Me on the Veranda (photo by William Dellinges)

This event was coordinated by Steve Dodder, a member of my club, The Saguaro Astronomy Club. Steve did an awesome job of coordinating the event. We had large crowds, racked up thousands of views for our guests, and had a wonderful time together as we shared with the common people in the streets views of their universe they did not even know existed.  The only blemish on the week was that Steve’s request for good weather was turned down. We had clear skies only two nights, and partly cloudy or cloudy skies the rest of the time. Still, the people who joined us in the Lodge auditorium for a 30-minute slide show, or on the veranda as it got dark, were enthusiastic, grateful to us for sharing our hobby with them, and full of good questions.

A week-long event like the GCSP-NR is a grueling event for an amateur astronomer, but the payoff comes to us in the expressions of wonder our guests make while at the eyepiece. I was paid richly by hundreds of expressions like “Wow!” and “Oh my God!” and “Holy cow!”  I even had one little Italian girl (maybe 8 years old) who spoke no English peer into my telescope to view M13 . She gasped, turned to her papa, and squealed, “Oh, la bella stellae!”

M13 (Hubble Space Telescope)

In the daytime, we slept late then arose to do what one can do at the Grand Canyon North Rim. I spent many hours sitting on the Lodge veranda gaping at the awesome spectacle of the Canyon.

Looking SE from the Lodge

The Lodge is perched on a narrow isthmus of rock. Just a few feet from the veranda walls the land drops nearly 2000 feet straight down into the Roaring Springs Canyon to the East and the Transept Canyon to the West. I often felt my palms sweat and my stomach tighten as I looked down into these gorges worn by 6 million years of rain, wind and snow.  Others in our group hiked parts of the Canyon; some took day trips to nearby places like Point Imperial and Cape Royal. Others shot hundreds of pictures with their digital cameras, others napped, and still others lolled around in the Lodge.

The group in our campground was a great bunch of people! We had about 10 campsites reserved for us and most of us were from the Saguaro club. But we also had great help from people from Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Tucson and points even farther away. One afternoon, two of the couples on our row of sites spontaneously set up lunches for us.  We began with a Mexican buffet at one site, and walked 150 feet to the other site for awesome beef satay with peanut sauce and cucumber relish. (The lady who prepared this was the wife of a SAC member and is from Indonesia.)

Next year’s GCSP-NR is scheduled for June 5-12, 2010. If you are planning a vacation around that time of  year, consider the star party as a great addition to what will be a wonder-filled vacation. But act fast-the Lodge books up almost a year in advance, and the Kaibab Lodge, a few miles north, likewise books up quickly. If you are a camper, the camp ground should have availability up to a few months before the event.

Hope to see you there next year! I can’t wait! Just 346 more days (as of today)!

For a PDF copy of Phoenix’s East Valley Astronomy Club’s Newsletter, which contains a great article on this star party, click here.

What would happen if you told your customers that if they needed a new system, they could name their price and you would build a system for them that met their budget? Do you think they would find that worth looking into? Better yet, would it tick off your competitors? (A good sign you are doing something right!)

So imagine a conversation that goes like this: “Mr. and Mrs. Jones, as our service tech Garfunkel told you this morning, your compressor is kaput. We can fix it for you, as Garfunkel informed you, but the cost was a shock, which is why you agreed to his suggestion that I see you about some options. You will probably need to replace your unit. But here’s my dilemma-as a dealer for (fill in the brand name here), I have literally hundreds of ways to solve your needs, with prices that range all over the place. I want to be sure I design the best solution I can for you that meets your budget. So I am going to do something you may have never heard of- I am going to let you set the investment you are willing to make, and I will then build a solution that meets your budget. Sound fair to you?”

I advise you to bring smelling salts with you on sales calls-your customers are likely to faint at this statement.

But why is it worded the way it is- “hundreds of possible solutions”? Because that is literally true (unless your brand only has one model of condensing unit, coil and furnace).

