Work Musings
Work Related Insights
Gridley Fine Gold and Silver Jewelry 1977 - 1979
No Scale Selling?
Selling fine gold & silver by weight without a scale and guidelines for gold and silver jewelry buying. The most intriguing thing about this was the flash of the solution a 2 am that astonished me – mostly because it utilized a concept that I had never known before. The uniqueness of the idea and the fact that it involved mathematics, for which I am the weakest intellectually in, along with the sudden and complete flash of knowing both that it would work and the idea itself leads me to believe there is validity to the notion written about in Napoleon Hill’s book, Think and Grow Rich. The idea that knowledge ‘floats in the ethers’ ready and waiting for someone to tap into a higher intelligence
Gold and silver were fluctuating rapidly thanks to the Hunt Brothers (Texas, I recall) cornering the market on silver by taking delivery and hoarding to drive the price up. Gold went up like crazy too, to keep pace relative to and ahead of silver. The problem then became that when we went to replace the jewelry, the price had gone up even higher than we sold it for. We decide to sell the jewelry by weight so we could hedge our profits if gold took a serious jump up. We needed to or we would soon be priced out of the market because we couldn’t replace our inventory with ever increasing wholesale prices.
My problem was that using a scale to sell 14k gold jewelry and sterling silver based on weight was cumbersome.
I wrestled with the idea until late at night and then like a flash of sudden illumination, I had it! In playing with the ratio of cost of goods purchased and cost of goods sold, I happened on the formula that would allow us to sell our items by the gold price of the day without using a scale. We were selling keystone, that is to say, we sold jewelry at a 100% profit. Most jewelry was being sold at that time at just about 400% markup with variations on stones and sterling silver which was often 600% in retail outlets. We could confidently say we were selling our jewelry at about half retail and did even better on special orders and custom work.
Consequently, we would buy an item – like a charm for $10 and sell it for $20. If the gold price of the day we bought it was $170, then that charm would have a “Magic Number” [so named by my mother Marilyn when I explained it to her] that could be multiplied by the gold price of the day when we sold it so we could (hopefully within a day or two) go back downtown to LA’s wholesale jewelry mart to replace the inventory.
If we bought an item like the charm above at $10 to sell for $20 when the gold price was $170 then the Magic Number would be 1177. $20 divided by the gold price of the day: $170 would give the decimal 0.117647 which we would round to .1177 . Each item would then have a Magic Number that would always remain the same so repricing became unnecessary. If gold went to $250 by the time we sold the charm, we could then sell it for ($250 X .1177) $29.43 and we should only have to pay $14.71 or half that downtown the next day. If gold dropped to 202 we could quickly determine the price to be $23.78.
By using the Magic Numbers with our wholesale suppliers we were able to keep from overpaying for our jewelry as some of the wholesalers tended to jack the price up whenever there was a large precious metal market upsurge. We could then weed out the hysteria pricers and also determine the wholesalers who were honest and fair. In one flash of insight, the problems of pricing to stay in business, wholesale controls, tagging and pricing in a fluid selling situation, selling by weight without a scale, and simplifying a pricing system with rapid price-fluctuating items were solved.
Teen Auto Club Driving School 1977-1991
Call Back System (Circa 1974)
Situation: Teen Auto Club Driving School was getting calls from teens interested in Driver Training from the Yellow Pages and from referrals of other satisfied students. At the time, it was just my dad’s part-time business which he used to supplement his teaching salary. Offered a partnership if I would join him, I set about to learn to teach people how to drive and the day after my 18th birthday, got licensed as a driving instructor. I would handle the calls and book first my dad’s lessons and I would handle the overflow. I moved into the office and handled all the office needs as well as teaching lessons. I soon noticed that we were getting several calls a day but some would call back and some wouldn’t and I reasoned that they would get their licenses through some company – so why not ours -- and so I began tracking them. They would call in and I would get information on what they needed and sent them information. In a few days, I would call them back and asked if they received the information and then struck up a conversation to determine when they would be interested in starting.
Some had to get their permits first, others had family issues, some had health issues but I realized that they were going to get their licenses eventually either through us or someone else, so I set up a follow-up system that track every call making notes on each subsequent call-back and then putting their record [a 4X6 card] with all their information and record of conversation in the future calls box which was organized by 1-31 and month dividers. If they went with another school, I’d try to find out why – price – reputation – what was the reason? Then I could set about fixing that and becoming competitive. If they went with us, we would follow up after to make sure they were doing okay. Often they would refer their friends. I used to get whole blocks of students because of referrals. It was very gratifying to be so well liked and trusted.
