Jennie’s sales numbers are SHOCKING... (she's amazing!)

This week, we put our new shipping station to the ultimate test. And if you had no idea that we had a new shipping station, go back and watch our last video to see that whole adventure. We also got a fancy new tape dispenser with new tape. New tape! I never thought that deciding on a new tape would be so difficult. There are just so many things that go into picking the perfect tape. Oh, and I guess I sold $9,000 in boards. We'll talk about that too. Let's go. We're Jenny and Davis. We fly through hurricanes for research and build furniture for fun. A while ago, we came up with a business plan to sell quality furniture, which brings people together. Follow along as we build our business empire. Empire? Yes, Jenny, big goals. Okay, we're starting an empire. Maybe one day it'll span beyond the garage. So at the end of last week, we got a ton of new board orders, which was awesome because we had just built our brand new shipping station and it was time to test it out and see if it was faster. All right, so I've been waiting on this all day. It's the first, it's the inaugural pull of the freezer paper off of the roll that's mounted on the rack. I'm not tripping over it in the floor. I'm not hunched over trying to pull it. We're gonna see how this goes off of the rack just like it is. I'm so excited. This is, I've, it's been a long time since I've been this excited. Perfect. All right, so we've done six boards in about two and a half-ish hours, give or take. We had to stop, we had to go meet our lawyer and do some other stuff, administrative shenanigans, but it's been about two, two and a half hours. So for six boards, it's a lot faster. I don't even know that it's the speed that I'm worried about. I'm just so happy that everything has a place and we're not fumbling around and looking for stuff. Now that we've got the big paper roll up here, we can standardize the size of the cutting and charcuterie boards, and I can cut this down on the bandsaw so we don't have to continually cut it with these big scissors. We can just pull off how much we need, rip it, and then be done with it. I'm so glad we didn't wait until we were in the commercial warehouse to get this. This is a huge upgrade, and it's already made our lives so much better. Oh, and if you didn't know, we're currently in the middle of trying to find a commercial warehouse to move into. We've been running this business out of the garage and just this office room and the living room and the shed out back and the other bedroom and basically the whole house. So it's time to expand beyond the garage and this little house and find an actual place to work. That means we can hire employees. Anyway, we talked about all this in previous videos, so go watch those if you're interested. Otherwise, we're getting really close to having stuff to share with you about this whole process, but not quite yet. So hit the subscribe button, hit the bell, make sure you get notified when that video comes out. I promise you, we will tell you something as soon as we have an update for you. So we got all of these boards out, but now we're dangerously low on boards, even though Dave has just made 50 the other day. We really thought that that last batch would carry us through until we got into the commercial warehouse space, but that's not the case anymore. We've sold way more than that. You're just way too good at your job. We'll see. We are seeing, we're drowning. Stop being humble. Anyway, we want to show you another upgrade that we made to the shipping station. Just got a shipment from Uline. I have no recollection of ordering anything. I remember what it is now. It's mine. Sometimes when you order enough stuff, they give you free gifts. Jenny apparently chose a Packers jersey. Yeah, go Pack, go! Go Pack, go! Cowboys all the way. America, one of them is called America's team. The other one really likes cheese. The other one's called the better team. The other one wears cheese on their heads. Another catalog, as if I need more of those. We're switching tapes. This tape gun is nice, but this sticky tape is, man, it's boring. Plus, we have to use a lot more of it when we're packing boxes, and that takes time. And here's paper tape. See this? It's like what you get on Amazon boxes. It's got the threads in there, and then it's water activated, so there's glue in there. It's much stronger, and you have to use much less of it, and it's more recyclable than the traditional plastic tape. I didn't order the tape. The tape came for free with the dispenser. We have some custom tape on the way, but we'll use this until then. Picture made it look so much smaller. Baller. Oh, it's not that heavy. Ah-ha-ha! Stupid like a fox. See, because it says no touchy-touchy, but you have to touchy-touchy to get to the manual and all the other bits. Now I need to fill this water bottle up. It's like a rabbit water bottle. All right, I think it's done. I think we're ready for our first test. It's not all that sticky. I mean, it's getting there. Maybe it's just got to run some more through it. Let me dampen the brush a little bit. Yeah, there we go. Now that's wet. Oh, that's much stickier. Yeah, that's what we're talking about. That one's sticky. So we've been looking for a new tape for a while. The plastic packing tape that we've been using is okay, but it's not recyclable. And you have to buy a very specific brand of plastic packing tape. Otherwise it doesn't stick very well to the cardboard. And that specific brand of packing tape is always back-ordered and oversold on Amazon. And you can't find it anywhere else. And I just can't trust another tape brand. So I know I sound crazy for just talking about tape this in depth, but when you're trying to build a business and you're trying