Consider why. This graphic shows what many would consider to be a broad product line (any major manufacturer has this) for condensing units or heat pumps.  Similar charts can be made for furnaces (5 options), air treatment (5 options), energy recovery  (2 options), air flow (5 options), and warranties (5 options). These few options give rise to 5 x 5 x 5 x 2 x 5 x 5 or 6,250 combinations! If your product line is broader (and some are), the count can reach into the tens of thousands; and if we add cased and uncased coils in various airflow options, and small package units, you could easily have 50,000 ways to solve a homeowner’s comfort needs. Did you know that?

So perhaps I get out of my briefcase a piece of foam core board 14″ x 18″ or so in size. On the board, I have drawn two axes at right angles to each other-the horizontal axis is labeled “Efficiency” (or whatever term you think is best) and the vertical one “Investment”. I then open a small bag of different colored foam core pieces like the blocks on the diagram, each labeled, such as “14 SEER CU” [blue blocks] or “10 year P&L Wty” [yellow blocks]. I show the customer how I can mix and match the colored blocks to build various solutions, and that each combination has a different height- a different investment to obtain.

I then say to the customer, “I have shown you only four or five ways to do your job. I could actually lay out for you 6,250 total combinations, but neither of us has time for all of that, do we? So perhaps now you can understand my dilemma- and help me help you. As you can see, on the center of this board is a blank with a dollar sign on it. Can you help me by telling me the how much you think you’d like to invest on this project? I will then design the solution that best meets your needs for the money you wish to invest.”

The customers clearly grasp now the relationship between efficiency and depth of offer versus how it affects the investment required.  Suppose the couple looks at each other, and the woman says, “$3,000.”

I say, “Great! $3,000 is the goal then.” And I write that on the foam core board with one of those erasable markers (so I can use the board on other sales calls).

Next, I begin my discovery process, asking them about their concerns, needs, issues and so on so I can get a good idea what it will take to make them happy with the job.

But suppose they looked at each other and then turned back to me and he said,  “Man, we have no idea! We’ve never done this before!”

I then say, “Well that’s ok. Most folks have not! Let’s see if we can work together then to figure out what makes sense to you. Let’s just suppose, for instance, that a solid solution to your needs would run, oh, I don’t know… let’s say, $10,000. How does that strike you?”

She with defiance in her voice: “No way! That’s totally out of line!”

I reply, “I understand. I did not say, though, that the job would take that much. I just used that number as a starting point for our budget process. Let’s aim lower. Would $7,500 be too high?”

She may come back with, “Yes!”

I can then say, “But we are getting closer?”

She: “Yes.”

Me: “Ok, now that you have the idea, how about naming a figure you are comfortable with?”

Once a budget has been set, and I know their issues, I tell them I’ll need a few minutes to design a solution and that they are free to return to what they were doing before I arrived, and that I will let them know when I am finished. (And if they want to stay at the table and watch me work, that’s also ok.)

I then try to compile a solution that meets as many of their needs as possible for the budget they have set.

When it comes time to present the solution, I may want to draw up several alternatives. One or two may be a little higher than their budget, but solve a lot more of their issues.

And in some cases, the budget will be set so low that you cannot meet their needs with anything in your product line. What do you do then?

You call them back to the dining room table after trying to find an economic solution and say something like this: “I have tried every combination I can think of to address all the needs you said you wanted to address, and I cannot get there for $3,000. Here is what I CAN do for that money…” and then present my $3,000 solution, pointing out that they will have higher operating costs than they wanted, or more noise issues, or that the hot/cold back bedroom cannot be addressed with this budget, and so on. I can then say, “Now if you’d consider moving the budget up to $3,500, I can solve that bedroom problem and go with the programmable thermostat; and for $4,000, we can meet every need to specified-lower operating costs, lower noise, stronger warranty. The works. Do you want to talk it over?”

Notice how this approach differs from the normal sales approach of breaking the ice, asking a lot of questions, designing one (or three) solutions, presenting them, and then tossing out the price (like a live hand grenade) and getting their reaction- which will range anywhere from delight to outrage. What a time to see if we just blew the sale-at the end, when it is too late to fix it!

I often have contractors tell me in sales workshops that you cannot ask a customer what their budget is. That is like a longhorn steer- a point here, a point there, and a lot of bull in between.

