Hello friends!  Its funny how you go along your merry little way in business and if it’s your first rodeo, like it is mine, you do more faking it then making it in the beginning.  Then you get some really exciting and really scary decisions that have to be made before you can really “make it”.  I’m going to spill my guts (as usual) and give probably TMI, but for anyone that’s reading this and thinking about following in my footsteps, you need to be ready.   Up until this point I have invested about $50,000.00 start up funds to get my little company to this point.  Sooner or later you will come to a cross roads.  Up until now, I have been selling cases to specialty stores across the
US (5 states now) and a catalog or two.  A BIG order would be 5 cases on 1
PO to a single store.  WHAT A THRILL!!!  Seriously, I just LOVE my wholesale accounts and my wholesale orders.  In inventory I have stock piled a few thousand units at my warehouse facility in
Ohio waiting for “the big one”.  Up until the past day or so, I didn’t really know what “the big one” meant.    I would be so excited for getting any multiple case orders that I couldn’t even fathom a single
PO for 10 cases, let alone anything more.  With one call from one Midwestern high end grocery store I realized that one account could completely wipe out my entire inventory!  With you are dealing with overseas manufacturing, the lead time from
PO to delivery is anywhere from 70-90 days and for a grilling item, that’s somewhat considered seasonal, that might pose a problem.  An average
PO for this one store (that I had not heard of until last week) would be about 240 cases.  That’s 2880 units just for starters!!!  Talk about a gut check moment!  So that got me thinking… what does that mean?  Well, if one store with one
PO could require that kind of volume, then what should my inventory be?  Probably at least 3-5 times that.  These larger companies expect to have product available within 7-10 days from
PO.  Knowing the basic formula for cost to manufacture to retail price, you can somewhat figure out how much my cost per unit is.  Then multiply that by my calculations that I would need about 3-5 times my current inventory just to cover potential new accounts and you will feel my pain.  This is SCARY!!!!  I’m about a few minutes away from hitting “send” on my Quickbooks PO to
Taiwan and all that entails.  I haven’t backed away from a challenge yet, and this is no different.  Of course I’m scared to death that this account won’t come through, of course I’m terrified about having 15000 units sitting in a warehouse that I can’t sell, of course I’m wondering where in the world that money will come from and at what interest rate I’ll have to pay it back, but what choice do I have?  Grilling season is heating up and if I want to play with big dogs, I better hike up my Spanx®, put my game face on, be a big girl and put my booty in the ring!  Wish me luck! 

Leslie Haywood, Founder and President of Charmed Life Products, Inventor of Grill Charms™  www.grillcharms.com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Inventor Mom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.