to stack success on top of itself in a business, you have to depend on quality materials, tools, and supplies that aren't going to fail you. And tape is one of those things where it just has to work. You can't think about it. You can't worry about your tape coming off of a box during shipping. So we did a bunch of research, came to no conclusions. But what we did notice is that every large distribution company uses paper tape. Amazon uses it. Paper tape is the industry standard for big shipping companies to use. And we didn't really need to know why. We just needed to copy what they're doing because knowing why is just going to waste a bunch of time. If it didn't work, the largest distribution company in the world, Amazon, would not need to use it. If Amazon uses paper tape, why am I so special as to think that I can be exempt from using paper tape? So we bought this fancy new water-activated paper tape dispenser. A couple of perks from using water-activated paper tape. The first is that it's faster. We use less of it. I haven't really done a cost analysis of it because that's not important right now. These boards are given as gifts to people. When they show up on the doorstep, sometimes they know it's coming, sometimes they don't. And all of our packaging is about building suspense, getting the customer excited to open the box. And one of the things that we can do with paper water-activated, can I just say paper tape, is that we can get our logo and stuff custom printed on the tape. We don't have it yet, but we've ordered some. And yeah, that's gonna be really exciting to have a brown box that nobody's expecting to have our branded tape on it and just to pique the customer's interest a little bit more. Speaking of which, a few of you have been asking, if you want to buy a cutting board, first of all, we'd be honored. Thank you so much for thinking of us and asking. You can go to smarttableco.com and you can find the board that you want there. And you need to get your orders in fast because we can't guarantee holiday shipping unless you order pretty quickly. So go ahead and put your orders in and we'll get to them as soon as we can right after Thanksgiving. But yeah, bottom line, we're really excited about this new tape dispenser. It's gonna give us a better presentation. It's gonna be faster and more efficient and yeah, it's gonna save us time. That's the big thing. So it's the end of the month, right? It's the end of October and I was going through our QuickBooks just to do our monthly scrub of all of our numbers, matching transactions, all that boring stuff. But I noticed, I was like, there are a lot of deposits this month. Is there a glitch? Did we screw something up? Did I add something twice? Did I accidentally match a transaction twice? Nope, we just sold $9,000 in boards this month. I knew we were selling more than usual, but I had no idea that it was gonna be this much. I didn't really pay a whole lot of attention to the numbers this month just because we were so busy. But yeah, the total income for the month of October was $9,375. And only one of those sales was for holiday gifts. The rest were just normal procedural orders and gifts. But we've just been so busy with the day-to-day work that we lost track of sales. And that's how it should be. You should have so many sales and so many prospects that you literally don't have time to stare at the numbers all day or get deep into the spreadsheets all the time. And if you're not making that many sales, you're not talking to enough people. Go talk to more people until you reach that point. A lot of you were upset in the last video that we spent $1,500 on a brand new shipping fulfillment table instead of just building our own since we're a table company. But we don't have time for that. Do you know how much money we would lose if we spent a day or two building a massive table like that? Way more than $1,500. Plus, it'd be nowhere near as strong or as modular. We're gonna have a video coming out on this soon, but you can't focus on the money going out. You have to focus on the money coming in. Spend your time going out and making sales instead of wringing your hands on how much money you spent on a brand new fulfillment table. If this concept is confusing or you need more help understanding it, join the stud stack. That is where we convert the mindset of being a hobbyist to the person who makes and sells and is profitable. We've got over 100 people in there just like you who are trying to run and grow their maker businesses. They would love to share what they've learned with you. You can share what you've learned with them. But this group isn't for everybody. It's expensive because we only want the most serious people in there. And that's the issue with all the free groups out there is you get a ton of armchair experts that have never sold anything in their life trying to tell you how to sell something. You don't need more advice. You just need advice from a couple of the right people. Anyway, the link to join is down below the like button. Otherwise, go to studstack.net to learn more. So we're coming up on the end of the year and spoiler alert, we have crushed our 2021 goals. We're gonna have a couple of recap videos here soon that outline month by month everything that we've done. So subscribe to see that. But in the meantime, enjoy our Maker's Money series. This is a series that we put a lot of time, effort, and energy into, and most of the videos have just flopped, but there's really good information in there. So I'll have a link to the playlist here on the screen. You can check that out. Otherwise, yeah, thanks for watching and we'll see you on the next one. ♪ Ask me how I do it, I just stick to the plan ♪ ♪ Stick to the plan, ask me how I do it, I just stick to the plan ♪