So its March already, 2005, and we're still thinking its just gone new year.
How quickly time moves on when you are desparate for it?
The last three years had been full of ups and downs, sideways, roundabouts and a few dead ends. Fortunately, this time we were given we did use productively to a fair amount, with some late nights and frantic days of work, and some days of laziness in the infrequent good weather. My name is Jay and this is my story.
I'm sat in my office talking to my laptop, the sun is attempting to poke its head through the murk that is called Manchester, but the canopy is still too heavy, until the afternoon when the clouds drop off and let a few rays of sun stroke our grey city.
For a couple of years I've looked at this view, laptop, wall, desk covered in paper with barely legible scribbling and post-its reminding me of some nugget of pertinent information I'll probably dismiss.
And The Program.
The Program has been in development for three long years, a fact not lost on any of us. Its been through the hell stage of constant bugs, errors, incorrect network infrastructures, call outs on weekends, week trips away to install at a clients, mad rushes at night to fix a glaring error and numerous changes and modifications at the behest of clients.
But now, from the tiny prototype we unleashed onto our first client's server, the continual lessons learnt and changes made as we evolved the product, to the painstaking days of neverending customisation, we finally arrived at something we thought was ready. Ready to take the world by storm!
Or so we thought.
Rightcontrol, will be a revolutionary idea, we said. A Stock Control Business Management system, that lets salesmen sell, warehousemen stock and invoicers invoice, that didn't cost the earth, but that could be changed with ease to match the client's working operations. And the target audience? Small business owners.
We would use the principle of low-price entry to engage the market and win loyalty. Sell a music cd for £30 or £3, and you would expect that the cheaper would sell more.
But one would need to sell 10 of those to make the same amount as the one.
Simple logic.
Furthermore, we figured if we offer an upgrade path from a cheap system to a fully networked, scaleable system, we could pull more interest than only offering a larger more expensive system.
We learnt the hard way that most small business owners are not in the position to pay thousands of pounds for a piece of software, never mind the projected savings in knowing what stock one has - the bottom line is what most small business owners see. When they expand and start seeing the problems of inadequate stock control, only then can they justify the cost of buying stock control software, but one wonders how much bottom line has been lost already from lack of adequate stock information.
Our first client had two directors, one of whom was adamant that he needed stock control, for they had expanded to the point where stock was lying all over the place and there were no formal documents to show their stock levels. The other director didnt really see the need for it, and only cottoned on about a year after it had been installed, when an enterprising customer of theirs tried to fob off some broken laptops to him as an RMA, but on inspection of said machines, using the barcode to check the serial numbers etc, they discovered that said machines had never come from our clients stock at all! The six laptops would have either been fixed or replaced, and unknowlingly would have cost them a huge margin at that, twice the cost of the initial stock control system we made them!
Well, like I said, here we are, three years on, and the latest version of the software is ready, in the two flavours of Single user and Networked versions.
How do we let the world know about it?
Watch this space...
