[TheForge] Re: marketing

[Rich Maynard]

Well said Mike. I hope one day to come and hang out with you and your
attitude!!!

Rich M.

Richard Maynard - Artist Blacksmith
The Forge, Much Hadham, Hertfordshire SG10 6BS
 
The Forge Experience - be a blacksmith for a day!
http://www.muchhadhamforge.co.uk/experience.pdf
 
rich at muchhadhamforge.co.uk
www.muchhadhamforge.co.uk


-----Original Message-----
From: theforge-bounces at mailman.qth.net
[mailto:theforge-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer
Sent: 19 May 2008 17:42
To: theforge at mailman.qth.net
Subject: [TheForge] Re: marketing



AndyV wrote:

> The conditions under which some of [our neighbors] live would probably 
> appall some of you.  Hell, the conditions under which *we* live might. 
> :)

I'll see your double-wide and raise you a two-holer. :-) :-)

If I had felt that I had to have a "respectable" place to live, proper
furniture, median or better income, good wardrobe etc. etc. I would have
just now retired from 40 years commuting to a lab or a garage or machine
shop.  I would just recently have finished paying the vendor and the bank
each $X for the nominally $X house, not to mention proportionate taxes,
insurance and maintainance commensurate with aforesaid respectability.

If you want to run a business in a businesslike way, I have no argument with
that.  If you're creative and inventive and make beautiful stuff, all the
better.

But there's a line.  It starts out very fuzzy and eventually becomes a ridge
between hollers: If you set target revenue, target income and set about to
organize your life to produce that, your life, your time and your state of
mind will go off down one path.  If you set about to do whatever you have a
mind to do -- be it very substantial or largely whimsical -- with whatever
you have at hand, your life, your time and your state of mind will go off
down quite a different path.

Switching paths becomes harder as time goes on.  There are a number of
blacksmiths who were brokers or scientists first.  I once met a hard-core
computer weenie who had spent a decade homesteading in back-country Alaska.
(You'd never have known he wasn't just another up-scale intern from Columbia
U. except that he hadn't been able to give up chewing tobacco, a real
shocker in the halls of prestige academe. :-) But -- baldfaced assertion
without supporting hard evidence -- the path you start on colors and usually
distorts your view of the path you jumped to.

> The funny thing about this market is that those clients with the most 
> disposable cash are often the biggest pains in the ass.

On the first path, that's just a cost of doing business.  On the second
path, you may well say to yourself, "Do I need this $20K bad enough to spend
my time hanging out with self-important numb-nuts, overbearing jerks or
wealthy weasels?"

Enough. I could rant longer but you get the idea....


FWIW,
- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^
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