Hey guys! Aaron here from Gough Custom, so some of
you might have seen from other places that I actually moved workshops again recently!
Hearing that you might be like what the F&#*? Why would you incur the time and expense of
moving again so quickly?? So I just wanted to make a video talking about how I came to that decision,
and also giving you guys some history to put it into context.
One thing that I haven't talked about, as much as I would like to, is that
about three years ago my business failed. When I say it failed what I mean is that I was working
full time as a knife maker, trying to support myself and I wasn't able to.
The main reason for that was because
my process was too inconsistent, and unreliable, to allow me to make the number of knives that I
needed to each month in order to pay my rent and cover my living expenses and so on. So
I was going out backwards, and by the end of that period of time I was working an incredible number
of hours trying to make things right, and I was also in a substantial amount of debt.
Things just weren't getting better, so I realized that
this needed to be written as a failure, and I needed to work out how to buy myself
more time in order to fix things, and in order to pay down my debt, to be honest.
One thing you may not know is that I've actually worked in quite a number of startup companies
in the past, and one of the most important lessons that I took away from that was that
success doesn't happen without failure. There's there's no one that really just like has one idea,
and they execute on it and it's instantly a success and and that's it... If there
are people like that they are very much the exception not the rule.
So a motto that I took away from my startup days is: "Fail Forward Fast", and this is just the idea
that you have to be willing to admit failure and allow it to drive you onto the next thing, and you
have to be willing to do that quickly! Because you have to try a lot of iterations in order to
find the thing that works, and if you just sit there and dig your heels in, and you know bail
water out of the bottom of the ship you're going to go down... You're going to sink with the ship!
What you want to do instead is what Johnny Depp does in 'pirates of the caribbean',
where he steps off the sinking ship onto the dock and just walks away. You know, you need to commit
to your idea and vision enough that you're at some level of risk, because you need to actually give
it a real try, but if it's not working you need to be willing to walk away and try the next thing.
So that's what I did. I didn't want to walk away from my business because I love knife making,
I love what I do, but the way that I was doing it was not working.
So I went and got a full-time day job, and I used that to buy myself the time that I
needed to pay down my debt, and also to try and work on improving my process.
That was obviously a really stressful time as well because I was working a lot, I was working
making knives evenings and weekends while working, you know, a regular job during the day. But
I was able to find a better way, and that better way was hard milling...
So for those of you that aren't familiar hard milling is the process of CNC machining
metal after it's been fully hardened, after it's already been heat treated.
And the reason that was important for me is because it suddenly allowed me to
buy large amounts of steel from my steel supplier, cut them up into rectangles and then send them out
for a really high quality vacuum heat treatment at a reasonable cost. Then once I got the steel back,
I could machine it, and then once it was machined I could go straight into hand sanding,
I could go straight to coating and assembly, and it drastically shortened the lead time
of my process and also allowed me to iterate on the machining process much more quickly.
Because I could just machine one knife and then do a test assembly and see how it all worked, whereas
before when I was machining soft steel, in order to make vacuum heat treatment financially viable
I had to machine a lot of blades and hand finish them, and then
send them all off and if there was something wrong with them that I hadn't picked up on
then I wouldn't find out until I got that whole batch back, and then
they would all be written off as a loss... and that happened more than once you know.
So buying myself that extra flexibility and the ability to iterate quickly on my design,
and on my process, was a really big step forward. It was a huge huge improvement.
So after coming up with that idea and getting it working, and after working in my day job for two
years, I started to feel kind of claustrophobic... I wanted to get back to knife making full time,
and I had the idea to try scaling up, to take things up to the next level as it were.
The main idea behind this was to give myself more time to work on the process, and to work on
refining the design of the knife, and also to work on new designs.
To do this I basically got a much larger workshop, I went from 500 square feet
up to 2,500 square feet, and I got a friend of mine, Mike, who is also a knife maker to
share workshop space with me, and to come work with me part-time to help me make my knives.
And that was fantastic he worked out really well but, I found it really,
really, stressful to be responsible for somebody else's income to be honest.
That in combination with a really large increase in fixed costs, so going from the small shop to
the big shop and then having wages on top of that and an increase in insurance and power and so on,
meant that my fixed costs went up by more than 400 percent! So all of these things just kind of
hung over me like, uh, you know a big weight that might drop on me at any time.
For some people scaling up is absolutely the right thing to do, it takes their business up
to the next level, but for me i just found that I couldn't put those stresses out of my mind,
they just stayed with me all the time, and they made me feel really stressed out,
and they really sucked the joy out of what I was doing, and I wasn't productive,
I didn't get to do the extra stuff that I really wanted to do because I was just so stressed out...
So about six months into that process I realized that this was not the right thing for me,
and I had to work out what the next thing was. That next step ended up being this: scaling back
down to just being me, and just being in a small shop. This shop is just over 500 square feet,
it's relatively close to my apartment, which is fantastic, I can actually walk here in about 20
minutes. Whereas the big shop was a 45 minute train ride either way, so much less time wasted
in commute, and the commute is much more pleasant. I get to walk through a park on the way to work!
So I think it's been a really positive change in a lot of ways,
and one of the biggest improvements has honestly been just the reduction in fixed costs. Because
when you're trying to make something to a really high standard, in my experience there are always
going to be delays. Whether it's my fault, or somebody else's fault, the delays just
seem to happen. A good example of this is that recently the company that does my DLC coating
started having some internal process issues, and that ended up delaying me by about a month.
Which was you know, obviously not great, but having smaller expenses in the smaller shop
I was able to do everything I could to fix that situation, and then to take a step back,
and just be like: "well I guess this is a forced vacation now". Whereas in the larger shop that
would have been a really, really, stressful time because I would have had all of these massive
expenses that I have to cover regardless, and no ability to bring in money to help cover them.
So that actually ended up being kind of a nice time, like it was some of the first time off
that I had in quite a few years! So it's been a really big change, and I think a change for the
positive to be in the smaller space, and to go back to just being me. I'm enjoying life,
and knife making, more now which is fantastic. So I think things are headed in the right direction.
I think a big part of the reason why I wanted to talk about this is just because,
in this age of social media where everybody wants to present as being
happy and successful, people aren't willing to talk about
hardship and failure as much as they could be, and it's something that we all experience.
We all have these really difficult times that we have to work through, so
I just wanted to share this because there are lots of other people out there that
have small businesses, or that are thinking about starting small businesses, and it can
feel really lonely to feel like you're the only one that's having trouble and failing. But
we all go through this stuff, so you know I just wanted to share my experiences with you guys.
And speaking of that it's been amazing to get to share my journey up and to this point
with all of you, I really really appreciate that process, and I really appreciate
all of you coming along for the ride with me. I'm looking forward to
what comes next, it always feels like I'm at the beginning of a new journey to be honest!
And I also want to say a huge thank you to my customers who have been really patient,
and supporting, and understanding through all of this. I wouldn't be
where I am now without everyone's help and support, so I really, really,
appreciate that. I can't say how much I appreciate that, it's been amazing.
So I hope this video was helpful, I hope you guys have a better understanding of
where I'm at, and how I got here, and I'm looking forward to speaking to you all again soon!