As I wind into the twelvth month of my business venture, the brain and the computer are busy crunching numbers. I've got a lot to crunch. Look at this boat from every angle and find out if it really holds water. Is it a viable and vivarant business? Yes. In spades. But like a fine instrument, it needs to be tuned. I've got the data in front of me. Start drawing lots of squiggly lines and find out where it's either too sharp or too flat. Start separating the tax records into their own pile. I'll need them soon enough. Yeah, I can wow the board with impressive sales growth, but I still have to make a decision every month whether to use profits to pay the mortgage or throw it back into growing the inventory and pay the mortgage out of pocket. It didn't grow fast enough to do both.

The solution is to match the inventory to immediate customer needs or better respond to them. I can't carry bhadras and bass clarinets because they'll sit on the shelf for years, but I still get requests for them, while the designer trumpets collect dust. I'd need an employee in order to respond to special orders in a timely manner, so it's a catch-22. Need more sales to support the employee. Oh well. I'll just get back to crunching numbers and maybe some under utilized cash generator will show up.

I watch with detached amusement all the political in-fighting at AOL Time-Warner. AOL and Netscape with it are now just little fiefdoms for new execs to cut their teeth before getting into the real business - the media empire. The AOL cash cow is now just that. All the top management tiers have been replaced with Time-Warner loyalists. The AOL weenies got the boot. It's actually an incredible story if you look back on the last five years or so. A little ISP grows up and consumes a multi-national media empire, and then promptly withers and dies, just like the other companies which it consumed, and in my case, Netscape before it with the 20 or so companies it swallowed. So many companies, so many ideas... all got gobbled up and the ideas thrown into some archive somewhere.