WHAT IS A “STAR PARTY”?

You may be wondering just exactly what a “star party” is, especially if you have never been to one. Think of a star party as you would any other party, except that instead of music, dancing, games or food being the focus, the focus (pun intended) is on the sky overhead. Amateur astronomers bring their telescopes and show the public the wonders of the night sky. People are free to mill about and take a peek at the sky through any of a number of telescopes that their owners will have trained on various night sky delights. As they take in the views at the eyepieces, the telescope owners will explain to them what they are seeing and how to get the most out of their view. (There is definitely a technique to seeing faint and ancient light in finely-figured glass!)

GOOD COMRADES

A great star party needs great comrades, and I was blessed this year to share the North Rim with some of Arizona’s finest amateur astronomers. Every year, the Grand Canyon Star Party accommodates guests at both sides of the Canyon—the South Rim and the North Rim. The Tucson Amateur Astronomers Association covers the South Rim while the Saguaro Astronomy Club (or SAC, my club) takes care of the North Rim. (This way, both teams have about the same amount of drive time—roughly 7 hours!)

Steve Dodder (of SAC) coordinates the North Rim events.  This is his third year of doing this and he did a superb job this year of assembling a team of knowledgeable and talkative astronomers to entertain guests at the Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim.

The Three Amigos (Ray, Harshaw, Spencer) at Cape Royal (photo: Spencer)

There was a sizeable contingent from SAC, including myself and my two friends, Jimmy Ray and Darrell Spencer. (The three of us combined to rent a cabin at the Lodge rather than camp out in the campground a mile and a half north of the Lodge.) Besides Steve Dodder, there was also Lynn Blackburn, Chris Hanrahan, and Al Steiwing. In addition to these, Tom and Jennifer Polakis helped out a few nights at the Kaibab Lodge, a private facility off National Park land about 20 miles north of the Lodge. There were also another eight or so astronomers from all over the United States, and since I’ll forget some of their names, I just won’t list them by name.

PETS AT THE CABIN

I’ll get to a description of the nightly festivities in a moment, but first, I have to tell you about three furry friends we made at our cabin. One was a chipmunk we named Roscoe. He was a brave little rascal, coming right up to our door step as if he knew we were safe and had food. We gave him none as we did not want to train him to be a welfare case. Several times he tried to get into the cabin while we were there, and each time a flick of the foot or a growl would scare him off.

Then there was Pepe, a brown field mouse. Darrell had his food stored in a cardboard box (Jimmy and I both used sealed plastic containers). We came back to the cabin one day after a day trip in the area and Darrell opened his food box to make a sandwich when Pepe bolted out and scampered away. Darrell almost ruined his shorts, and we laughed so hard, we almost passed out at the high altitude (8255 feet). Pepe had managed to chew through a bag of bagels Darrell had, so Darrell had to toss the bagels. Pepe did not seem to bother us the rest of the week (Darrell figured out a way to store his food in a more mouse-proof way) and we thought we were Pepe-proof. But as we were leaving on Friday, Darrell found more mouse droppings in the bottom of his box, so Pepe must have found a new way to play the role of the 45% of Americans who are on the federal dole.

A Kaibab Squirrel

The third critter of interest was a Kaibab squirrel. These amazing creatures grow only on the Kaibab Plateau in northern Arizona and resemble a cross between a skunk (without the odor) and a squirrel.

(Arizona is a remarkable state. Our geography has created several distinct eco-systems, each isolated from the others by deserts, or canyons, or rivers. So whatever life develops in that eco-system tends to specialize in the environment and can be found nowhere else in Arizona—or the US, for that matter.)

AN ARSENAL OF TELESCOPES

Each day, we kept informal logs of how many people we think looked through our telescopes. (A few actually had manual counters with buttons they could click for each guest.) I estimated about 750 people looked through my 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope (SCT) that week. Jimmy, with another 11-inch SCT, logged perhaps 850 to 900, but he was just off the Lodge’s door to the veranda, so everyone who came out of the lodge stopped at his scope first. Poor guy—he gave the same eyepiece speech dozens and dozens of times each night, eventually sounding like a tour guide! He did yeoman’s work!

The Lodge Veranda (photo: Spencer)

Darrell set his 8-inch SCT up next to me and did a brisk business as well, doing SAC proud and providing great entertainment for the guests.

On my other side was Lynn Blackburn with his 8-inch SCT. Between Darrell and Jimmy was Chris with his 80mm Vixen refractor, a high-quality scope with rich wide fields of view perfect for views of the Milky Way from the North Rim. Al was in the second row with his 14-inch Dobsonian and 8-inch SCT, while Steve anchored the back corner with his monster 20-inch Dob. Next to Steve was another 20-inch Dob, and Jim Mahon, a good friend from Los Angeles, had his 14-inch Dob in the other rear corner. Two astronomers from NASA set up a 16-inch DOB, and a couple from Washington set up a 10-inch Dob. There were a couple of other scopes that week, but they were not there the entire week and I did not get a chance to meet their owners.

GUESTS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD

Most of the people at the Lodge were, of course, Americans on vacation, most of who did not know they were staying at the Lodge during the annual Star Party, but were thrilled when they learned of it. But there were also many guests from all over the world (Portugal, Scandinavia, Germany, Russia, France, England, China, Japan, Brazil, Mexico, Australia and Canada). Many of them planned their trips to coincide with the Star Party—it has become that well-known.

On more than one occasion I had to rely on a husband or wife (or parent) to translate for their family members while they were at the eyepiece so they would know how to find and observe the faint light we were collecting for them.