I usually ask those same protestors, “Have you ever bought a house?” (Or a car.) They invariably have. I then ask, “What was one of the first questions the realtor (or car salesman) asked you?  How much did  you want to spend!  And  you gave them your budget. And you didn’t even know the person!”

There is a right way to ask for the budget and a wrong way. I think this method may have merit as being a no-pressure right way to advance the sale to a successful conclusion for all the parties concerned!

Think about it.

Two-thirds of the American automotive industry is now in Chapter 11 reorganization. (One of those cases is, as of this afternoon, pending a decision by the Supreme Court on whether or not shafting the protected creditors is legal. I hope the courts rule in favor of the bond-holders and not cave in to the pressure by the Administration to pay back their union cronies with a fat slice of GM and Chrysler. To approve the Administration’s plan would be to forever smash the rules of bankruptcy that have protected American investors to this point. If the Court upholds the Administration, watch American investing dry up as venture capitalists find safer places to invest-and that includes foreign investors.) Meanwhile, the President promises to “save or create” (how can you ever tell the difference in these two????) 600,000 jobs over the next 100 days-at a time when the economy is losing 600,000 jobs A WEEK. Big deal.

The sea has changed, and probably changed forever.

The old, comfortable ways of doing business are under assault and many cherished tactics and theories are being dissolved like a penny in strong nitric acid.

In my next blog post, I will outline a sales approach that may work in this new economy (inspired by the insurance company commercial that talks about naming your price). But before I get to that, I must spend some time in this post laying a foundation.

There was a time-only recently-when Americans had more money than sense and confidence to go with it. In such an environment, “selling up” is not difficult if you use the right approach. When there are more dollars than a basic solution requires, selling better stuff is easy.

But when an economy gets shaken so badly that its participants lose faith in the system and start to fear for their very survival, all the old rules of conduct come crashing down.

Here in Phoenix, a number of high-end restaurants have closed (but very few “low end” places) as folks have to rethink whether or not to spend $200 on dinner for a family of four or spend $60 somewhere not as upscale but with good food. We are starting to see the closure of upper end shops and boutiques, and services that once thrived in an affluent economy but now are starving for business as people decide to walk their own dogs or cut their own grass.

And in this climate, it no longer makes sense to focus exclusively on a selling-up approach. There will be some customers who will still want the very best and can still afford it. When that is the case, you should use a sell-up approach. But when most families now are having to make meager savings stretch as far as possible, when the old A/C unit dies, a new 18 SEER Rolls Royce type unit may not be a practical solution.

An ethical approach to sales means that we offer our customers the best solutions we can to fit THEIR constraints. While we can easily justify in our own minds (as contractors) the replacement of an old unit with the best we can install, to the customer, that decision is not so easy. If the customer really has an issue with spending $12,000 for a new system when a $4,000 system will work adequately, we must be very careful about pushing them beyond where their economic situation allows them to live comfortably. We might make a fast buck, but we may also drive one customer out of our economy as their savings evaporate and go dry before the economy rebounds (if it ever does) and they lose their home. Personally, I would not want that on my conscience.

The problem is, in most sales systems, we never try to determine what the customer thinks is a reasonable price for a system and so we spend a lot of time designing an elaborate solution and then announce the total investment required, and watch as the homeowners squirm and nervously smile, and promise to get back to us after they get two more bids. What they don’t have the cahoneys to say to us is that our price was not only higher than they expected-it was MUCH higher than they expected and clearly beyond what they felt they could invest at this time.

So we lose them to a “low-ball” scum-bag. But we didn’t have to. We could have figured out the dimensions of the sandbox up front and helped the customer get a superb solution within their budget. But we don’t get the dimensions of the sandbox.

In the next blog post, I’ll share an idea on how to do that and how to use it to close a sale in a shaky and competitive economy.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not knocking their products. I am sure the insurance offered by the folks who came up with the gecko (or the stack of money) and Flo have good insurance. I am just getting sick of their stupid ads.

But those ads do work, don’t they!  You know precisely which companies I am talking about, don’t you!