If I was to call back in 3 days because the student was going to take the permit test, I would call back and ask how he or she did. If the student was successful I would be happy for him or her and if not, then I would be encouraging offering practice tests and emotional support. In this way, I could treat people in a concerned and caring and helpful manner and gained a tremendous number of students this way.
I remember one student who broke his leg so he couldn’t sign up. I asked him how long he’d have to have the cast on. He told me it would be 6 weeks. Using my callback system, I contacted him at the end of the six weeks and asked him if he’d gotten his cast off yet. Of course he signed up and we were able to give him the finest skills available. He was surprised and pleased that someone remembered him and told me all about it. The business was kept personal and about making friends even as we grew to tens of thousands of students. We cared about our students and gave them the best training we could deliver because our motivation included producing safe and courteous drivers as an end result.
Due to the implementation of the Call-Back System, one of the finest driving schools in California went from a one-car one instructor unknown driving school with a terrific program to a 10 car 15 driver top California Driving School with an ever improving system for teaching students driving life skills that could keep them safe throughout their lives after 2 years.
Not being offered a partnership at that time, I left. The call-back system continued to be used and was tremendously improved by Josephine Vadetsky, later Jo Terrusa when she married my dad. With the promise of eventual ownership and partnership with my father, I returned after 8 years in the world to find the company had grown to 15 cars by 1981 and had good leadership and an ever improving business system. I added what expertise I could to the company for 10 more years and we grew to the top school by reputation in the state with classrooms from Camarillo to San Diego and over 20 cars and 50 instructors.
Unfortunately during the late ’80 and early ‘90’s the DMV which was the oversight licensing organization was unable or unwilling to stop the wholesale selling of certificates of driver education and training. Students and their parents faced with the choice of attending or not attending classes for a whole week or 5 Saturdays for Driver Ed and 3 Two-hour Lessons behind the wheel -- by law a student needed a minimum of 6 hours of Driver Training and 50 hours of Driver Education. This we offered with no shortcuts or shortened time because we were a legitimate and honorable school charged with our own mission to prepare teenage drivers to be safe and build skills that would serve them throughout their driving careers.
Other schools gained grass-roots popularity by offering the immediate certification without providing any services at all capitalizing on the teenage fervor to drive without having to attend classes. This is akin to getting grades without taking the class – in school this is terrible – on the road this is deadly. This certificate buying was apparently being justified by ignorant parents and students who believed that all they needed was to learn how to brake, gas and steer and study for a DMV quiz.
Otherwise intelligent parents rationalized that they could teach them how to drive since they needed to practice with them anyway. In effect, the certificate selling schools made tons of money selling certificates and the fact that they didn’t provide much of the services they were required by law to give meant that their profits went through the roof. If you don’t have to provide service you could make a ton of money for two pieces of paper.
This was highly illegal as it was not in the best interest of the student or the other drivers on the road, Teen Auto Club lost business as it seemed only the well informed parents insisted that their children get the proper training.
After numerous attempts to get the DMV to do their job and close these schools without success, we discovered that the only way for us to compete with the crooks in the industry was to do what they did. We wouldn’t do it. This was unacceptable so after 22 years, we closed the business.
The Call-Back System was responsible for growing the business but it would not have survived long if we didn’t have strong, moral and ethical leadership in a company offering top quality service and training designed to benefit our student for life. Leadership that, I am proud to say, came from my father, Sal Terrusa. We always gave more than was paid for in our services and this helped us attract and keep top instructors who understood and embraced our mission. I hope some of them are still out there making a difference for their students.
I am somewhat distressed to see drivers who clearly got their driving skills in some video game. Discourteous driving, tailgating, not using signals, snaking lights all existed before, but they have become mainstream in the video games and some drivers don’t seem to be able to tell the difference between antisocial driving games and the real thing which requires practical adherence to the rules of courteous cooperation and civil laws. Without a beacon of integrity like Teen Auto Club in the driving school industry, I fear we will see decay in the driving habits of subsequent generations to the level that the driving death toll will be embraced as an acceptable form of population control.