AWESOME SKIES

Having grown up in the Midwest, I was used to murky skies with high levels of light pollution. As a result, I was not accustomed to crisp views of truly dark skies and how the Milky Way could dominate such a sky. The Grand Canyon gave me a whole new perspective on great skies!

8255 feet above sea level combined with the dry desert air of Arizona can make for a window on space that is about as clear as it gets on this planet. When the Milky Way majestically rose around 10:30 pm, at first most people thought clouds were moving in. They were shocked when they learned that the glow as from billions of stars in the plane of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

Milky Way Rising (photo: Spencer)

Not only were the vast star clouds of the Milky Way plainly visible—so were the things that are normally not visible, the so-called “dark nebulae”. (Astronomer E. E. Barnard discovered over a hundred of these clouds of pre-star gas and dust, clouds that have not yet condensed to form stars, and which do not have any nearby stars to light them up like the “bright nebulae.”) The dark nebulae are hard to see because of the light that is NOT there, but they were easy at the Canyon, tracing out gossamer threads of darkness that laced their way through the star clouds of Sagittarius, Scutum, Aquila and Cygnus.

There was also a wonderful slate of “deep sky” objects (things beyond our Solar System) that are normally considered to be binocular or telescope objects that were also visible to the unaided dark-adapted eye—M13 (the great Globular Cluster in Hercules), M17 (the Lagoon Nebula in Sagittarius), M7 (a wonderful open star cluster in Scorpius), even NGC 7000 (the North America Nebula in northern Cygnus).

Needless to say, with such great sky conditions, the views in the telescopes were stunning.

Saturn was always a big hit, mostly because it was the first thing visible each night, and also because people always seem to be amazed that it actually has rings (as if astronomers projected a slide of Saturn on their lenses to fool people!). Each night, hundreds of times you would hear, “Wow!” or “I can’t believe it’s real!” as people got their first-time ever view of Saturn through a telescope.

One night, we had really good air, so I ran the magnification up to 800x (a very high power for a small telescope), while most of the other astronomers were using 100x to 200x. As a result, Saturn filled about 1/3 of my eyepiece’s field of view and people who dropped by for a peak often gasped or shrieked at the sight! The rings were clearly visible as was the shadow of the rings cast by the Sun on the cloud tops of the gas giant. Also several moons were visible, as well as the shadow of Saturn on the rings BEHIND the planet. It moments of good seeing, the subtle cloud bands could be seen.

One little girl—her name was Katie—was really impressed by the view. She was about 8 years old and had a raspy voice, but when she put her eye on my 800x Saturn, she actually yelled, “Wow, this is the best Saturn EVER!” She then went around the crowded veranda telling everyone who would listen that my scope had the “best view of Saturn EVER” and so I had a line that lasted nearly 2 hours! When Katie’s parents made it to the scope, they agreed that Katie’s assessment was correct.

I was also amazed at how well people who were not trained as astronomers picked up the subtleties of deep sky observing. On several occasions, I showed people either M51 or Centaurus A. M51 is a beautiful spiral galaxy, seen face-on. It is nicknamed “the Whirlpool” (for obvious reasons when you see it). It is almost a twin of the Milky Way, in both size and approximate shape. Centaurus A is a large elliptical (ball-shaped) galaxy low in the summer sky. The neat thing about both of these is that they are undergoing collisions with other galaxies. As I coached people how to observe, they all could see the nuclei of M51 and the interloper that crashed into it about 100 million years ago. Others could clearly see the dark lane of dust that bisected Centaurus A as the giant elliptical (with a trillion suns, five times the size of the Milky Way) was colliding with a smaller flat spiral galaxy (like ours). I pointed out that in both cases, the larger galaxy always wins, and that in M51’s case, the smaller fuzzy patch was a wrecked galaxy, giant M51 having stolen most of its stars when it passed through M51. Likewise, Centaurus A has stolen most of the stars of the poor spiral that wandered too close and will end up a super-galaxy while the shattered hulk of a once great spiral limps away into the darkness of space.

I pointed out to my guests that such a scene had been enacted in the Milky Way several times as our galaxy has gobbled up many interlopers over the billions of years, and that in fact, we were going to be gobbled up in turn by a bigger fish, as M31 (the Andromeda galaxy) is approaching us and will collide with us in about 5 billion years. The outcome will be a super-galaxy and no more Milky Way.

People usually asked at this point if the stars ever hit each other in such a collision, but I pointed out that compared to galaxies, stars are very small and the odds of two stars hitting each other in a galactic collision are about as high as two flies running into each other in the Grand Canyon. Such is the size of space!

A DAY FOR LOOKING BACK DOWN BELOW

As people came to realize, our telescopes are actually time machines, letting them see events that took place millions of years ago. There is something magical about having your retina stimulated by light that began its journey when the dinosaurs were still alive, to realize that this very night, your body is having a chemical reaction with something that began its journey when T Rex was walking the plains of South Dakota!

But we took one day out to look back in time below our feet. We toured the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and were treated to vistas and implications of time that were equally mind-numbing.

Cape Royal and Angel's Window (photo: Spencer)

We went to Cape Royal and then to Point Imperial, two stunning view points on the North Rim. From there, we could see incredible rock sculpture, the rocks being carved by the great flood that created the Grand Canyon some six million years ago. We watched in fascination as the shadows of the clouds played across the dappled rock layers, creating a never-ending kaleidoscope of color and contrast.

