Although our first ad appeared in the 1983 Nov/Dec issue of Fine Woodworking, our first full year of operation was 1984 and that makes us officially 25 years young. It does not seem that long ago until I realize that I was 32 when this started. .. Yikes!
What an incredible ride–here are a couple of fun facts and statistics that you may find interesting–
- We have sold tools to over 450,000 unique Bridge City customers over the years. This is actually a small number for a direct marketing company. However it is an amazing number when 100 percent of the woodworking catalogs I contacted in 1983 told me that American woodworkers would never pay for quality.
- The TS-2 Try Square we introduced in 1983 for $45 would cost $100.39 today.
- When it came time to design a combination square, all of my field research dictated that it would be a mistake to eliminate the scribe pin that Leroy Starrett included in his invention. Not one bound by conventional wisdom, our CS-12 Combination Square (sans scribe) was the single most successful tool introduction in our history. We sold 6,500 units in three weeks. It took us 6 months to make them.
- It is hard to forget the theft ring that operated out of our warehouse. An employee informed me that there were new BCTW tools at a pawn shop in downtown Portland. In fact, new tools were subsequently found in all the pawn shops in Portland. An inventory of our warehouse indicated no discrepancies. All tools were boxed, stacked and sitting on shelves. We discovered that counting empty boxes was the problem–the loss on this one event was around $50K.
- Our single biggest sales day was $255,000.
- We never had a zero sales day until 9/11 and we had six in a row.
- In the direct marketing business one way you can judge growth potential is by the pool of available names. These names are from other woodworking businesses, magazine subscribers and a couple of other sources. The pool of available names today is almost 1/2 of what was available in 1990.
- The largest check I ever signed was for $360,000 to the US Post Office to deliver 1,400,000 catalogs.
- In 25 years we have never missed a payroll*.
*I hired an MBA to help me run the company years ago. It was his idea to delay payroll for the manufacturing team one day to impress how important it was to increase productivity. Instead of being paid on Friday, they were paid on Monday. Five people quit that day. It was the last time I allowed my gut to remain silent.
- Fifteen years ago we moved paydays from Fridays to Wednesdays. Absenteeism on Mondays decreased by 80%.
- About four days after signing the largest check I have ever signed, our manufacturing manager walked into my office and told me sit down. The 1.4 million catalogs that were hitting the street had the wrong toll free number on every page and the order form. I knew this was the end. I called the phone company and requested the wrong number knowing that most issued numbers have uncommitted numbers on both sides–but not in this case. The wrong number belonged to a prescription drug company in New Jersey and low and behold, my next call was the most foul, angry call I have ever fielded from a CEO–furthermore it was from a woman. After her spleen burst, all I could say was, “Why would I do this on purpose?”. Knowing that every problem has a solution, I called her back a couple of hours later and proposed that her staff take orders for us for the next 12 weeks and for so doing, we would pay 10% of each order as a bonus to her staff. Each day we received a FedEx package of orders from her staff and each week we mailed out the “bonus” checks to the phone staff . We managed to make it through the biggest blunder I could imagine. About six months later I received another call from the CEO thanking me for making her company better–apparently in a race to answer the phones, her customers noticed a marked improvement in customer service and her average order increased over this same period! Go figure. Oh, the bonus checks were in excess of $100K.
- The first trade show we attended was at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, March, 1984. I had no booth, signage or display material. I simply sat on a table and showed our first two tools, the TS-2 Try Square and the SA-2 Scratch Awl. The booth cost me $500 and I wrote $2500 in orders. The following week I went to Pasadena with the same meager presentation and wrote $5000 in orders. That year, our total revenue was $37,000.
- We never failed to double our revenue for the next six years. The jump from 1.5 million to 3.4 million in 1990 was when I realized that I needed serious management help.
- Up until about 10 years ago, we had an unconditional guarantee on all of our tools. Then one day I walked through our shipping department and noticed a pallet of returns (we normally receive one or two returns a week, 50% are screw-ups on our part and the other 50% are from buyer’s remorse after the wife sees the credit card bill). The same day I get a call from a customer directing me to a post on a woodworking forum. This genius outlined, “How to Get Free Bridge City Tools”. This involved buying our tools from estate sales at less than face value and then deliberately damage the tools so they were beyond repair. In one day we received a package with 17 tools within. The try square blades were all bent, as if someone stepped on the blade and pulled the handle upward. This type of behavior would never occur to me but this guy violated the spirit of good faith in such a way that I voided his warranty. He was informed and then he called me to share that he was a lawyer, my warranty was explicit and that he would see me in court. I told him I could not wait for the day where he had to explain to a jury what he did to these tools for new replacements. We sent all of his junk back and never heard from him again.
Well, there are more fun facts but I will save them for another day. Sometime today or tomorrow I will share how we plan to celebrate all of my mistakes by doing what I do best, which as you now know, is not running a business.
–John
