Monopoly and Risk

Monopoly and Risk. Those are my two favorite board games. I like them best because they are almost entirely won and lost on strategy. More importantly, the strategy that you start with almost never works as planned because it is affected by luck and the moves of the other players. So, in the end, it is your strategy of reacting to shifting conditions that determines your success. Sometimes conditions call for you to be bold and take risks. Other times it is best to retreat and rebuild your strength or risk annihilation.

This business venture is very much like those games. I knew that when I started. That means that I could not have predicted with any certainty how things would turn out and accepted that. For a while, things seemed to be going my way. I had great hope in the MWD grant. I had a solid source of supply in my friend with the China manufacturing partner. I had chosen a marketing company that made awesome graphic designs for my logo and website early on, and best of all, the southwest is experiencing a prolonged drought that has led to water rationing. What could be better?....oh, how things change.

I finally got to discuss the funding of my grant with the MWD rep a few days ago. MWD likes my product (even though they don't claim to understand what it does ??!!??!) but they can not / will not fund anything except a study to document the water savings. So, that means that they won't help with actually developing the product, marketing and getting it into consumer's hands. That's up to me. Worse, I have to re-write my proposal around the things they will fund to even move forward. This after I spent about 3 weeks straight researching and writing the first one. Time that could have been spent completing the models sooner to get manufacturing going in China. Arrggg.

Oh, yeah, the manufacturing. As time goes on in a business relationship, like any relationship, you get to know the people you are dealing with much better. My friend, who I still trust and respect immensely, assured me that we could get molds made quickly and would have product in only a few months from when we started. I think that is true for products that have a sense of urgency with the manufacturer. My products, on the other hand, are just a small project that fits in wherever it can and is pushed by a very laid back group that have no vested interest in the schedule. So, I am constantly frustrated by the lack of attention to my product and have failed to get samples of the materials that I asked for about seven times. After all of that, I still have no better option at this point and must simply work to make the best of it.

Then there's the marketing. As I said, I have been very happy with all of the graphic design they have provided. Now we are moving ahead on the website. The website they promised would be done over a week ago. I finally got a test to look at. I'm appalled. Its awful. The whole thing looks like some sort of blogger site with no product focus and hidden links to get to the core selling information. Ahhhhh!!! Now I have to spend hours typing up a whole laundry list of changes that need to happen, will obviously cost more time and wait and see if they start squealing about cost. And I still don't have the site!

But all will work out fine, because the drought will drive customers to my project, right? So I said to my kids the other day "what would really suck would be if by the time my product got finished the drought ended and we had record rainfall". A calculated risk for sure. So, guess what was in the paper this morning. El Nino. The little boy who brings warm water to the equatorial Pacific and causes heavy rainfall in the southwest. The forecasters don't agree yet, but there is hope (not ME) that we may be heading into an El Nino year. Fantastic!