Jimmy Tempts Fate (photo: Spencer)

There is just something about geology on this scale that numbs the mind and expands one’s awareness of our place in the scheme of things. That, combined with the panorama over our heads at night, always leads me to a special place of reverence and contemplation.

ARE THERE OTHERS OUT THERE?

Several times, people would ask me during a quiet moment on the veranda if I thought there was other life out there. I replied that as a scientist, I had to say, “No,” because we have found no evidence for it yet. We may someday, but right now, the facts don’t support any form of extra-terrestrial life. In fact, I added, we may be it. Puzzled, many people asked why. When I explained how unlikely it is for random chemical reactions to produce even an amino acid (let alone the thousands of proteins amino acids combine to form, many of which are absolutely vital for life), let alone for that life to survive and give rise to intelligent creatures capable of pondering their place in the universe, I said it is not likely that there is any other intelligent life, and maybe not even any other life of any kind. (Time may prove me wrong as some day a NASA probe finds evidence of microbial life somewhere, but I am not betting the farm we’ll find anything.)

Combine that with the highly unlikely chain of events that had to occur to lead to our existence—a universe that is governed by laws that work in such a way that three generations of stars had to form and rip themselves apart in death to create the heavy elements needed for life… that we live on a planet that is just the right size to support life… that the earth has a molten core that leads to active plate tectonics, which creates conditions perfect for the development of life… that we have a moon that is far oversized for its job (compared to the other planets), and that it formed by an impact from a Mars-sized body about 4 billion years ago in a collision that was at exactly the right angle to form the moon and not destroy the young earth in the process… that we live on the back edge of a quiet spiral arm in a huge galaxy, safe from the deadly radiation that rules the galactic center… that we live in a place where we can look out across the terrible reaches of space and see not only stars, but other galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and clusters of clusters of galaxies… The odds of all this being “just so” by pure random events has been estimated at less than 1 in 10 to the 10,000^th power!

It all blows my mind!

Then I think about the Father who created it some 13.7 billion years ago and wonder in silence at the vast intelligence and wisdom he has to create a world like ours and us in it. There is far too much balance, symmetry, and beauty in this world to be the results of pure random chance. I for one argue that an intelligence beyond anything we can imagine dreamed all of this up, and gave it to us as a gift of the highest love.

That is why I so love this amazing hobby!

Thank you, LORD God, for such an awesome world in which you display your wisdom and love!

Front Cover

Back Cover

I hope to have a “galley proof” in my hands by the end of the week. After that, a few final edits and we begin printing. I hope to be able to announce the book for sale by the end of this month, so keep watching here for the announcement.

The book will be for sale on my web site and you’ll have the option to get an autographed copy if you prefer.

Stay tuned!

It is in honor of my friend, David F., who just passed away after a grueling battle with brain cancer.

David was a fellow astronomer and in my short time of knowing him (only about 15 years), he became one of my closest friends.  He was always known among our astronomy club (The Saguaro Astronomy Club) as a man of

David at our Sentinel (AZ) star party, 1998

teddy-bear friendliness, youthful enthusiasm, and almost religious devotion to observing the handwork of his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. He began experiencing minor problems with coordination as early as last October, but the doctors did not think it was anything that warranted alarm.  About Christmas time, he began to experience bad headaches, which the doctors thought might be related to his blood pressure and diabetes.  In January, he began to experience moments of confusion. (It was at this time that he called me one day with tears in his voice– he had just accepted the job as our club’s treasurer– and he told me that he just could not focus on the job, that the doctors were trying to adjust his insulin dosage, and that he wanted to get help with the treasurer’s job. I told him his health mattered more than anything, so we’d find another member to handle the club’s finances.   In fact, two members have stepped forward to co-shoulder that job for now.)

Finally, one day last month, he exhibited very odd behavior before going to his job at a local junior college (where he taught astronomy), and later that morning, his wife got a call from the school that he was in great pain.  She came to get him and took him right to the emergency room where the doctors performed an MRI and discovered two brain tumors.  The one on the front left of his brain was the size of a golf ball and came out cleanly.  But the one at the back of his brain was the size of an orange and had grown tentacles into the surrounding brain tissue.  It was removed, but found to be a stage 4 carcinoma.  This was a death sentence, as the tumor had already seeded itself into the rest of David’s brain, like a creeping weed.

David never regained consciousness.  I visited him twice in the hospital and spoke to him both times, hoping that he could hear me.  He did not make any responses, but one never knows!

M104, David's Favorite Galaxy

The night he passed from us, I was assisting another club member with a star party for his Sunday School class.  A third member was helping us, and at the end of the night, we all decided to aim our telescopes at the galaxy M104, David’s favorite deep-sky object.  We agreed to look at it simultaneously as an act of honor to our friend and hoping that somehow, this act would be significant. Little did we know that at the very hour he was drawing his last breaths.

I pray for strength and grace for his wife and children, and want them to know how much our club in general and I in particular loved and respected David.  He was a class act and will always hold a special place in our hearts.

In am an ardent admirer of the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler.  In the 1890’s, he wrote his Second Symphony, known as “The Resurrection Symphony.” It has 5 movements (an unusual thing for a symphony, but the norm for Mahler). The 4th and 5th movements contain vocal music– the 4th, an alto solo, and the 5th, an awesome and grand chorale finale. I end this blog by quoting the libretto.  If you can find a copy of the 2nd Symphony, you may want to listen to these two movements and you’ll understand why I think Mahler’s symphony is a fitting tribute to my friend:

[Alto]

O red rose!
Man lies in greatest need!
Man lies in greatest pain!
How I would rather be in heaven.
There came I upon a broad path
when came a little angel and wanted to turn me away.
Ah no! I would not let myself be turned away!
I am from God and shall return to God!
The loving God will grant me a little light,
Which will light me into that eternal blissful life!