Then as I pondered the latest spiel by Flo, I got to thinking. Flo’s company is now offering customers the option to name their price and they then build a policy around that price.

Shazzam! What an idea. Let the customer name the price, then give the customer what his price will buy.  (There must be times, I assume, where the price a customer would name would not buy her enough coverage, so she may need to reset her price level to get the protection she wants- but once she is on their website, she probably ends up buying from them, doesn’t she?)

So that got me thinking.  What if we sold air conditioning that way?  Let the customer set their price up front and then showed them what we could build for that money?

How many times have you gone through an elaborate and intense sales process only to set your price and then be told by the customer, “Well, we need to get some more bids.” (This is a polite way of saying, “Hey, clown, you’re out of our price league!”) Or, “Let us think about it. We’ll call you back in a day or two.” (Which often turns into… like never.)

So I am going to put together what a “Name Your Price” sales call might be like and will post it here as soon as I get it done (hopefully by the middle of next week). Check back soon to see what I come up with!

The premise of the article was that the publishers solicited advice from various contractors (painters, plumbers, electricians, flooring specialists, cabinet makers, etc.) to help homeowners haggle with contractors so they can “cut costs, not corners.”

The first two “experts” advised customers to get multiple bids (at least three) so you’ll know the market price range for the job. And let them all know you’re getting three (or 10) bids, to keep them all honest.

First, what guarantee do you have if you get three bids that you’ll have anything even close to the “market price range for the job?” You’ll just have the range of the three people you talked to, and they may (or may not) be good contractors and therefore their bids may (or may not) reflect the “market price range for the job.”

One expert had some good advice-draw up your specs before getting bids and have the bidders bid on the same specs rather than let each contractor offer their own solution. (I must point out they were not saying the homeowner should design the job themselves, but merely specify things like color, tiles, hardware. To that I would add energy efficiency and sound ratings.) But then he advised homeowners to get itemized bids and compare the costs apples to apples. In other words, cherry pick the contractor!

Unless you are conversant with job bidding, how would you know that the red tiles quoted by flooring contractor A were an apples to apples equal of the red ones bid by contractor D? You wouldn’t know, so this is dumb advice too.

Two more experts suggested homeowners dangle incentives before their bidders. One suggested the homeowner should offer to pay the subs and suppliers directly (which lets the homeowner know your exact costs, doesn’t it?). Of course, implied in this is that you’re screwing the contractor out of his markup on materials and subs. Do that enough, Mr. Dealer, and you will become a bankruptcy statistic!

Another expert suggested you have the contractor lean on his subs for price concessions. That might work in a bazaar in Timbuktu. I don’t think it has much merit for America right now.

Another bit of advice said to play your hand and then shut up. For example, if the contractor says the job will take $9,000, come back with “My budget is $7,000,” and then clam up. The advice from this sage is “he who speaks first loses.”

Bull! The best way to sink that ship is wait a few seconds and then say, “Mr. Jones, my mother taught me when I was a lad that silence was consent. Was she telling me the truth?”

I think any contractor who puts a price on the table without first establishing the homeowner’s budget is a fool anyway and deserves to be handed the “silent treatment.”

And don’t tell me a contractor cannot get the customer to divulge his budget. I did it all the time. If he does a great job of establishing trust and rapport, it is just as easy to ask, “Have you set a budget for this project?” as to not ask and then guess and end up priced out of the ballpark. Most customers won’t have a budget, so you can work with them to set one.

It goes like this: “Well, can we work together for a minute to establish one? You see, I have literally thousands of combinations of units I can bring to this problem and the prices will vary a lot based on the combination. If I know what you are comfortable with, I have a better chance of finding a solution that will please you.” Most folks would be ok with that. Then, to set the budget, start off, “Let’s suppose we went top-grade all the way and the job came to $12,000. Would that be out of line?” The customer gasps, “Twelve thousand! Are you nuts?” You reply, “I am just looking for the ceiling. Obviously $12,000 is too much. Suppose the job came to $9,000. Would that be more acceptable?” And so on until the customer indicates the range you have found is workable. (A variant is to cite monthly payments instead of the lump sum.)

