Author Archives: Unsigned Podcast

Taste of Chicago

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This year’s Taste is the 28th annual – how about that for a long successful run? It has changed a lot from when it started, but it is a great street festival and we are looking forwarding to going again this summer.

The cost is only $8 for a strip of 12 food and drink tickets. All of the vendors are required to offer a taste for just 1 ticket, and then they can offer anything else they want for as many tickets as they want to charge. Last year the average food item cost 4 tickets and we bought 3 extra strips for just two of us to fully enjoy and sample everything we wanted to try.

We really liked several of the different foods and made note of which restaurants had the best food so we could patronize them later in the year. I even tried fried goat cheese for the first time – but I found it rather strong and don’t think I would order that again. I found one vendor selling key lime pie and jumped at the chance to have some, but what they served was absolutely AWFUL and nothing like the real southern key lime pie recipes taste like. But the variety of ethnic tastes was fantastic and one of the things that I love about Chicago – the international influence on everything there, with a solid core of Americana.

Supply Chain

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Up until now our warehouse operations have been focused on very little production work, mostly pick and pack for our franchisees. With just one warehouse, the inventory control has been relatively easy to manage.

But now that we are expanding, the warehouse manager and I are considering two primary options to handle the increase workload and just in time inventory methods of so many franchisees that require a quick turnaround and delivery window. the first option is obviously opening one or two more warehouses in other parts of the country. Our warehouse on the west coast has a lot of advantages, but with the price of real estate so high and our hours of operation not matching people on the east coast, we could easily justify a second warehouse located on the east coast. My thought was to put one in the mid Atlantic states, such as southern Virginia, because of the lower cost of real estate and excellent transportation network. Then we can consider a third warehouse somewhere in the midwest, with my preference being the Oklahoma City area.

The warehouse manager has suggested a second option that we are investigating – using a third party fulfillment service. We have been checking out a company called AMS Fulfillment and I like several things about their services. They can handle warehousing, inventory, and shipping for us without the expense of renting our own space and hiring more employees.

It will be simple enough to perform a cost analysis of the two options once I gather a little more information. AMS is a california fulfillment company that handles both business to business operations and also business to consumer operations. So if we want to start offering our products directly to our customers we can use their fulfillment to handle the orders, most likely placed over the internet and possibly using inbound telemarketing. We hope to have both of those in place by the end of the year to increase revenue at the corporate level.

I also like that AMS offers OnGuard Inventory Protection. When you have so much of your product located in one place, your risk of loss due to natural disasters, arson, and other factors is much higher. Of course you never want anything bad like that to happen to your property, but bad things don’t always happen to other people. You have to be prudent in protecting you assets and being prepared for the worst, while hoping for the best.

Fletcher

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A local coffeehouse is one of my customers and I like to stop by to patronize them every once in a while, even though they are a little out of my way to do so.

On the counter by the register was a CD by a band called, “Fletcher.” The photo on the front is three guys in jeans and tee shirts. On closer look I realized that they looked a lot alike, so they must be brothers. But two of them looked a LOT alike and I realized that they are twins.

The coffee shop clerk told me that they are indeed brothers and indeed two are twins, that they like locally and he is helping them out putting their CD out on the counter for sale. They have a southern rock sound, which is something I like.

I struck a deal with the clerk – if he can get the brothers to autograph the CD for me the next time they come in the store then I will buy one along with my iced coffee. Let’s see how that works out – I’d like to give them a listen.

Van Adventures

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Last year we bought a full size Chevy van from a used car dealer that advertised online. We were looking for something to use at the warehouse and didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it – just something mechanically sound with no frills.

The one we found was a good price and since we were in a hurry, we agreed to buy it. That meant someone had to fly out to California to pick it up and drive it back, which wasn’t a big deal. The hardest part of the plan was figuring out how to get from the airport to the dealer, which involved a cheap hotel room on the way because of the flight schedules. That all worked out and a few thousand bucks later we had the keys to a van.

I have full coverage insurance on the Tahoe and the Mazda, so I called my insurance agent to let him know that we bought the van and needed to add it to our policy. Since it was the weekend, all I got was his voice mail. Since we made the decision so quickly and had to buy it quickly – good deals never last – we had bought the van and driven 1,200 miles before Monday morning when the insurance agent got my voicemail. I was worried that if something bad happened on the way back we might not be covered by insurance. But thankfully the trip was uneventful in that regard, and as it turns out my full coverage insurance policy covers a new vehicle purchase for the first few days anyways.

The great thing about having that little insurance umbrella is that we were covered for the trip back but when we got back I had the chance to make some calls to get competitive quotes and also go online to find the best price on Van Insurance. We ended up paying a little under $100 per month for the van’s coverage by adding it as an additional vehicle to our other insurance. But it is always worth checking and getting new quotes it’s time for renewal.

This reminds me that I took some great snapshots on that trip back from California. Let me see if I can find a few and post them on the blog to share – it was a great trip. And we’ve got a good work van, now.

Summer Storms

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Heard on the news this morning that the midwest has had even more severe weather. It seems like Kansas especially has been hit by tornadoes this year and now a lot of the midwest states are having flooding, too. Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Oklahoma are all having a hard time this year.

When I decided to move here, the mild weather was one of the main attractions. Tennessee has all four seasons yet all four are relatively mild. The worst weather we have in the summer is the threat of severe thunderstorms with hail and high winds, and sometimes the threat of a tornado. In the winter we have the threat of an occasional snow storm or ice, but they usually only last a day or two and the past several years have been very mild with almost no snow at all.

With all the bad weather hitting the midwest, I’m glad that I chose Tennessee when I moved, instead of Illinois or Missouri. I’ll just go to those states for vacations and hang my hat here in Tennessee for most of the year.