[Choir]
Rise again, yes, rise again,
Will you My dust,
After a brief rest!
Immortal life! Immortal life
Will He who called you, give you.

To bloom again were you sown!
The Lord of the harvest goes
And gathers in, like sheaves,
Us together, who died.

O believe, my heart, O believe:
Nothing to you is lost!
Yours is, yes yours, is what you desired
Yours, what you have loved
What you have fought for!

O believe,
You were not born for nothing!
Have not for nothing, lived, suffered!

What was created
Must perish,
What perished, rise again!
Cease from trembling!
Prepare yourself to live!

O Pain, You piercer of all things,
From you, I have been wrested!
O Death, You masterer of all things,
Now, are you conquered!

With wings which I have won for myself,
In love’s fierce striving,
I shall soar upwards
To the light which no eye has penetrated!
Its wing that I won is expanded,
and I fly up.
Die shall I in order to live.
Rise again, yes, rise again,
Will you, my heart, in an instant!

Rest well, noble friend.  Oh, the views you now have of M104, and the other incredible displays of God’s handwork! Know that the day will come when we will join you and together, we will re-celebrate our great star parties, this time from observing fields of unbelievable splendor and grandeur!

I  have been busy completing the details on my first book (click here) and have been working like a one-armed paper hanger in a hurricane behind the scenes on my second book– a book I am tentatively calling “The HVAC Territory Manager’s Field Guide.”  (My editor may suggest a better title, so for now, this is a working title.)

I finalized the paperwork on the contracts over the weekend, and we should be in print in about 90 days +/-, so expect it to be ready in mid-June of this year!  (Just in time to help rescue your career from a worsening economic nightmare…)

This is going to be a huge book– the manuscript is 564 pages long!  It will also have a CD-ROM as part of the project, and there will also be a Sales Manager’s Guide (on CD-ROM only) for sales managers who wish to take their sales teams through the process.

Here are the chapter titles for now…

CHAPTER 1: WHAT IS YOUR JOB?

Overview of what it means to be a territory manager

CHAPTER 2: MAXIMIZING YOUR INCOME

How to do the things best for which you get paid

CHAPTER 3: WHAT IS YOUR TIME WORTH?

Determining how much you are worth per hour; and then, why would you do stupid stuff with your time when you are worth that much?

CHAPTER 4: RULES OF THUMB

Quick ways to determine key averages and performance indicators for dealers

CHAPTER 5: TERRITORY ANALYSIS

Simple ways to analyze a territory and build a sales plan

CHAPTER 6: TERRITORY FORECASTING AND PLANNING

How to forecast sales, expenses, margins and profit and then build a plan to achieve these

CHAPTER 7: THE TYPES OF CONTRACTOR

Commercial, residential, service, low-temp, and so on– how are these business segments handled differently by successful contractors?

CHAPTER 8: THE LIFE CYCLES OF A CONTRACTOR

How contractors change as they go through their life cycles and what you can do to be of the greatest value to them at every step along the way

CHAPTER 9: HEY, IT’S A BUSINESS!

Understanding the fundamentals a dealer has to know– how to run a successful business (no TM is born with this knowledge)

CHAPTER 10: FINDING NEW DEALERS

How to recruit to find diamonds and rubies, not lumps of coal

CHAPTER 11: HELPING CONTRACTORS DEVELOP AND MATURE

How you can bring what a dealer needs to his party to help him grow and earn his business

CHAPTER 12: ACCOUNT SEGMENTATION

How to organize your accounts along logical lines and differentiate your sales calls with those classifications

CHAPTER 13: KEEPING SCORE

Tracking the numbers; what and how, and why!

CHAPTER 14: GOT DEALERS?

How many dealers do you need to achieve a given sales goal (such as share of market or dollar level)?

CHAPTER 15: BASIC CONTRACTING FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT

The HVAC business by the numbers; what every dealer needs to know (and most TMs don’t)

CHAPTER 16: KNOWING YOUR STUFF

Being the right balance of subject-matter expert and resource versus being useless to your dealers

CHAPTER 17: INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

How you pass information up and down the channel to help all concerned; how to leverage technology to get more done face to face

CHAPTER 18: DOING THE GRIND

Seeing to the details of the job– finishing the paperwork, dotting the i’s, crossing the t’s

CHAPTER 19: SALES REVIEWS

How to survive a sales review!

CHAPTER 20: MARKETING AND ADVERTISING

Can you speak audience ratings?  Column-inches?  Gross rating points?  You need to if you are going to be of great marketing help to your dealers

CHAPTER 21: SALES SKILLS—THEY AIN’T WHAT THEY USED TO BE!

The old days of feature/benefit selling and trial closes belong in museums; learn the new low-key way to persuade dealers to take action.

CHAPTER 22: DEEP COMMUNICATION, THE KEY TO AMAZING SALES

Reading people beneath the surface and unpacking their decision processes so you can influence their decisions

CHAPTER 23: DISPUTE RESOLUTION

Problems are going to arise; how do you handle them effectively?

CHAPTER 24: DOING A GOOD SHOW

Showmanship and presentation finesse– it’s what separates the territory makers from the order takers

CHAPTER 25: PRUDENT ETIQUETTE

Know when to walk away and when to dig in and get involved

CHAPTER 26: EXPENSE REPORTS AND THEIR ROI

The ever-present pain in the neck of expense reports and why you need to track them carefully

CHAPTER 27: TIME MANAGEMENT

The first myth of time management is that it exists.  Learn how to manage yourself to be effective in the now.