I have made the core of the Teen Auto Club Driving School’s Success System available to drivers and driving schools world-wide: The 13 most dangerous traffic situations and how to avoid them – a system that could eliminate well over 90% of all accidents that could happen to you if properly learned and practiced.
We are closed. A great number of fine families came through our doors over the years but there were not enough intelligent families to keep us open. This information – The 13 Most Dangerous Traffic Situations and How to Avoid Them is crucial to driving excellence.
XBrain
A Single Device for School or Work
X-Brain or The Book. Or Personal Companion [PeCo PerCom PersComp]
or the Life Book It really needs a name of it’s own like a personal book: a Pook or an All Life Allife or Brainiac or and I like this best so far: the X-Brain stands for External Brain – something I’ve accused lazy minded people of using all the time anyway: You can’t figure it out or think it through? Then ask someone who knows – or copy from someone who knows. Using someone else’s’ brain is what I call external brain usage.
Idea (3-2006) An electronic book that contains all the individual’s information but also doubles as a host for any book made for electronic media. Put in a memory chip containing a current best-seller and swap it out for your current text book. Open the book and a menu of options shows: Along with the schedules and assignments, appointments, to do’s and tasks would be books which, when selected, would open to the ‘page’ you last read. You could make notes and highlight text on each page and add supplementary notes as needed. You could add questions and make suggestions. It could be your diary of work with an automated feature to track your time. Text size, color, even Braille technology along with audio options for those who have trouble reading visually. The Book would also be able to view instructional video or full length movies by downloading from the internet or transferred by any number of methods – memory chip, infrared, download, memory module, USB drive, etc.
Teachers could send via infrared or other technology current assignments for the class and receive assignments due in the same manner. Each Book would hold ever increasing memory modules so that all the books needed for a specific period of time – such as in school – all the current text books would be carried in one simple book.
All work – business or homework could be written or spoken into the same book and securely stored until such time as the work could be transferred to the teacher or supervisor or others at the time determined by the author of the work. Every individual in the civilized world would have such a Book to use for communication, education, entertainment, creativity, work production, organization and purposes yet to be devised. It could be your own personal meeting room where members of your team scattered around the world can join a private meeting with video feeds from all units if needed. It would be unparalleled as a video phone and entertainment device which could be connected to any number of configurations in the home or office to take the Book as a brain and dock it into the family TV Entertainment Center or office docking station. Each affected industry will benefit by having a new and predictable outlet for their products, presentations, and services. As they embrace the coming of this extremely useful technology.
The book would become so useful that it would be an all-in-one solution as it would be a phone and fax and internet connection and organizer and so it would need to be secured and keyed to the individual so that, in the interest of privacy, only the owner could disseminate materials. Levels of protection or encryption would be built in so that office work product could be accessed by the supervisor should the employee be discharged or incapacitated, but other items would be protected except with prior authorization. Some of the Book features would not need the Book to be present: Work product could be sent or stored on the Internet as it is submitted and could be used for Identification when traveling because it would be usable only by the person who owns it. If one is sold, all information is transferred to a secure loading station – on the Internet or other media and data is securely erased so that a new user can imprint his or her own information on the Book.
Physically, the book would be a lightweight companion whose materials would be of the highest quality practical material so that it would last for many years. I expect that, like computers, the earlier versions of the Book would become obsolete and replaced by newer and more capable versions. If high quality materials are used however, the obsolete books would last longer than their current ‘life’ in advanced civilizations and so could be collected and distributed to countries whose citizens cannot afford modern technology but would benefit by using and learning about this new Book so that they will not be left behind this technical revolution. You can open it – even have a leather or other material binding if you should so desire – it would be considered retro.
My idea is that through fiber optics, the book would take on the image of the book that you are reading. Of course the owner’s name would show making social contact easier but optional. Driver’s license information available to legal authorities. Other uses of course would be to use the outside cover for an ever-changing advertising medium – perhaps geared to the interests of the book owner. For example, all stuff that a 10 year old would want would find it’s way onto the cover via scrolling advertising much like pop-up ads and the reason to allow advertisers to buy ads is that it would help pay for the books themselves. In return they get extremely well-targeted advertising.
Book Generations:
The book would start out like an empty book with books you can plug into it.
The next iteration would be a book with a PDA and Phone function
The next generation would be adding the other functionality features described above.