Now here’s the catch. What if their range is well below what you need to charge for the job? You then say, “There may be a problem. In my experience, solving the issues you want to address cannot be done for that low a number. Are you willing to give up some of your requirements for me to meet your budget, or do you want to reconsider your budget and meet all of your requirements?”

Perhaps the best advice of the column was the last one: “Choose the guy who’s best for the job and then talk budget.” I can work with that and create a great solution (most of the time) for the money the customer wants to spend.

In the months ahead, I will be placing some sales training materials in my web-site’s “Shop” that you may want to consider and purchase. Check back from time to time to see what new is on the shelf!

I AM GROWING WEARY OF THE “GO GREEN” MOVEMENT!

There. I said it. And I feel better for having said it.

But why did I say it? Because I have seen this sort of marketing fad before. I was a freshman in college when the first Earth Day took place (April 22, 1970) and I recall the silly hype about how we were killing the planet back then. Nothing has changed. We are still talking silly hype about how our chemicals, our buildings, our cars, are killing Mother Earth. (You want a shock? Google Isaac Asimov’s essay, “The Nightmare Life Without Fuel” and read it. Then note when it was written.)

I am an amateur astronomer. I run around with people who are astronomers and geologists. And contrary to what people with a doting press that fawns over every word they say would have us believe, the scientific community as a whole is NOT buying into global warming as a result of human activity. (The term is “anthropogenic.”)

Did  you know that about 70% of the thermometers that are used around the globe for reporting local temperatures (and hence “proving” global warming) are within a few feet of asphalt, concrete, or (heaven forbid!) building exhaust fans? The protocol for climatological measurement calls for such thermometers to be many feet from such sources of artificial heat (about 100 feet to be precise). When most of those thermometers are relocated to a spot that meets the protocol, they read about 2 to 3 degrees C lower than they did before. Yet, the global warming Chicken Littles tell us that the earth’s temperature has risen between 1 and 2 degrees C. If that is true, we may actually be seeing a global cooling cycle!

A colleague of mine is a geologist at Arizona State University and on NASA’s payroll as a planetary geologist. (His name is Paul Knauth. He has done major work on the Mars Lander projects, especially the Phoenix mission.) He has done calculations that show a strong correlation between an isotope of oxygen in a rock known as chert and global temperatures. His research suggests that we may be heading into a prolonged cold earth phase (the earth has had many such phases in its history). In fact, at one time, the entire planet was covered with thick ice (like the planet Hoth in the Star Wars series). It has also been hotter than today-a lot hotter.

The point is that the earth goes through climate changes fairly frequently (in terms of geological time). But we humans have been on this planet as a civilized species (and some would argue with that!) for only about 10,000 years-a mere snap of the fingers geologically. We just happened to come along at a warm phase in the planet’s history.

Another friend of mine, an astronomer at the Lunar and Planetary Lab at Arizona University, points out that our current warming trend began 10,000 years ago (about the time we came on the scene!) and that deep caves in Arizona are still warming inside from the last ice age cold snap.

Did you know that Mars is slowly warming right now too? Who is up there putting all that carbon into their atmosphere, wrecking their planet?

Hmm, the only thing I can think of that Mars and earth have in common is… the Sun. A major source of heat (or its lack, when it dims a bit, which it does from time to time-again, on those long geological time scales, not day to day).

One fellow who participates in an on-line forum I belong to blasted my ideas by saying that the Pacific Island nations are slowly submerging as the ice caps in Antarctica melt. He is wrong. Those islands are actually sinking. The Pacific has not risen appreciably.

People go ga-ga over hybrid vehicles. Have you ever studied the overall impact a hybrid has on the environment? If you look at the total cycle-from production, to distribution, to ownership, and recycling (or scrap)- what is called its “resource utilization factor” or RUF- hybrids are no better for the earth than internal combustion engines. They just make those who drive them feel better because they aren’t harming the earth with carbon dioxide emissions as much.

Hey, wake up. Your very presence on this planet has an impact on it. There is no getting around that. And as more and more of us live, we’re going to create more and more pollution.

But cause global warming? I don’t think so. Unless we can find a way to change the energy output of the Sun.

