we (almost) burned down the shop! 😰🔥

This week Davis almost burned down the shop. I'm such an idiot. I'm so mad at myself right now. I could have just burned the whole shop down. And we're afraid of losing everything. Anybody else request a walnut charcuterie board, I'm out. I got nothing. So it's another day, another board fulfillment. But my only concern is that, look how many walnut charcuterie boards we have left. Exactly 10. Our realtor who only uses walnut charcuterie boards, she usually orders 10 at a time. Yeah. So if I get one request from her, these are all gone. And if anybody else requests a walnut charcuterie board, I'm out. I got nothing. So we are cutting it real close. And now that we're making more sales and reaching out to more people, a batch of boards just does not last as long as it used to. We go through it so quickly. But yeah, I'm like, oh, this is good. All good problems to have, but we need to build. We need to build. The next morning. All right, y'all. You know the drill. Board fulfillment time. So. All right. I am a bigger idiot than I thought. I don't even know if I'm going to show this in the video. This was stupid. This was really stupid. I almost burned the whole shop down. I left the branding iron on. I think it's been on for two days straight. See the burn on the table? Now, was I stupid for leaving it on a wooden table? Absolutely. Should I have not left it until it was turned off? Absolutely. But I guess I just turned it on. I was going to try to rebrand these three charcuterie boards. And I was waiting on the iron to heat up and I just forgot all about it. I'm such an idiot. This is so mad at myself right now. I could have just burned the whole shop down. I don't know. Maybe I'm the only person in the world that's ever done this. Maybe I'm the only person that's willing to admit it. But this has got to get solved. This is the difference between running a hobbyist shop and a commercial shop. A commercial shop would have a system in place to keep this from ever happening. And I think I have a solution. This week, Davis almost burned down the shop and we're afraid of losing everything. And you guys are too, believe it or not. We put out a poll on YouTube earlier this week all about people's most common fears. And this was one of the most popular, by far. In any given moment, we could lose everything. Everything we've worked for, in the blink of an eye, it could all be gone. The branding iron could light the entire shop on fire. A tornado could come hit the shop. Davis could cut his hand off. At any given moment, there's always a thousand things that could go wrong. We talk about this a lot, actually, with our close friends on the Stud Stack. If you want to talk with other business owners in a safe, non-judgmental way, the Stud Stack is the place to be. We have over 100 business owners in the group, and everybody in there is always willing to talk about any issues your business might have. Walking out the front door is risky. Running a business is risky. And running a manufacturing business is even riskier. And it's even scarier when you stop and think about all those risks. How in the world can we achieve our big goals of hiring people, growing the furniture business, and eventually buying a P51 Mustang, if we are always just one misstep away from losing everything? After a couple days of the big scare with the branding iron, it got me thinking. I've got the solution. I'm going to show you that in a minute. But I'm just really curious to see, would this actually start a fire? That was not supposed to be a pun. But would this start an actual fire? Will it cause an open flame if it's left on a block of wood? So that's what I'm going to test. I think it will. For the record, I mean, look at how much burning is here. I'm just curious to see what that looks like. All right. So we've got the branding iron, fire extinguisher, and a block of walnut that has some bark and stuff. So while that's heating up, let me talk about the solution. My experience is I've been around a lot of large military equipment to include ICBMs, trucks, Humvees, like everything. And one of the things the military does a great job of is making reminder. Because we're just stupid animals, right? We're like barely smarter than a dog. And one of the things that the military does is they put obstacles in your way to remind you of things or to keep you remembering how to do certain procedures. And so that's sort of the concept. So there's nothing keeping me from walking away from the branding iron. Now, I could tether myself to the branding iron where I physically can't walk away, but that's a little silly. It works for a jet ski, you know, because you pull the plug in the boat or whatever and the boat dies. But for this, that's not going to fly. Another thing that they do in the military is they make equipment make noise every so often. If you're in an airplane and something happens to the airplane, you're going to get a message over the headset. It's going to tell you something is wrong with the airplane. This thing is almost silent. You can't, I mean, you can kind of hear it buzzing. But I mean, more than two feet away, you can't even tell