So we just got back from a 2-week research mission with the Air Force. If you read our last blog post, we just had a record-breaking winter storm pass through Houston leaving a lot of us without power and water....and right after all that happened...we had to pack up and leave to go fly for our Air Force jobs!
Not many people know this, but we don't JUST fly through hurricanes! For the last 2 weeks we were flying through Atmospheric Rivers over the Pacific ocean. An Atmospheric River is basically just a weather pattern that brings a lot of moisture to the west coast in the form of rain and snow. We fly through them to get data to help forecasters more accurately predict when/where the winter weather events will occur!
But....that means we left the business for 2 weeks.....
This year we were flying the Atmospheric River missions out of Reno, NV. It was a nice change of pace from Houston, so whenever we had some free time between flights we decided we would try something new...
Snowboarding!!
Neither of us had ever snowboarded before, so we thought it'd be fun to give it a try! Turns out we weren't very good. The views of the slopes were much better than our skills! But we still had a great time giving it our best shot!
But one afternoon after a day of attempted boarding, we received an email- we got an order for a cutting board from a Realtor back in Houston!! We're always excited when we get orders, but this one was different. It was from a Realtor we didn't know.
We keep track of all the Realtors we talk to (whether in-person, on Instagram, or over the phone) so that we can sort through who we've followed up with or not. However, this order was from somebody NOT on our list - which means they got our name from somebody else! All of our work reaching out to as many people as possible in the community is finally starting to pay off. Realtors are starting to share our name with OTHER Realtors they know all over Houston! We were so stoked to see that.
And then we got ANOTHER email...for TWO cutting boards....from ANOTHER Realtor that we DIDN'T know! Game on.
We weren't really thinking about the business much on this trip because we were so focused on flying missions and gathering weather data, but it was SO nice to watch orders come in from people we had never met or talked to.
We then went on to sell a coffee table....and another coffee table...
This was all FANTASTIC news, but we were really starting to create a mound of work for ourselves once we got back from our trip! Funny how life works. We were making sales while we weren't even trying to think about the business.
So now we're home and filling the cutting board orders we received as fast as we can! But that's not the only thing we need to accomplish this week...we're still "behind" on a lot of stuff due to the winter storm that hit before we even left!
We have to reschedule meetings, reschedule phone calls, design our next round of furniture prototypes, and restock our cutting board inventory...on TOP of all these new orders!
But we're rusty. We haven't had to follow our own checklists to fulfill orders for a couple weeks now....so we're out of the groove we used to be in!
We were slow. We were skipping steps. We were confusing one checklist for another.
The whole experience really just taught us that we NEED to follow the checklists every time! Which is exactly why we wrote them in the first place - because we knew we'd run into situations like this. So, even though we're really busy this week, it's been nice to go through our checklists and make some changes/updates with a couple new processes - we can't wait for our first employee to try them all out!
#woodworking #woodworkingbusiness #entrepreneur #farmhouse #farmhousemodern #design #Ash #furniture #furniture business #charcuterie #charcuterieboard #cuttingboard #realtor #closinggift #sales #marketing
The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.
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