I am not against conservation or being wise with the use of our resources. I camp out often in Arizona’s deserts and forests for astronomy weekends and I am very careful to leave the environment just as I found it (or better, as I often pack other people’s trash out). I have an energy efficient heating and cooling system in my home. I drive energy-efficient vehicles. My home is full of CFL lighting (despite the fact that they will eventually end up putting mercury in our landfills). And I think everyone who is considerate of life (human or otherwise) will do likewise.

But enough of this “go green” rubbish! If you want to use bio fuels or environmentally friendly chemicals in your car or on your lawn, do so. But don’t think you are averting global warming by doing so.

And don’t pass laws that make us pay for carbon emissions so we’ll pollute less. If the government wants to benefit from global warming economically, it should tax the Sun.

For those who want to dig a little deeper, check out this web site (www.climate-skeptic.com) or this blog post (www.coyoteblog.com).

As he cheerfully did this, I struck up a conversation with the female barrista. She asked me if I wanted a cup to hold me over until I got home, and she had the most awesome smile as she said this! Her teeth glistened and her eyes twinkled joyously. I told her that I could wait until I got home, but thanked her anyway. Somehow, she caught a tiny non-verbal cue in my face and said, “Hmm, I just saw a moment of hesitation there. Did you know that when you buy two bags of coffee, you’re entitled to a free Tall?” That awesome smile again!

I chuckled and said, “Alright, give me a Tall decaf!” As she did, the Barrista grinding my coffee smiled and softly chuckled.

I told her that I teach sales and that her ability to pick up that little non-verbal was awesome!

If I were a contractor, I would have handed her my special contractor’s business card.  On the front would be my company name, logo, contact info, etc. but on the back is a simple statement: “I really am impressed with your sales skills. If ever you wish to change employers, please call me. I will always make room for talent like yours.”

The girl probably doesn’t know beans about air conditioning. She can be taught that.

But she has that special ability to read a customer that I find in only maybe 1 in 100 sales people today. She has a great future ahead of her!

Fiske's Awesome Telescope (Photo by Fiske Miles)

In astronomical parlance, we would say that the “seeing” in Arizona is moderate to poor most of the time, but the “transparency” is excellent. In the Midwest, the opposite is true-usually pretty good seeing and moderate transparency.) Fiske’s web site has a wonderful history of building his telescope. (To put things in perspective, if Fiske had built this scope 150 years ago, it would have been the largest telescope in the world.)

Fiske is a true “renaissance man”, a man of many talents, ranging from cabinet making to birding to astronomy to gourmet cooking. He has a voracious appetite for books and is one of the most intelligent and well-spoken people I know.

Fiske drove his motor home out from Kansas City and arrived in Cave Creek on the afternoon of March 24, a Wednesday. (He has put together a really great slide show of his trip at this URL:)

http://picasaweb.google.com/fmiles01/ArizonaAstronomyTrip#slideshow

I had already packed my Honda Element to the gills with my equipment (Celestron C-11 telescope and mount, sleeping gear, cooking equipment, food, water, etc.) and about 2:00 pm we began the drive west to one of Saguaro Astronomy Club’s (SAC) favorite winter/spring sites, “The Antennas.” This site is about 110 miles west of Phoenix off Interstate 10. We arrived well before sunset and had plenty of time to set up and then relax as we waited for the sky to darken.

This hour or so between sunset and darkness is one of my favorite times of day during an astronomy expedition to the desert. As I relax and let my thoughts settle and compose my spirit, I watch with fascination as the Belt of Venus makes its brief appearance. (The Belt of Venus is common in the desert, and  rare in the Midwest. Fiske had never seen it before and was amazed when I pointed it out to him. It is a rather thin band of purplish sky on the eastern horizon that appears for a few minutes after sunset. It is formed by the shadow of the earth extending through the upper atmosphere, so it is not visible for more than a few minutes.) The Belt of Venus is like distant herald trumpets announcing the beginning of a wonderful night of ancient photon-fall from the skies.