CHAPTER 28: GETTING YOUR SALES MANAGER TO WORK FOR YOU

Your boss should also be your greatest coach and helper; use him (or her) to make big gains

CHAPTER 29: MENTORING THE NEXT WAVE

Doing what you can to prepare the next generation (or, if you ARE the next generation, doing what you can to shorten your learning curve)

CHAPTER 30: IS SALES MANAGEMENT IN YOUR FUTURE?

So you think you want that corner office and those nice little perks?

The book will retail for $79.95, but once the publisher has the order form up on his web site, I’ll be offering pre-printing deals for volume orders.  Stay tuned for that in a future blog post!

]]> http://www.lodestarconsultinginc.com/one-step-closer-to-the-tm-field-guide/feed/ 4 http://www.lodestarconsultinginc.com/my-new-book-is-available/ http://www.lodestarconsultinginc.com/my-new-book-is-available/#comments Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:06:01 +0000 Richard Harshaw http://www.lodestarconsultinginc.com/?p=690 This will come as perhaps a surprise to some followers of this blog, but I have a new book out on building a glorious church.  It is published by InterMedia Group and can be ordered by following this link.

It reflects my passion as a Christian to see the church assume her rightful and glorious place as the steward of the Kingdom of God and how we as Christians can cooperate with God in that awesome project.  (If there is one thing that melts my butter more than the HVAC business, it is my life in God and its expression in my local church, Church for the Nations.)

If you’d like an autographed copy, use the “Contact Us” link on this web page to send me an email requesting an autographed copy.  You’ll need to include your shipping address.  I will invoice you via PayPal so you can pay by credit card, and I’ll have to add shipping and handling.  The book lists for $22.99.  Arizona residents will have to also ante up the sales tax to help our beleagured governor and state treasury, making the total for Arizona residents $25.13, plus shipping.  Those who don’t live in Arizona would only need to pay the $22.99 plus shipping.  (Shipping can run from $8 to $25, depending on how you want it shipped.  Please indicate how you want me to ship your book– U S Postal Service, UPS ground or UPS 3-day.)

ALSO OF EXCITING NEWS is the fact that my book on Territory Management (mentioned in an earlier blog post) is 99% done and should be at the presses by May or June.  When it is ready, I’ll be sure to let you know!

Childs writes this chilling line in the introduction:  “There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst or drowning.”

Most people get the first option; few understand the second.  But the fact is, every year, Arizona has brief but furious rains and the washes (gulleys), which are normally dry, quickly fill with raging flood water and can become lethal to anyone unlucky enough to be in a wash when a flash flood comes galloping down upon them like a thundering herd of wild stallions.  (Another of his books, The Desert Cries, recounts a summer in Arizona where over 20 people died in such flash floods, including a hiking party caught by a killer flash flood in the awesome Antelope Canyon, in our state’s northeast corner).

But what many people don’t realize is that the desert holds a surprising amount of drinkable water (even though you may need to filter it and treat it with purification tablets) if you know where to look for it.

An even casual scan of some of the topographic maps of Arizona show numerous “tanks”– like White Tank (for which the White Tank Mountains west of Phoenix are named), Red Tank, Smith Tank, and so on.  When I first moved to Arizona and started poring over the topo maps to find benchmarks to recover and possible sites from which to do astronomy, I thought these referred to water tanks for cattle.  But there were so man of them!  And frankly, there aren’t that many cattle on some of these quadrangles!

Then I learned in Childs’ book that a tank is the ugly English word for a beautiful Spanish word, tinaja, which is probably better translated as “basin”, like a large ceramic shaving basin.  Tinajas are depressions in rock that are carved out by fast-moving water that cascades down from the mountains during our furious thunderburst storms.  They take thousands of years to form.  They are shaped sort of like a gravy boat, being steep at the input end, and tapering to shallower and shallower water as the water approaches the exit point, where it cascades down the mountainside to the next tinaja.  (This shape keeps them purged of sediment, so that a free-fowing tinaja will be full of fresh rain water after a rain and little, if any, sand and silt.  Ranchers, thinking it would be good to build up the walls of tinajas to trap more water find that they then lose their hydrodynamics and silt in quickly, becoming useless.  It seems like every time people try to improve on God’s designs, they mess up things!)

Here is the point: people are often found dead in the desert because they run out of water and instinctively head for the low ground, thinking that this is where water goes in a rain storm (it does), but not realizing that the desert sand in such lowland is like a sponge!  Often, a flash flood will disgorge a wall of water, silt and mud out of a canyon in a 20-foot tall freight train (carrying trees, cacti, and house-sized boulders), and within a mile or two of hitting the shallow, open washes, be totally absorbed by the thirsty desert.  Too often, people trying to enter the United States illegally from Mexico are found dead in these areas, their plastic milk cartons of water having gone dry two days earlier.

Our economy is something like the desert right now– unpredictable, and dangerous.  Yet almost every HVAC salesman is looking for water in the wrong places– the low ground, the easy places to walk to.  Yet, they will find no water there, only death.

If an HVAC sales person wants to survive this desert, he must climb into the mountains, seeking the trapped and life-giving rain water that can only be obtained by herculean effort, climbing higher and higher.  There are no easy solutions.

In this economic desert, where will you seek your water?  In the easy places (where many will die this year), or will you climb the hard mountains and work hard and find the life-giving water in the heights?

