Burrows Solutions News

It’s been too long, really.  It really makes me sad too.  Quite honestly we had a decent business going at this point last year, we were building a decent online presence.  I thought we could grow more and we opened up a “real” store.  I thought we could handle the additional expenses and didn’t foresee some of the problems we ran across last year.  It is what it is and we just simply failed with our “real” store.  With less time and money, this wonderful online store has suffered A LOT over the last year.  We are still here though and while we aren’t as strong as we once were, we really hope to stabilize soon and be able to do more great deals like we used to do.  We still have some inventory on hand, most of it is listed but then there are a few items that are not.  I really wish I had more time to spend on the site so we could have good sales again, but the financial hole we built with the “real” store has kept me too busy.  I wanted to post something tonight for a few reasons, but the biggest one has to be the fact that we are NOT dead.  While we haven’t really made any money (expenses eat all profit because the amount of orders has been pretty low) over the last few months, I am not giving up.  Luckily we’ve been able to handle most of the expenses of the site so we are still up and at least selling an occasional UBCD or UBCD4Win disc.  The store looks pretty bare, but we still have a few good deals left and we’ve marked some prices down to try and help move a few things.

Over the years I have honestly greatly appreciated all the customers we’ve had.  I thank all of you for your help in supporting us and picking up some of the great deals we’ve had over the years.  Like I said, we have some inventory left and I’ve been marking prices down.  I really hope to have the time to send out a newsletter again soon, in hopes that some of you will visit and pick up a few deals.  Within the next few months I hope that our road to recovery is looking better and really hope that we will be adding more deals and products to the site once again.

I just ask that you please consider visiting our store whenever you need something and maybe even send me an email when you don’t see something you need.  I will do my best to find you a great price on that item and if I can I will let you know, if I can’t then I’ll send you to the place where you can find a great deal.  Please just visit the site regularly, check out our prices, and please order something if you need it.  We’ve seen a lot over the last year, really a lot of hard times……but we will continue to fight on and start growing again.  Thank you again for your past orders and for reading.  Let’s all have a great 2012!!

Maybe the real question should be “Should you put a price tag on reviews?”  We have signed up or paid for a variety of services over the years.  Most of them have been security tools to help make sure your data is safe on the site but a few have been to help prove our reliability.  Online review sites have caused me headaches on a few occasions.  Finding the most popular, most reliable, and cheapest solution is difficult.  Most of them promise some type of “free” service but then they go out of their way to show everyone that you are too cheap to pay for their “professional” services or really don’t offer much of anything.

The only service that I’ve found to be of decent quality has been Reseller Ratings, but they still piss me off.  They have at least lowered their monthly fee down to $24 so I finally felt that could be managed.  We’ve recently had a few minor problems with a few of our accounts so I received a call from them on Friday because my payment method had been declined.  I never found the time to really check the site and see what was available during the 30 day trial so I voiced a few concerns to the girl on the phone.  One of my main concerns was the “pop up” they try to highlight all the time.  If you’ve shopped at Tiger Direct, you’ve seen that pop up.  I haven’t paid attention to what it actually says and just always close it.  Plus TD’s prices generally suck so we don’t order from them very often.  I assumed that since the pop-up bothered me and I just closed, most other people do too?  She said they actually get good results from that and it is an easy and good way to get feedback.  The customer enters their email address and then a week later they receive an email from RR asking for a review.  So this afternoon I added the code to our order completion page and am hoping for good results.  I’ll have to read about more of the features and options that are available for the $24 a month with our account.  Maybe if there are a few other interesting things then we’ll have to revisit this on a future date?  What do you think of that pop-up?  Have you or do you leave reviews and do you use Reseller Ratings?  Please let us know your thoughts and/or concerns.  Thanks for reading and please comment.

While I was out on a business trip a few weeks ago I made my way through Columbus,OH on the way home.  It was a slight detour and took me a few minutes out of my way but it was well worth it!  It was really nice to be able to find time to stop off at a few of our manufacturers and pick up some orders, which in turn saved us all shipping costs.

For the past month we have been selling the Emtec “animal” USB 2.0 4GB Flash Drives. They are extremely cute and perform quite well also.  We haven’t been selling many here on our Burrows Solutions site but they have been doing very well on Amazon.  I honestly don’t think we’ve made any money on them yet because my family is driving me nuts with them!!  I of course have a penguin and sea turtle, Amy has a few, Benny has two or three, and William has a few.

There is their sign, let’s drive up and see what is going on.

Nothing fancy really, just a standard office complex.  Keep in mind these were quick pictures with my cell phone.  Originally I did not have this visit planned so I didn’t have my nice camera or anything else with me.  It was a treat to meet a few of the guys there and they were nice enough to let me us their printer real quick so I could print off some paperwork for a work order.  I picked up about 30 more animals, talked to them for a few minutes, and then was on my way to finally get home after a long 3 days out of town.  I am really happy that we can find good manufacturers that we can deal with directly and it’s nice when they are close to us so we can pop in to visit.  Brent is busy on the phone most days and never really gets to meet his customers so it was a small treat for him too?  If you haven’t checked out their great drives on our site, please do so.  They are quality and the guys there are great.  I wonder if we could possibly stop by and visit anyone else next month when we take a vacation?  If we do, I’ll be sure to snap some pictures and tell you all the story.

