a contract basis because he does have graphic art skills.

the veneering was a disaster, good thing it wasn't a demonstration. I'm talking to the supplier now, they're saying that they had this problem already. They saying that they put their own backer on the sheet goods and they used sombody different to put the backer on this particular load of material. The backer from this new vendor is causing problems across the board. Hence forth their is a new dilevery of carmelized bamboo verticle sawn veneer schedualled for delivery at end of march. The client is not going to like that. We've glued up lots of veneer and never had it bubble up like that.

Today I'm gluing veneer to a door. Should be successful the temperature is correct. I'll know for sure soon. I went to Raybern to pick hardware that I was silently elected to procure, sometimes I'm just to much of a nice guy, I had to correct some work today that had been done incorrectly by my staff, not to big of a set back, but standards must be met. I have to teach my people when to pull the plug and when not to pull the plug. Knowing that simple fact is very important, especially when you are asking your people to work in your absense. The hardware I spoke of earlier is being used to install four solid 1/4 sawn white oak doors that have an eliptical top, I'm hoping to use the doors as photographic flag ships so to speak. The install is very challenging and will require my utmost attention. We make so many doors that we can profit on that part but the installation skill set resides only in me among the staff here so I'm not happy about that. I have more improtant things to do than install doors. So I always try to opt out of that.

At the end of today while mamanging the farm team I was sorting out my collection of knife templates that I have. I've got about 2500 different templates from band moldings to casings, to crown moldings, geometric shapes of all sizes, and even some really exotic ones. I'm seperating anything that really jumps out me, in order for a knife to jump out at me it has to have the right kind of curves, curves that come from elipses and parabolas. I'm also taking out any cope and pattern paris that I find. I'm wanting to make a different kind of glass door cutting set for my cabinet glass doors. I like what I'm currently using but I know that if I use what I envision then I'll be much better off. I've just started using my profile grinding machine and am very pleased with how it is working and also the results that I'm haveing. There is alot to profile grinding and there are many variables at play. I've got a long way to go, but it is one thing that will really be a differentiator market. I'll have tooling that will be unique to my company and difficult to copy.

god was not willing. the plotter did indeed break down. We learned something new though from the experience. I was able to easily email the file as a pdf to Service Point where they printed it with-in 30 mins and I picked it up, and dropped it off at the clients just as I planned. Until we can afford a new plotter we'll have to resort to the $3.15 per page charge. I did find out though that I can have those documents printed at any Serice Point, which could be handy. Anyways my late autoCad tutor used always tell that pdf's where the way to print. So this will forcew us to be more patient with how often we print plans. IT'll require shcllepping as well.

I wanted to try and play hookie today, And I was but I realised that getting the plans for job b67 completed was more important. In that way I can submit my changes possibly today god willing and my plotters works, those machines are fussy beasts. Maybe next tues. or wend. I can go snowboarding with John Buttaro a custom homebuilder. That was who I was going to go with. The plans for b67 are my finest yet in terms of design and presentation. I'm using autoCAD 08 and having great success, it's one the best decisions I've made recently to sqwitch from hand drawing to autocad.

More of the same, my new hours are till 7pm. I'm starting out a new person in the farm team. The farm team is an important part of how we do what we do. How we do it is are edge. First an foremost the farm team must embody the core values of the ownership. More on the values later. The farm team guys usually start after hours, a part time thing. It's the only way it really works, just by the way of our shop size for starters. The new guy needs constant management until they know the ways of the shop. It's a personality thing too everybody is different and needs to be managed accordingly. What we are trying to do with farm team is keep steady supply of reliable employees that are trained.

But sometimes design changes can go the other way and be very difficult to handle. Sometimes the client can throw unexpected design changes at you and it's essential that you meet those new demands. Our many years of experience have made us so flexible, that even sudden design changes are handled effortlessly.

Today I'm working on what I consider to be our best work thus far. It's job b67 and it is a kitchen. For now hopefully it will lead to more work. The ceiling has just been lowered by the site carpenters and it is really helping the appearance of the cabinets, I'm discovering as I'm making the changes.

This blog is something that I've wanted to have for a couple of years. For my staff, our clients, and our prospects.

Not knowing where to begin I'm just going to jump right in as if this blog has been going on for a number of years. First thing I'[m going to do is make sure that I can post to this blog from my mobil device, then we'll have the real time stroy off what is going on for a young entrepenuer in the buisness of wood work.