The Cash Flow Crunch: Navigating Growth, Uncertainty, and Survival Mode
episode
The Handcrafted Podcast: The Business of making things
18 min
1 speaker
4 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
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Welcome to the Handcrafted Podcast, the business of making things. I'm Paul, founder of Philadelphia Table Company and the Handcrafted Network, and I believe great craftsmanship deserves great business strategy. This podcast is for makers who want to build not just great products, but a thriving business. Each episode will dive into the mindset, systems, and skills that turn craft into success.
Hey guys, welcome back to the Handcrafted Podcast. Hope everyone's been doing great as summer starts to kick off. Hope everyone has been, you know, busy and productive and getting the stuff done that they need to get done. This podcast is brought to you by the Handcrafted Network. The Handcrafted Network is an online network of now mixed bag of makers. So it's been primarily woodworkers, but there's been a few people, a upholstery person just came on, as well as a few ceramicists and a few other things, custom gate makers, just because we kind of share a lot of the same business background. struggles and problems. So I thought it was helpful for them. I did do some one on one calls just to make sure that the group was right for them.
And they were like, Hey, I think this does sound good. So they signed up as well. So if you're interested in that, feel free to email me or send me a you could schedule a call with me. It's Paul at the handcrafted network.com or just the handcrafted network.com. We could talk through it, see if it's sort of the right fit for you. I'm also working on a few different modules in there, things like marketing, AI use all that sort of stuff. that I think is gonna be helpful moving forward. We're also gonna have like a sales combo, which is like many of us makers don't really know how to do sales. When I got into this, I wasn't really a salesperson per se. I like talking to people. So I figured out a few strategies that work that I wanna make sure I share with everybody else.
All right. So on today's podcast. So I've always told you guys that this was going to be sort of like the real thing. So opening the kimono, the good, the bad, the ugly, all that sort of stuff. And, you know, if this is not the type of content you want to hear, I guess let me know. I'd love to get some feedback on that to be like, hey, look, I just want to hear about good stuff. So this one's not about sunshine and rainbows. And so, like I said, let me know in either the comments on YouTube or send me an email and just be like, hey, Paul, I prefer the sunshine and rainbows. But I want to give you a very real perspective of what I'm sort of dealing with at Philadelphia Table Company right now. And I think it's relevant because it's been so at the forefront of my mind for the past about two weeks or so.
So at PTC, we're running into a cash flow crisis. May was a very slow month. I know I've been talking to a few other makers and people in the industry. I know that the industry itself has seemed to slow down a little bit. So we were 50% less than we would normally do per month. So that hit the bottom line pretty hard. As makers, a lot of us are kind of... often depending on those deposits and incoming projects to help fund projects that are in the queue. Now, with that said, of course, we can still operate profitably and we still can make ends meet by completing the projects that we're in. But what ends up happening is you just end up running very thin to the bone with that in that world. So I've been navigating this and things that I've been finding very helpful have been talking to other people who are either A, going through this or B, have gone through this.
And of course, you know, your feedback to me potentially is, hey, Paul, why should I even be listening to this podcast? Why are you like, why should I even listen to any of the information you have? And that's kind of the idea. That's what's been going on in my head is like I've been just like feeling, I don't know, like a fraud in a way. And, you know, I had talked to my wife about this, talked to a few other people, and people are just like, you know, Paul, you're able to provide this perspective to people, which actually is very genuinely real.
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