I have touched on this before but want to talk about it a little more.  Having all this great stuff sitting on my shelves can be a bit difficult at times.  We have so much nice stuff, I always catch myself wanting to rip it open and use it for myself!!  We don’t mind buying nice things and are always careful in making sure that it is actually something that we need and will use on a regular basis.  Take for example the awesome Stahl Soldering Station that we sell.  We’ve had these for at least 9 months now, we’ve bought them on a few occasions and they have sold pretty well.  My soldering iron works perfectly fine and I could never really justify opening one of those up for our use.  Friday I was doing some repairs and was getting really frustrated with my current iron and figured it might be time to move on.  So I opened one up and fired it up.  Wow, those are some great soldering irons!!  I had an idea that they were quality and nice but never really “played” with one much.  The temperature adjustment was just awesome and it performed very well!  So if you haven’t picked one of these up yet, you really need to because our inventory is getting low.  They are a great low cost soldering station!

I started thinking about this more because I am preparing for a small business trip this week.  I will be in mid and southern Ohio late this week to do some training and I want to be sure I have everything covered.  It is paying well so I am very happy with the opportunity and glad that I have Amy to run the store for me for a few days while I’m gone.  Anyways, I was thinking of what all I need and thought about the great APC travel surge protector we have in stock.  So I opened one up just now and stuck it in my bag.  Last week we finally picked up some power supply testers and of course kept one for our internal use.  A few weeks ago we picked up some better quality Universal Laptop Chargers that are made by Targus.  I apologize that they are not listed on the site yet but they will be soon.  Those chargers are pretty nice though but I’ll get into that more later and I also had an awesome experience with their Partner and Support teams.  Their excellent support will be talked about more in an upcoming post here also.  So basically I just wanted to mention that for the most part, I behave myself.  I can control myself.  My goal here it to give you great deals on your computer needs, not to give myself a bunch of toys to play with!  If you had a store, do you think you could control yourself?  What do you think?  Thank you for reading and your comments are always welcome!

Opening a real store finally has been the start of a great journey.  An opportunity for us to become bigger and better, jeez how many times have I said that now!  After working almost non-stop all of my adult life, for about 17 years, it is nice to work for myself now.  Luckily those 17 years were spent learning and experiencing many different things, all of it building up until we were finally ready.  There really haven’t been any big surprises so far but a few things haven’t worked out the way I wanted but we are ok.  I was really hoping that more customers would have found us by now but it has been enough to keep us busy.

The biggest difficulty we’ve seen so far and honestly have always seen has been money.  We have access to and see so many great deals that it actually drives me a little crazy.  We love having products on hand so we are prepared for all our customers (in store and online) so they can pick up what they need quickly and at a good price.  It drives me bonkers when we miss a deal but oh well, there is only so much we can do.

Another small problem I’m finding is my time management also.  Even though we haven’t had many customers so far I have been working about 70-80 hours a week and it still seems like there is never enough time.  I’ve been a bit disappointed in myself lately too because there have been so many different distractions and things that happen, I never seem to get things done when I need to.  I’ve dropped the ball on a few laptop and LCD repairs that have been shipped to us recently but in most cases the customer has been very forgiving.  We have prided ourselves on 1-2 day turnaround for the longest time and lately we haven’t been meeting that standard.  It is getting better though and we’ve been making sure to get these repairs done quickly now.  Thanks to a few new credit accounts we have been able to purchase more inventory of capacitors so we shouldn’t have customers waiting on us to get stock in.  Luckily they are pretty inexpensive (most of the time) so it doesn’t hurt us too much to have a decent inventory of them.  However laptop DC jacks still present a small challenge.  We have hundreds of dollars in DC jacks on hand and it always seems that ever other repair we need to order more.  It is so tough to figure out what we really need to order.  You of course get better deals when buying in quantity, but if it’s an 8 year old laptop then how many more are you honestly going to see??  Oh well, we can just guess and hope that we don’t have too much money tied up in that inventory.

To anyone that has recently had to wait too long for your repair, I thank you for your patience and guarantee you that it won’t happen again.  For anyone considering us for a repair, please be assured that we will take care of your repair in a timely manner.  Thank you for reading and have a great weekend!!

When a company estimates a date a product is supposed to arrive they generally “cover their ***.”  For example one company I do business with estimates that my payment should arrive in our bank within 3-5 days.  Yet, time and time again the money is always there the next day.  I figure that sometime in the near future I will desperately need the money on Monday and it won’t arrive until Tuesday or Wednesday but that is another story.

I mention this because we do the same here.  I sometimes worry that my estimate with a few extra days may deter possible orders but I want to make sure we hold up our end of the bargain.  Plus I think customers appreciate that more?  Perfect example is our order of Stahl Soldering Stations.  Our distributor had an ETA for them of today so I figured we would receive them by Friday.  So to cover us I had estimated that day of arrival.  To my surprise though I found that my distributor must have received them yesterday and shipped them out, so we are supposed to receive them today.  So we will have a very busy afternoon packing up all those orders and getting them shipped out before everyone closes for the day; USPS (5pm) UPS (6pm).

Another reason I wanted to talk about this is the recent orders we’ve received.  When I personally order something, I want it asap.  That helps drive us to ship so quickly and if you see our reviews on Reseller Ratings, you’ll see that we’ve made a lot of people happy with our fast shipping.  In the past I haven’t wanted to list items on the site until we actually have it on hand.  However over the past few months we’ve been listing items before we receive them and the experience for me has made me proud.  Our current APC Promotion is doing OK, but what made me proud is that several people placed ordered before we received our shipment.  The same has happened with the Stahl Soldering Stations and actually I’m a bit surprised that they have sold so well!  So I am really proud that all of these people trust us enough and have the patience to wait a few days or a week until we receive our shipment.  We continue to grow and become bigger and better.  Some new and exciting news will be coming soon so keep your eyes peeled for some great news.  Thank you for taking the time to read all of this and we look forward to shipping you an order in the future.