Hey Puzzle Friends!
If you're here for puzzle content, this blog post might be a tad boring for you, but if you're entrepreneurial, or just curious what all goes into owning and operating a wooden jigsaw puzzle company, read on!
The Company Vision
When starting a business, it's important to know what kind of business you want. In our case, as homeschooling parents of three kiddos, and with me already having a full-time job, we wanted to create a business that didn't suck absolutely all of our time and energy. This meant we were very clear on a strategy of outsourcing much of the non-creative aspects of the business, focusing on the creativity and connection to you all, and leaving a lot of nuts and bolts logistical stuff to folks that have the time, energy, and expertise in those areas.
Here's a list of all the goings on, and who shoulders the responsibilities!
Things We Do Ourselves
- Puzzle Design. This is the obvious one, and if you read our blog, most of it is showcasing the process of designing unique and excellent wooden jigsaw puzzles! This absolutely cannot be outsourced as it's the personality of who we are; very core to Puzzle Bomb!
- Customer Service. In the age of AI and virtual assistants, we still highly value personal connection, and personally answer all emails. We also love going way above and beyond in our customer service, and actually have a lot of fun surprising folks in this area! We also treasure all of the more personal conversations that have occurred via email surrounding life and faith in Jesus (some emails are in agreement, providing encouragement or seeking help, and others are confrontational in nature; we welcome and value both!).
- Bookkeeping and Planning. While I (Chad) am gifted on the creative end, I am not organized. As often happens in marriage, opposites attract, and Caylyn is highly gifted in administrative skills! She tracks the finances to ensure we're good to go come tax time each year, and provides much necessary structure to our business decisions vs. my wild west approach.
Things We Outsource
- The Website. A common theme here well be that I'm not tech savvy! While I do the day-to-day upkeep of things like adding product, updating listings, etc, an old friend of ours helped with all of the set-up, and the recent major overhaul we did to the Shopify team (if you haven't looked at the site in the past week, check it out!). He owns a company called Brand New Box (https://brandnewbox.com) that offers innovative software solutions for all kinds of business applications. If you're ever having a need, check them out.
- Puzzle Production. While most quality wooden puzzle companies seem to own and operate their own bank of laser cutters, cutting in house, we don't. Going back to the tech-savvy thing, operating, callibrating, and maintaining a piece of equipment like a laser cutter sounds awful to me, especially at the precision we require, much less the fleet of them it would take to keep up on production. Additionally, it would be a huge time sink (or a labor cost, which isn't feasible out of the gate since we're committed to operating on zero debt).
We've been using Wincent (https://wincent.en.alibaba.com/) as our production partner since the beginning. The extreme precision color-line cutting necessary for our puzzles is no small feat to pull off, and they've nailed it!
- Shipping Logistics. Having a garage or warehouse full of puzzles, and then having to ship them ourselves would again take tons of our time for what is a rather routine task. Fortunately, we live in the age of third party fulfillment, and APIs that connect our Shopify site directly to their fulfillment system. We work with the wonderful Fulfillrite on this (https://www.fulfillrite.com).
This comes with numerous benefits! They handle all of the international logistics of transporting our goods from the production facility to their warehouse. They're fast, with orders often being shipped within an hour of the order being placed. They store my inventory. They have preferred shipping rates that I don't have access to. If there's a problem with a shipment, they get me compensated by the shipper. Lots of headaches solved here!
- Marketing. We run a pretty healthy Facebook ad budget to bring in new customers. I quickly found keeping up with best practices to be an uphill battle, as that ecosystem is constantly changing, and I just don't have the time it takes to constantly stay on top of it, much less the large amount of marketing assets you need to be constantly generating to keep the marketing fresh.
I've contracted the services of Heath Media (https://heathmedia.co.uk/) for this, as they're experts in the field. This relationship is fairly new, so we'll see if it pays off!
- Customer Insights. This is related to marketing, but we're just now running a survey of y'all to help us see who you are, and exactly what attracts you to our puzzles. This will help our marketing efforts immensely, as we're offering something a bit strange and unique in the puzzling world. Your feedback will help us know what are the most valuable things to communicate about our puzzles, and who we should be communicating it to.
Your five minutes of participation here is huge for us! You can complete this survey here: https://proof.click/pzb25.
Proof Positioning (https://proofpositioning.com/) has been wonderful to work with here, so if you have a business, and need help figuring out how to best communicate your business, and to whom, you might find this worth a look!
- SEO. This is also a new initiative, as search engine traffic is so valuable, and we really don't have any clout there at the moment. However, if keying in on certain search terms can bring another 2,000+ visitors per month, it's silly to ignore. We've just begun this work, strategizing in collaboration with a promising expert with a good track record. I'm not ready to recommend them yet, as I don't have proven results, but hopefully I can provide a good update here a few months from now!
- The Legal Stuff. If it requires legalese, like the initial formation of the company, I have a lawyer do it. There was so much research involved at the beginning, and I still wasn't sure I crossed all my t's. Having an expert here saved a ton of time, and gave peace of mind it was done correctly.
- The Coffee. I post these blogs while my kiddos are at homeschool co-op on Wednesdays from the comfort of a nice coffee shop, Groundhouse, in Gardner, KS.
Questions of Curiosities?
As a non-details guy (unless I'm designing a puzzle!), I'm sure there are things I missed here. If there's an aspect of running this business I missed here, and you'd like to know more about, let me know! I'd love to either cover it in the comments or a future blog post!
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