Wednesday night was a moderately good night for Arizona-it started out superbly clear, but by midnight, high thin haze began to rob us of the sky’s pristine sparkle and by 2:00 am, the sky was all but suffocated by the tiny ice crystals high in the sky. In the few hours we had of good seeing, I bagged a number of faint open clusters in Puppis and Canis Major while Fiske put his 22-inch Cyclops through its paces, gobbling up faint galaxies, dim nebulae, and other distant wonders of the universe.

Thursday was windy all day (so windy in fact that it almost blew Fiske’s telescope over!), and stayed windy until 10:00 pm that night. During the afternoon, a friend of mine from SAC joined us, Joe Goss. Joe uses a 14-inch Celestron (the big uncle of my scope). We were sitting in Joe’s RV chatting and waiting for the wind to die, which it did not do. So I went to bed. But about 10:00 I could hear Joe setting up his telescope and aligning it on the north celestial pole, when suddenly I heard him and Fiske say, “Hey, the wind has died!” And sure enough, as if someone had hit a switch, the wind was dead. I hopped out of bed and had the C-11 running 15 minutes later. It was a wonderful night of more faint clusters in the southern Winter Milky Way and a gaggle of galaxies in Draco and Gemini for me, and more of Fiske’s telescope gobbling up photons like a huge PacMan on a rampage. Joe was doing his usual thing– searching for LTG’s (little “tiny” galaxies-I can’t use the word he actually uses on a family friendly blog site!).

Our observing site (Photo by Fiske Miles)

On Friday morning, Fiske and I took a short hike around the area to enjoy the incredible beauty and richness of the desert plants in full bloom. The Sonoran Desert is unique in all the world for its moisture (6 to 8 inches a year of rain) and non-freeze climate, so plants thrive in this harsh world and compete fiercely for pollinators by offering up dazzling flowers to any bees in the area.

Friday was the best night of all, and we were joined by two more SACers-Chris Hanrahan and Darrell Spencer. Chris also brought a friend from work, a young man who had never done any stargazing before.

Five Friends United by Starlight: L to R, Steve Kennedy (maker of Fiske's mirror), Fiske, Chris, Joe, and me (Photo by Pat Goss)

Saturday started great, but ended up clouding up between 2:00 and 4:00 am.

We all got in some wonderful observing (Chris managed to bag about 40 galaxies with his 12-inch Dobsonian telescope), but that was really not what made this 4-day safari so fun for me.

What really melted my butter was the quiet industry with which each of us worked during the night. I have been a member of astronomy clubs where the star parties were noisy affairs with folks talking up a storm, laughing, eating and drinking, but not doing a whole lot of observing. But in Arizona, our group is seriously dedicated to collecting radiation that is as old as vertebrate life on earth. We all work on observing “projects” (like Chris’s pursuit of the Herschel 400 observing award, or my pursuit of trying to observe every known open cluster in the Milky Way, a project that is almost completed, or Joe’s pursuit of the LTGs-he has observed 800 galaxies just in the constellation Virgo-and Fiske’s unplanned but very intentional exploration of the sky using Sky Atlas 2000 or Uranometria to find juicy bits of star flesh to consume in his mega-light-eater, and Darrell’s boyish enthusiasm from seeing things he has never seen before and realizing just how far away some of that stuff is).

During our nightly work, we would occasionally call out to each other, “Hey, Fiske, what are you looking at now?” And the reply would come back, “Omega Centauri.” Wow! I have to see this in Fiske’s astronomical naval cannon, so I ask if I can sneak a peek. And like any good-hearted amateur astronomer, Fiske has as many of us as wish to take a look at this awesome globular cluster low on the southern horizon, a star ball of over a million suns blazing away from 18,300 light years away. The meager remains of a once proud galaxy that the Milky Way cannibalized billions of years ago, it is an awesome sight even in binoculars and appeared from The Antennas site as a naked eye glow as large as the full moon!

Or I would invite Darrell and the others over to see a particular tiny but rich open cluster in a dazzling star field, or Joe would let us munch on one of his LTG’s, or Chris would share views he was enjoying.  We never crowded in on each other, but always were polite with each other, seeking permission before copping a view through a friend’s finely-figured and expensive glass.

