The hardest part of running a company is dealing with time. Time pressures can take on any number of forms.

1) Not enough time. Every minute is important and we do not want to miss any opportunity. This is why I fly to HK for 3 days, fly home and drive 6 hours round trip the next day for a sale meeting, then fly to Canada for 2 days the next day. Yes, its exhausting, but it also allows me to understand the goals of our customers. I learn about what makes their customers unique. And then we can make product that will maximize the retailers goals for its consusmers.


2) Focusing on different time horizons. This last week, I made decisions within each of these time horizons.

• Immediate: Daily or weekely - watching and analyzing our daily and weekly POS data from products selling at stores right now. Shipping products daily.



• Intermediate: This week thru the next few months - taking and producing orders that ship from now into the next 6 monhts.



• 2 to 6 months from now - introducing, selling and quoting our new lines that would start appearing in stores next Summer and Fall,



• Future - looking at new licenses and artists that we would develop into new puzzle and other toy lines. These issues will not start appearing in stores until 2011

3) World time zones - We sell our puzzles all around the world. Like the old British Empire, it seems that the sun never sets on an LPF puzzle. But it also means that I have distributors and partners who are awake when I am suppose to be asleep. So I find myself doing a lot of meetings from the phone in the kitchen at night. Some times this works to my advantage. I can ask someone to complete a task at 5:00pm my time in Lafayette. When I get up in the morning, the task is complete. The person who did it was not up all night. The work was part of their normal day. Anyone doing business internationally knows what I am talking about.

In thinking about this post, I thought of this song from a long time ago.

Time keeps on slippin' slippin' slippin' into the future. - Steve Miller Band

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1f7eZ8cHpM



JP

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1t90Bg9wAw

I am not sure how to embed a YouTube video. Can anyone help?

Anyway, I found this little Christmas song to be something as a parent I can relate to.

JP

I used to work for a puzzle company before I started out on my own. Our offices and factory were in a building that was built in the 1800's. Legend had it that they used to make wagon wheels in the factory. Later they built old fashion gas pumps. Sometime in the early 1900's, they made hat boxes and sold them to hat stores in Chicago. Hat boxes led to puzzles and since about the 1920's, the factory made puzzles.



Today that building is being turned into condos. It is really remarkable to think that people will be living in a building that only a few years ago was a noisy and dusty factory that employed almost 150 people. The building is brick and has huge wood beams inside. The floors are wood on the 2nd and 3rd floors. The buiding is well built and has a lot of history.



I am sure the units are really neat inside. As I understand it, each unit is 3 stories and highlight the architectural details of the building. Walls and beams are exposed. It has to be the most interesting interiors for a condo in Lafayette. I believe the first folks have already moved in.



I think having worked in the building, I could never live there. It would be too strange to know that where your kitchen is located used to be a die cutter or a lamination machine. Obviously, anyone moving in now only sees the high ceilings, wood floors, and exposed brick wall. But I would see the ghosts of over 100 years of manufacturing.



JP

I love hearing from people who buy and enjoy our jigsaw puzzles. It really does make the day that much nicer when I get an e-mail from someone who particularly enjoyed one of our puzzles.

Just last week I had a nice conversation with a woman from the midwest. Puzzles and shoes are her hobby (I think she actually said shoes first and then puzzles). Puzzles are her way to relax. Living on a fixed income she recognized what a good entertainment value a puzzle provided. With the price of movies and books rising every time you look around, it is hard to find an entertaining activity that is affordable. But puzzles provide the entertainment.

As a person who has been doing puzzles for many years, I have never understood the appeal of very, very difficult or impossible puzzles. I do not see how it can be enjoyable (or a good value) to be stumped by a puzzle. In my opinion, for a puzzle to be enjoyable and relaxing it must be solvable. It might take some time and concentration (and a good lamp for light as I get older), but I want to finish the puzzle. It can't be too easy. But it has be realistic.

Those of your that do super hard puzzles (Buffalo Games has a line of Impossible Puzzles - they are sort of known for that line) tell me the appeal. And what makes a puzzle really difficult. Is it the die lines, the image (or lack of image), the colors (or lack of colors). Help me understand.

JP

So, were you out shopping over the weekend? I was. On Friday particularly. Among several stops, I was at Woodfield Mall outside of Chicago. I seem to have heard that Woodfield is the #1 tourist destination in Illinois. More people visit the mall than the Sears Tower or any other tourist attraction you can think of.

When we arrived, we found the parking lot was crowded. But we got lucky and found parking without much hassle. We had a quick lunch and headed into the mall at about 12:30pm. The mall was definitely crowded, but not terrible. It was more like a very crowded Sunday than what you would expect on the busiest shopping day of the year. The good news was that most people were carrying bags. People were not just walking and window shopping. They looked like they were buying.

At one store, they had a really good selection of Lafayette Puzzle Factory puzzles. They even had some on an end cap. Even better was that the inventory looked to be running a bit low. But with a little reshelving by myself and my mother (who is a puzzle expert), we had the shelves looking first rate.

What was really fun was watching people select puzzles. Especially when they would select LPF puzzles without my prompting. I also could not help myself and make a few recommendations.

There was one young girl who I watched select a puzzle. She spent a lot of time checking out each and every puzzle. She ultimately selected a great panoramic puzzle by Robin Koni. It is a very colorful underwater scene. It was quite pleasing to watch this transaction unfold. Especially since I remember our team picking this image for our puzzles over a year ago. We probably looked at hundreds and hundreds of underwater art scenes before we picked Robin's.

A year later, watching someone select that image over the 200 other puzzles in this store was really quite satisfying.

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.

JP

Happy Black Friday!

Have you ever heard of Flat Stanley? I must admit to only being vaguely familiar with him until this week.
Flat Stanley came to visit us from my niece in Cincinnati.
I'll let Wikipedia to explain Flat Stanley: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Stanley

Anyway, I had a trip planned to Toronto last week and I took Flat Stanley with me. We had a great time. Stanley is pretty small and slips easily into my computer case. He also provided me with a good excuse to ask for silly things from officials.

I asked the pilot if we could take Stanleys picture on the flight deck.

I asked the immigration guy if he would "stamp" Flat Stanley. Apparently, he can not. But he did do a stamp half on Stanleys leg and half off the leg. It is ok to have a half stamp on a non-passport. I think Stanley was ok with that.

Yesterday, we took Stanley over to Purdue University to have his picture taken around campus.

I have been going non-stop the last 2 weeks. In the last 2 weeks, I have driven over 1200 miles (I flew to Toronto, so this is not even including those miles). Having Flat Stanley with me the last few days was a nice distraction. And hopefully explains my lack of posts.

I have had some really nice conversations with folks who have been buying our puzzles. The response has been really positive. And it is incredibly the depth of knowledge folks have about puzzles. Every conversation I have with someone about puzzles is an education.

Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving. If you are traveling, travel safe. It is rainy here in Lafayette. We are driving to the Chicago suburbs later today. I imagine traffic in Chicago will be a mess.

JP