Jesse Heywood
Member
Got this e-mail from Jake
I feel the need to send out a shipping update. The first thing I want to do is offer my sincere gratitude to those of you who have been patiently waiting for orders to ship. We've been working non-stop since March and all of us are really starting to feel it. Many of you have taken the time to send us words of encouragement and many of those emails or gifts of toilet paper have come just when we needed them. Thank you!
I've posted a picture of the dates that we are working on for each bullet right now. I'm very sorry that we've gone past the 8 weeks backorder estimate that is on the website. I promise you we've been working as hard as humanly possible to get as many orders out as we can. This week are are going to switch three of the machines over so that we can make all of the 115 HP, .380, and 135 FMJ. We only have enough orders for them to take a couple of days to make all that we need to fill those orders. Once those are done, we will switch right back to the most popular stuff. (Don't worry, we are still gonna make the more popular 115 and 124 FMJs while we work on these others. We have plenty of lead cores made to keep rolling those out for a few days). Until we can get caught up on the 115 fmj, 124 fmj/hp, and 147 FMJ we won't be making anymore of the 115 HP, 135 fmj, or .380. I know some of you guys love them but we just have so many more orders for the others that we have to dedicate as much capacity to them as possible. Once we get through July for the 124s orders should start going a little faster. July 31st was the last day that we allowed bulk discounts on the website so once we get into August orders we should be able to do several days worth of orders in just a single day. That said, we've kind of hit a bottleneck right now. The post office has been really slow sending us more shipping boxes and padded envelopes. They are about two weeks behind in delivering our order and we just ran out of padded envelopes and we will be out of small flat rate boxes in a few days. Keep your fingers crossed that our order arrives soon or we won't be able to ship out much of anything.
Along with your emails of encouragement, we've also been getting several complainers. It happens and we don't blame some of them. Some are just plain mean and we do blame those ones. Many of them just don't read the notice on the website. Many want to know what the heck we are doing if we aren't sending them their orders. Well, here are some of the crazy things that we've done so far this year to try to be a better and more efficient company. We've hired 4 new employees. We've had employees with 80 hours of overtime in a two week period. We've sacrificed vacations and holidays. We've brought in family members to help. Our kids have helped fold and tape boxes. We've been working. That's about it.
In addition, here is what we've purchased this year. We pre-purchased enough lead and copper to pretty much fill all the orders (Charging the cards up front allowed us to make sure we didn't have any material shortages or delays). Four new bullet machines, five lead core machines, a 30 HP screw compressor with a dryer and 240 gallon air tank, a 6500 lb Toyota forklift, a 7000 lb Hyster forklift, a 4400 sq. foot shop with 1.3 acres of land next door to our current shop, an enclosed trailer, an atv for snow removal/weed spraying/gravel lot dragging, two mills, two lathes, two surface grinders, a sink EDM, a hone, a power sprayer, a lawn mower, and enough tooling for our machines to last us for a long time.
We also were able to pay off several loans for our machines. We no longer owe any money on our .224 machine and 3 of our 9mm machines. I still need to talk to our accountant so I don't screw us with taxes, but if they give me the okay, I plan on paying off the loans for two more 9mm machines by the end of the year. This should more than make up the additional cost of the new employees so we won't have to get rid of anyone if things slow down after the election.
Oh, and you might have noticed, we are putting in a machine shop in that 4400 sq ft shop. The idea is to keep our machines running and to get them back up and running as fast as possible when they break down. The EDM is so we can try new bullet profiles in the off chance we ever get free time again. Lots of cool stuff in store for our future. Thanks for all your orders and for helping us pay off our debt. One more year like this and we could be completely debt free. That would free us up to do lots of cool new stuff. And yes, we have new stuff planned...