Often on our desert safaris, we take breaks around midnight to 1:00 am and sit around someone’s RV or campsite and drink coffee or cocoa and snack on food to keep us energized and alert for the glorious hours still ahead of us. We talk of our views so for far the night, and what we hope to see yet, and then, of course, tell astronomical “war stories” and discuss the latest developments in eyepieces or software. Often, we will hear the lonely and painful sounding yelps of coyotes way off in the distance, or gasp at the appearance of a sudden bright meteor.

I have heard it said that God does not deduct from a man’s life the hours he spends looking at the heavens. If that is true (and I suspect it may be) I should live to be 130!

To all my star-gazing brothers and sisters everywhere, I bid you peaceful nights, stunning views, mind-numbing realizations of what you are seeing, and many extra years tacked onto your lifetime for all the hours you spend bathed in pre-historic radiation. May your skies be clear and tranquil, your eyes fully dilated, and your heart made light by the Light from above!

This is a Type B blog.

Many HVAC contractors want to sell their businesses some day, but most have no idea how to go about doing that. One thing is for sure, though– a well-developed customer database is worth more than your building, fleet, and inventory (in most cases, anyway).

So what constitutes a “well-developed customer database?” One thing it is NOT made of is a shoe box full of job cards. You may have installed 20,000 jobs over the life of your business, but the big question is, How many of those folks have you seen in the last 24 months?  THAT’s the measure of your realistic customer database. I doubt if it would be 20,000. (If a typical service tech can see five customers a day and works 240 days a year– wishful thinking, maybe!– he could touch 1,200 customers a year. Multiply that by the number of techs you have, then multiply that result by 1.5 and you probably have your 2-year “customer touch” count. The 0.5 deduction allows for customers you see very year for tune-ups and the like.)

If those customers are not regularly seen, they are vulnerable– vulnerable to another contractor with an aggressive marketing campaign. So how can you keep your customers tied to you? (And make them of value to a prospective buyer?)

With service agreements. Research I did in the 1990’s, and published in the magazine Contracting Business (Dec 1993, May 1994) and The HVACR News (Nov 24, 1997 and Dec 1, 1997) showed that an undeveloped customer database is worth maybe ten cents a name, while a service agreement base is worth at least $75 a name. Adjusting for inflation, today I would say an undeveloped list is worth $0.15 a name while a developed database is worth at least $110 a name. If you had 8,000 customers in your database, the difference in value between an undeveloped list and a developed one would be $880,000! Holy snowballs, Batman!

But one of the biggest barriers to contractors getting into service agreements is pricing them. That is why I am please to announced I now have available on my site an Excel spreadsheet that takes the guesswork out of pricing them. It runs on Excel 2003 and all later versions and lets you calculate prices for residential and light commercial jobs. Both types of jobs let you price inspection-only agreements, maintenance agreements, and full coverage agreements. The commercial sheet is for DX cooling systems only (no chilled water units, please), but can handle almost any size DX job.

To visit the page or order a copy, click here.

FISH is an acronym I came up with. It stands for

Fantastic
Idea
Superbly
Honed

A FISH is an idea you get that is powerful and neat and has the potential to help people out. But when we first get big, audacious ideas like this, they are not always useful in their raw forms. We need to take some time to distill them, to let them percolate in our minds and hearts. We must carefully remove any slag from the idea and pour out only pure gold and silver from the crucible. Then- and only then- is the FISH ready to take to other people.

About two months ago, I sought God’s guidance for what to do with this business- how to improve it, how to strengthen it, and make it viable in the coming economic crash we will probably experience in 2009. As a result of those prayers for guidance, a torrent of raw FISH came to me, but none of them were useful in their original forms. I have been purifying the FISH so that soon I will be able to offer my clients a new menu of services and tools to help them make their lives better, whether it be in sales, management, or just their personal lives. I have been writing new material, developing new spreadsheets, creating new ways of seeing old truth.

Soon, these FISH will be ready to display on my web page. When they are, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, as time permits, I will blog some more about how I go about preparing a FISH for public consumption. Stay tuned, sushi fans!