1/ OK, we have the second plant starting to produce Purifize. They start on Wednesday. This took a lot of wrangling. Their largest customer is Sherwin-Williams. They never produced sanitizer ever. So we tried to convince them and we would give them our formula.
2/ First hurdle. They did not want raw 190 proof ethanol in their plant. They are 500 feet away from our warehouse and 2 blocks away from our current plant making Purifize. So they are mixing the the thickener, fragrance, etc. minus ethanol. We then transport in 55 gallons drums
3/ back to our plant where we add the ethanol. Then refill 55 gallon drums with finished Purifize solution, send back to them to fill tanks for filling bottles on the line. They have trucks to haul. But wait...there's more.
4/ They would not begin until we could guarantee at least 100,000 bottles. OK, we did this. But our current plant owner has never done business at this scale. He still operates in the conventional decision making phase when we are in the crisis decision making phase.
5/ One constraint after the other surfaces. Running two lines meant going thru bottles, caps, etc. twice as fast and our *guy* did not want to be stuck with bottles, caps, etc. so we guaranteed everything. He did not have enough bottles or caps in stock as he assumed one line and
6/ had time to resupply. So I know next to nothing about bottle caps. My job turned into finding bottle caps and reading specs to some sales person that appeared I knew what I was talking about. Any question to me quickly revealed that I didn't know a bottle cap from a snow cap.
7/ I had the salesman rolling on the floor describing my ignorance. I am a media and marketing guy turned supply clerk... and actually it was fun. I am not a buyer, but a sales guy. I rather sell than buy...but price negotiation is out the window in the crisis phase.
8/ Internalize this. In a crisis phase, price is nearly irrelevant. Time is the currency of the day & this more than any other issue is why people fail in the crisis phase. They're using the wrong currency like using drachma at a 7-11 in Peoria, IL. Cannot even buy a slurpee
9/ We once had a tight lid on left tail risk. But as Purifize took off, we plowed back a lot of the profits into inventory of *stuff*. But our left tail risk is clipped as we will not extend past the profits we made.
10/ But I have very little patience with those who accuse PulseTV as profiteering in a vulgar manner. The initial financial exposure before profits rolled in, time, energy devoted to solving a small plant's inability to enter crisis decision making phase has been trying.
11/ While @spyrosmakrid and other forecasters unfollowed me long ago, crisis decision making turns all of them into IYI. None of our decisions have been made based upon forecasts/projections. It has all been based on what we were willing to lose. Sunday lesson over.