if it's on or off. There's not even a way to tell that it's on and hot to the touch. There's no light. There's no, there's no nothing on this branding iron. But I can't think of a way to use noise to let me know that this is on or off. Well, what about sight? What about visual stuff? Because, you know, if we got headphones in, sound won't work. What about sight? How can we distract somebody's eye to let them know that this is on? And I don't know about you, but this looks like my wife's curling iron to me. And most curling irons have a light on the handle or whatever that says too hot to touch. And I wish there was something like this in the handle. Don't have one. Don't feel like buying a new one. I think we can solve this a little bit cheaper. I have two solutions. Do the fun one first. So this is the soldering iron. It's getting plugged into this new extension cord. Into here is the fancy new disco light. Fancy disco light does not have an on off button. So as long as we use this extension cord for the soldering iron, when it's plugged in, this disco light is on. So check this out. At the end of every day, we just do a walk around of the shop and we turn all the lights off. We make sure everything is set the way it's supposed to be. And check that out. There's no way that we're going to miss that when we do a walk around to close up shop for the day. No matter where that soldering iron is or wherever this branding iron is, this guy is going to be making plenty of light. We're going to see it and we're going to remember that it's on. This is 10 times safer than what we were doing before. And eventually, yes, we'll get a nice branding iron that has all of these features in the handle. But for now, this is a much better solution. And that's all I'm worried about is how can we get 10% better every time? All right. So I just did a test brand. Branding iron is up to full temperature. All right. I'm a little nervous. Here we go. I'm going to start a stopwatch for science. All right. So it's been about six minutes now and steady smoke, but it's not as much smoke as there was. And I've been blowing on it. I can't get an open flame to go even on the bark side. So this is really interesting. So I'm going to see if something really stupid will make this thing do an open flame. I'm going to put some tissue on top of the branding iron and see if that gets things going. Don't do this at home. I'm seeing what could go wrong in a very controlled environment, mostly controlled environment. All right. So after about eight and a half minutes, I finally just decided that was enough. Take a look at the board. It really charred that thing. So while there was no open flame, I definitely think that after 10, I mean, this looks just like firewood. It's still kind of hot to the touch. It looks just like firewood or charcoal. No doubt in my mind that if you had something a little bit more flammable than wood, it would definitely start to combust. When you're afraid of losing something, the first step is always to figure out if the fear is a legitimate risk or not. I mean, is this actually a statistical probability of something that might happen? Or is this fear just sort of made up in your head? If you've identified that something is a legitimate risk in whatever it is that you're doing, there's really three options of how you can move forward. The first one and the easiest one is you can ignore it. If you say something like, oh, well, I'll just remember next time or I'll just do better in the future. That's ignoring it. When we say things like that, we're not actually taking responsibility for mitigating the risk. We're just pretending it doesn't exist. The second option is that we can avoid the risk altogether. We'll never put ourselves in that scenario again. In this situation, that would be never branding another thing that we build ever again. Get rid of the branding iron completely. We don't want to do that because we like branding things and the laser isn't always going to be able to brand things the way that we want to brand them. So that's not really an option for us. But the third option, and this is the most complicated one, but it's the best of all worlds. You mitigate the risk. You lower the chance of something bad happening while still getting the result that you want. These are things like developing safe procedures, using safety equipment, educating the people who are going to be at high risk for these sorts of situations. That's how you mitigate risk. It's a very fine line to balance because if you do too much of that, you're going to get complacency and people are just going to start ignoring your precautions. And then it'll backfire. Again, no pun intended. But we'll see if the solution catches us and keep an eye out for any other issues that can be solved in this same way. If you made it this far in the video, we'd really appreciate it if you hit the like button so that more people can learn about how to mitigate risk. Also down in the comments, share with us your close calls and how you mitigated the risk. Can't wait to hear your stories because we're all just trying to learn and grow and be better together. Transcribed by https://otter.ai