Think about it…

I was watching a report last week on The Fox News Channel (yeah, I’m one of THEM) about the bowling industry in America– or rather, what USED to be the bowling industry in America. At one time, almost all of the bowling equipment sold in the US (balls, pins, machines, shoes, uniforms, bowling alley furniture, etc.) was made by either AMF or Brunswick.  But when NAFTA was passed in the 1990’s, the factories went to Mexico to take advantage of the cheap labor market.  Why?

Because American bowlers were demanding cheaper and cheaper gear, and it could not be produced in the States with our higher standard of living (and attending wage base).  So the Mexicans celebrated as they inherited hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of factories, development, and expertise.  There were fiestas down south as plants closed up north, and several small US towns hat depended on AMF and Brunswick were decimated.

But now the Mexicans are singing the “Bye Bye Birdie” song because the manufacturers (still mostly owned by Americans) are moving their plants to someplace where the labor is even cheaper– yes, China.

I find it ironic as it can be that our friends to the south, who celebrated their big wins with NAFTA-inspired migrators like AMF and Brunswick are now in the same state of shock our workers were 16 years ago.

Why?  For the same damned reason as it was in the early 90’s– American bowlers want their goodies STILL cheaper.

I’m going to reap a lot of flak for what I am about to say, so before you hit me with your flame thrower, read the entire

Off-shore call center?

blog carefully.  I am a patron of Walmart.  I like Walmart.  They have been generally good for America, especially in the smaller towns were they set up shop.  But there is a downside to Walmart– and it is what I call the “Walmart mentality.”  It’s the mindset that cheaper is ALWAYS better, that somehow it has become an American right to have the best of all goods at the cheapest possible price.

The result?  Someone off shore makes a knock-off of  a high-quality US product (or, sometimes, a poor-quality one, as Detroit knows only too well) and sells it for 25% less than the US product, usually at Walmart (and similar discount chains– it’s not just a Walmart issue).  So what does the American manufacturer do?  Try to match prices and keep the quality up (sometimes an impossible task), so they either have to beat the bat snot out of their employees for concessions to stay “competitive” or they must move out of the country to where labor is cheap.

It began 50 years ago.  First shoes went offsore.  I grew up in a small town in the Midwest that had, among other things, a shoe factory, owned by the Brown Shoe Company.  I worked there one summer while in high school. At one time, it employed about 400 people, making shoes that Americans built, Americans wanted, and Americans wore.  Then someone– I don’t know who– maybe the Italians, maybe the Fillipinos, or Indonesians– began making equally good shoes (or better ones) at a lower price.  Brown tried to keep up by cost cutting, but it was not enough, and eventually Brown outsourced all its shoes to off-shore factories.  Today, Brown is still in business as an American company, but the shoes are not built here any more.  Because Americans wanted it cheaper, faster, cheaper.

Then television sets left the American landscape.  Do you remember when RCA, Magnavox, Philco, Emerson, Motorola and others were built here?  I do.  They are all built in Asia now.  And they are darned good sets too!  But again, we clamored for cheaper, faster, cheaper.  And we got it.

Steel mills followed soon thereafter.  Then cameras.  Then computers.

We demanded it cheaper, and we got it.   But at what price?

What does the future hold for us?  I have heard it said that information technology is the new steel mill for America, that we have a huge lead in that area and that we can leverage that for wealth.

But not for long.  We’ll lose that lead to cheaper, faster, cheaper soon too.

Gee whiz, I sound pessimistic on this, don’t I?  But have I missed it?  Am I wrong?

The English art critic and essayist John Ruskin said it so well over 100 years ago:

“It’s unwise to pay too much. But it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.

The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot. It can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better.

There is hardly anything in the world that someone can’t make a little worse and sell a little cheaper and people who consider price alone are this man’s lawful prey.”

Can product quality and superior salesmanship save the United States from its plunge down the world’s economic toilet? I hope so!  I’m betting on it!  But we have our work cut out for us!

I then decided it was time to go ahead and get a new laptop as well, so I got the latest Lenovo Think Pad.  The thing is so fast and powerful, it can launch and guide a rocket to Alpha Centauri!

Both have Windows 7 (in my opinion, a VAST improvement over XP and a huge improvement over Vista).  However, there is no upgrade path from XP to W7 (there is from Vista to W7), so I had to install all my software again, etc, and that took a few weeks.

Anyway, I’m back for the year, and ready to go.

So here’s my first blog post for 2010.  You ready for this?

Normal???

When you were a little kid, did you ever wonder if you were “normal” compared to your classmates?  Maybe some were taller than you—a lot taller.  Or smarter. Or better looking.  Or better athletes. Most kids, at some point, wonder how they compare to everyone else. It’s normal.

We never outgrow that tendency.  Even as adults, we wonder, “Am I normal?”  We look at others, the houses they have, the cars they drive, their appearance, and we wonder, “Is that the way it is ‘spozed to be?  ‘Cause I ain’t that!”

Every five years, the US Department of Commerce, in cooperation with the Census Bureau, undertakes a massive study of business in the United States.  They look at dozens of industries, including Plumbing and HVAC. The last survey was done in 2007, and the data just recently became available. I will report to you what the data showed for the average US HVAC contractor in 2007 (adjusting for inflation since 2007) so you can see if you are “normal.”  (By the way, being normal is not necessarily a good thing.  How much would people jeer at you if you put on the side of your trucks, “ABC Heating— Man, Are We NORMAL!”

