It Is Not Always Obvious

It Is Not Always Obvious was Originally Posted on November 16, 2011 by

Buttoning It Up

Part of my farm’s irrigation system involves a timer to trigger each zone to water. Although the timer is needed, there is also a need for manual watering too, especially when fixing broken lines or making adjustments.

I am using a Hunter controller and purchased a wireless remote control unit also. Even though it works well, its signal was not covering my whole farm and there were dead spots. The controller used to be under the house with the receiver antenna mounted at the roof line. The control lines would go from the controller up the trench and to each zone. Thus being at the far zone, the voltage for the valves might be a bit lower than the near ones, however the wire is very heavy guage and not a problem. The main problem was the radio signal not reaching the controller when I was up there.

After much thinking, I moved the controller to the middle of the property to minimize the distance the radio controlled manual signal would need to cover. While I could have used some type of solar array to power the controller, I decided to leave the AC power at the house guaranting that the electrical voltage would not be lower than the lowest point now. Since all wires are in a cable, there is no additional wores needed, the direction of current changes in some cases.

The rewiring of the system was quite simple as I only needed to cut one cable, move the controller and reattach a few wires in a few places. The toal rewire and move time was a couple of hours and the whole system worked the first time. To say I was pleased was an understatement, yet with the advanced thinking I did helped quite a bit.

Sometimes I overplan and over think projects and I hate to make a mistake that will cost me money. In this case things worked.

Yerars ago I was in a fast-paced computer business where we were encouraged to think outside the box. We were reminded though that once we made a mistake, learn from it and try to avoid making the same mistake again.

We were also encouraged to measure results which also helped us to make decisions. Imagine going t o a doctor, getting a prescription and then never telling the doctor if it helped or not. The doctor may still prescribe the drug without knowing if it really helps or not.

An organization wanted to tell the public about an issue and decided to pay for newspaper classified ads. They have no way of knowing if their ad is working, because there is no way to track sales based upon responses to the ad. The ad is also geared towards tourists and I don’t think many tourists read local newspaper ads. I might be rwong yet in this case, there is no data either way and I err on the side of frugality.

On my coffee website I list retail prices with an occasional sale price. I also offer discount coupon codes if customers know where to look. Many of the codes give the same discount but have different code words. I can tell at any given time where the code was found and who used it. Asa businessman I need to know what works and what doesn’t, especially if It will cost me money. To me it doesn’t matter which code people find and use, or even if they pass it to friends or family or post it elsewhere. What matters to me is which code (and which location) brought me the business.

Another item of interest is rebranding. A soft drink company may have tied up 20% of the cola market. They might brand thir product as fun and tasty. They may not be able to increase their sales above that 20% market share . An idea might be to make a very similar product and sell it to a supermarket chain which brands it with their own house brand. The price might be lower than their original product and might be purchased by price-concious consumers who would not pay for the expensive original brand. Thus the company may increase their market sales without hurting their main brand.

Personally I try to look at a problem from all angles. When I had an opportunity to move to Hawaii and buy a farm to grow coffee, I first built a website, purchased unroasted coffee, had it roasted, then I bagged it and sold it on my own website. I created business cards, got a toll free telephone number and so on. My feeling was that it was cheaper to spend a few hundred dollars up front trying this, than to buy a farm, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and then finding out I was a bad salesman.

Then people tell me they ae going t obuy a computera nd which one would I buy, I ask them what they are going to do with it. What *I* would use it for is a completely different scenerio. The better way would be to see how a computer would be used and which applications are needed, then determining which computer models would do that.

Sometimes the obvious solutions is not so obvious to us at the start.