Re: Bank failures

In article <LPGdnVzxGeg9QUvVnZ2dnUVZ_vudnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
BAR <screw@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Lloyd Parsons wrote:
In article <R-2dnSZgG7pr10vVnZ2dnUVZ_qednZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
BAR <screw@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Lloyd Parsons wrote:
In article <1OmdnYHkoK6IIUjVnZ2dnUVZ_ridnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
BAR <screw@xxxxxxx> wrote:

assimilate@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On 20-Sep-2008, "\"R&B\"" <noneofyourbusiness@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Earnings have plummeted during the Bush years.
what bull, back it up blow hard

My company has had 20 straight quarters of double digit earnings.
Glad to hear that. I like successful businesses and was fortunate
enough to work for 3 of them until the computer business died off.
The computer business hasn't died off. It has changed but it hasn't died
off.

If you are a commissioned sales person, it sure has dropped off!

When I retired, here is what the average profits were on some of the
items I sold and recommended.

Computers/monitors/some printers - Gross profit 5% on an avg of $400
box, so $20 gross. I got 10% of that. Got to sell a ton of them to
make a living.

Higher end lasers (non HP) : Gross profit of 27%, I got 40% of that.
These were my real bread and butter. But you don't sell enough of them
to make them the only thing you sell. BTW, these were not just a
printer sale, it was printer, scanner and software to make them more
productive than they were out of the box.

Hated selling HP printers as gross margins on them were just like the
damn computers.

These were school/business sales. I didn't do consumer stuff, margins
there are worse.

My real bread and butter was designing networks and infrastructure, but
in this very rural area, we got saturated pretty quickly.

So here, if you want to run a computer business, it is mostly one-man
shops with emphasis on repair and not sales.

So maybe the business didn't drop off, but except for the mfgs, the
profits dropped like a stone.

It sounds like your were in the wrong market, "in this very rural area,
we got saturated pretty quickly."

It does, doesn't it?

But I was holding the line on margins much better than my city brethren.
I was making 20-25% margins long after they had all dropped to 5% in the
cities. We didn't have any of the big box stores down here until very
late in the game, so support was a big issue for our schools and
businesses.

Send it in if we think it is broke enough, or reformat the HD isn't good
enough support for them. We offered on site support and always an
English speaking person answered the phone. And for our best clients,
each tech had a few of them to support and they gave out their cell
numbers to those clients.

But then Best Buy came in, the schools finally got enough computers in
them that they needed their own in house support and many of the
businesses also needed that. So it all kind of died way down.

As I said, most computer stuff here is either mail order or big box for
sales of computers, and one-man shows for support.

I still do some consulting, but it is very rare these days. I'm
enjoying my retirement. If someone wants help in choosing or designing
or whatever, their computer or network, I just charge them an hourly fee
for anything I do for them, and let them buy the hardware from wherever
they think is best. I do recommend some hardware over others, I just
don't do direct sales anymore.

Or even much of anything but golf, organs and girlfriend!!!

Well, the occasional posting on usenet of course :)
.

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