The average HVAC shop had 10.64 employees in 2007.  (I wonder what 0.64 people looks like?)  Half the shops are bigger than that, half are smaller.  (And we are talking about roughly 100,000 shops.)  A breakdown by size shows this:  1-4 people (58,039 shops); 5-9 people (19,295 shops); 10-19 people (12,242 shops); 20-49 people (7,638 shops), and over 50 people, all the rest (3,255 shops).  There are a ton of small shops out there, and only a relative handful of “mega houses.”  If we graphed this data, we’d have a sharply dropping line that ran from a high on the left to a low on the right.

Yet the sales data is completely different. If we look at the total sales racked up by each size bucket, we find that the curve would have a hump in it, like a camel’s back.  The 1-4 man shops account for only 10.5% of the sales (but are 58% of the shops), while the 4-9 man shops account for 13%; the 10-19 man shops rack up 17% of the sales; the 20-49 man shops tally 23% of the sales; and the rest of the family brings in 36.5%.

The average payroll per shop was $495,293 (which amounts to about $46,550 per employee).  Of that, 69% went to direct labor.  Fringe benefits came to $148,158 per shop (30% of pay).

The average shop in 2007 had $1,737,275 in sales.  This amounts to a throughput average of $163,247, a marked increase over 2002 (which one would expect considering the 2006 change to 13 SEER as the minimum efficiency standard).  Equipment and material ate up 37% of this and subs about 9%.  The average shop spent $60,488 per employee at the supply house to get equipment and materials.

Gross margins averaged around 46% in 2007.  (So if the average dealer wanted to make 12% net profit, he’d need to divide costs by 0.42.)

Sadly, the average shop only spent about $11,105 on advertising (less than 1% of sales!).  The data did not indicate whether this was before or after co-op dollars, so I’ll assume it was net (after co-op).  Even at that, there is not enough going towards advertising to sustain the average shop’s hunger for leads.

I don’t have the net profit figure for 2007, as the way the Government reported the data made it very murky to extract, but I would imagine that if it followed historical trends, it was below 3%.

Now here is what worries me— this data was all compiled before the Great Recession of 2008-2010 hit.  I suspect the numbers have gone south across the board, but we won’t know for a while.

Make sure your tray tables are in their upright and locked positions, that your seat backs are fully up, and that you have securely fastened your seatbelts. I think 2010 may be a very turbulent year for the economy in general and our trade in particular.

One thing is certain— the definition of “normal” is going to change, and those who are below normal will probably become fossils in the bedrock of our industry.  Does that make you sit up and start to want to manage your operation better?

Mr. Drucker’s writings are not normally common fodder for most small business people because he wrote primarily about large business (the Fortune 500 and similar classes of company) and most small business owners don’t see themselves in the same light as the corporate behemoths Drucker spoke of.  But Drucker actually had a lot to say that is good for small business too!

Drucker had the ability to write about complex and abstract concepts, but also to put real-life feet under them and make them pragmatic (a real rarity, if you spend much time reading the HBR or other similar publications).

Drucker wrote in the 1980’s, for instance, that allowing executive pay to get out of control (where the focus was on taking excessive risks to reap possibly huge short-term gains) would lead to economic disaster for those companies who practiced it.  (AIG, Fanny-Mae, Freddy-Mac, Leiman Brothers, Goldman Sachs… the list goes on and sounds very familiar, does it not?) That is because Drucker believed in principle-based management, something from which American big business today seems to have drifted.

He bemoaned Detroit’s reluctance to change and adapt to the new world realities and since his death, we have seen the near-collapse of GM and Chrysler.

He warned of emerging industrial competition from the third world, and no one listened, until now America lags behind China and other industrial comers in annual output.   (When was the last time you bought a TV set made in America?  Or shoes, or even a shirt? Oh, they can still be found, but it is getting harder and harder, isn’t it?)

More Drucker-isms for small business: “If I put a person into a job and he or she does not perform, I have made a mistake.  I have no business blaming that person.”  (“How to Make People Decisions”, HBR July/August 1985).

Or this: “Asking, ‘What is right for the enterprise?’ does not guarantee that the right decision will be made.  Even the most brilliant executive is human and thus prone to mistakes and prejudices.  But failure to ask the question virtually guarantees the wrong decision.”  (“What Makes an Effective Executive”, HBR June 2004).

To quote Rosabeth Kanter (“What Would Peter Say?”, HBR November 2009), “Drucker was not a revolutionary.  He merely asked that we constantly challenge assumptions.  He preached steadiness and long-term vision.  He recognized that leading in turbulent times requires foresight about where things are heading as well as judgment about what not to change.  He would remind us that the best preparation for a smooth journey, even as we steer across troubled waters or leap across chasms, is a clear sense of meaningful purpose.”

There is rising optimism that 2010 will be a year of moderate recovery.

I don’t share that optimism.  Recent articles in the Wall Street Journal, for instance (lead stories of Tuesday, Nov. 19, 2009 and Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2009) combined with the fact that in 2010 the five-year ARMS that were sold in 2005 go up (and these are for the most part jumbo loans) has me thinking that the last half of 2010 will be as bad as the end of 2008, maybe even worse.

I hope like heck I am wrong, but my reading of the tea leaves does not give me much confidence in our ability to climb out of this government-made hole.  Now more than ever we need the wisdom of dead sages like Drucker and Deming.

Get their books while you still have time and read them, then act on what you learn. It just might save your business in 2010!

In the 1990’s, I became interested in a concept called open-book management and had the opportunity to attend a seminar at a company that was a pioneer in this field, Springfield Remanufacturing Company, located in Springfield, Mo. The plant manager and CEO, Jack Stack, had written a book called The Great Game of Business which described their approach to beefing up the financial literacy of their employees, and I decided I had to see if this stuff was really true or just hype.

Springfield Remanufacturing (you can check their web site at http://www.srcreman.com/homepage.htm) is in the business of remanufacturing diesel engines for large trucks and tractors and do about the best job of it of anyone in the country. I don’t know if they still offer the monthly “open book management” seminars like they did in the 1990’s, so if you want to check them out, you may have to call them.

My experience over the 3-day session I attended was amazing. Here you have a manufacturing plant that employs several hundred people, most with only a high-school education, and everyone on the shop floor knows the key numbers every week! Each week, the department managers gather at the central offices for a half-day recap of the business for the past week. Each manager divulges to the others the numbers his department reached (not just production numbers, either— we’re talking financial numbers as well!). If he or she is not on track to meet the mutually-agreed upon business plan the team put together at the end of the prior year, they had better have an explanation, because any person in the meeting (not just Mr. Stack) can grill a speaker if the data is not on track. (And man, did they!) After the meeting, the department managers take the results of the meeting back to their departments and hold mini-meetings where they share not only the department’s financial performance but the company’s as a whole.

So why do they do this? To build a more profitable company. As Jack Stack writes in his book, “When you appeal to the highest level of thinking you get the highest level of performance.” Gee, such a nice, warm and fuzzy platitude, the kind of thing Pollyanna might say. But is it real?

My experience blew me away! As part of the Great Game of Business Seminar, you are allowed to tour the factory floor and talk to any employee you wish. Any question is legitimate. I paused at one station where a 30-something woman was putting the final touches on diesel fuel injector nozzles. A small part, a pittance as they might say in England. I asked her, “What do these injectors cost?  Do you know?” (Thinking I had her!)

She walked over to a shelf near her station and pulled down a 3-inch thick 3-ring binder. She turned to me as she opened it and said, “What week?”

Surprised, I said, “Oh, any week. You pick.”

Then she said, “Do you want to know our cost, the cost to the reseller, the cost to the end user, or the cost of the raw materials? Shall I include burden too?”  I just shook my head and chuckled, “Never mind! You know this like the back of your hand, don’t you?” She replied proudly with a smile, “That’s my job, mister!”

Major decisions about capital outlays are not made by senior management— they are approved by management, but not planned or made by management. That is the job of the floor people.

Case in point: employees are taught to watch the balance sheet like a CSI studies a crime scene. One year, the peoplein the shipping department came to management with a request for a new super-duty fork lift truck—a beast that could handle engines that weighed thousands of pounds. They said the ones they had were not big enough to handle the largest engines by themselves—that they had to rig two trucks together to move the biggest stuff in a ballet that almost defied choreography. Management replied, “Have you run the numbers yet?” They replied, “No.” Management said, “Well, do so and bring us back what you find out.”

A week later, the shipping department team came back to the weekly management meeting with the forecasts, projections, and what-if scenarios all worked out. It turned out that the move would put a serious ding in plant equity for a while (and since the employees get a piece of the equity pie, that is serious business!), but in the long haul, it would increase productivity more than enough to eventually offset the investment. As is the case with large outlays like this, the matter was brought to the factory floor for a vote. Employees looked the situation over carefully, weighing their loss of equity (and hit to their year-end bonus checks)  for the long-term gains in productivity— and voted to buy the new truck. Senior management then authorized the purchase.

Now compare that to the typical HVAC company, where often not even the owners know what is going on financially. How often do they get their financial statements? And when? If they don’t get them monthly and by the tenth of the month prox, they are in a fog. And they need to get three reports (income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement). And they need to go over them line by line with a CSI’s UV light and look for any clues of fiscal anemia and take countermeasures.

And let alone the crazy and burn-me-at-the-stake thought of the employees knowing the monthly numbers! Heresy!

Yet let me ask you a question: if you are an owner of an HVAC business, you probably have found out by now that these things are a whole lot more trouble than raising babies. Babies just wake you up at night sometimes and crap on you sometimes, but a business can keep you up all night and bury you in crap. You probably did not bargain for all this, did you? So what if your former employer (you know, the one who inspired you to go off on your own and start your own gig) had shared with you and the rest of his employees the monthly numbers and taught you what they meant? What if they had showed you how your contribution (or lack of it) impacted the numbers (and not just the bottom line— the equity too)?

If you had seen those numbers then, would you have started your own shop later? Maybe. Maybe not.

I’m not saying you need to hand out your normal income statement at a monthly meeting— you can condense it down a lot (instead of showing  how much Mary at the front desk makes, just lump her compensation in with all the other office staff and show a line “Office Wages”) and make it simpler to read. But you do need to share the numbers with your people and explain to them what they mean and how their activities affect those numbers.

“But what if we’re having a slump?” someone will say.  “Won’t that scare them?”

Maybe. And perhaps it should. But it should also show them that slumps are normal and that by working together, they can be survived. And they can learn that their daily activities really do impact the company’s finances, maybe more than they thought.

And if you give them a steak in the outcome (I used “steak” on purpose rather than the normal “stake”), they might amaze you!

I will be adding a new departmentalized income statement worksheet tool to The Shop area soon. It includes an option to print a simple 1-page income statement for use in employee meetings. Check in later to see if it is posted yet and get a copy for your shop.

NOTE: For other great insights on open-book management, read John Case’s two books, Open-Book Management and The Open-Book Experience. To that list I would add Charles Coonradt’s The Game of Work.