Moved on & closed shop

Thanks Ted.

Yes, it is not easy sometimes trying to introduce new ideas and products to as small an industry as this one. Your best ideas will get stolen by the large companies with the big marketing departments and high dollar legal help if they think they can get away with it, and the rest you sometimes have to wage a seemingly endless series of battles with your fellow peers in the industry to show them that you have what you know they need. After you have their interest on these products, they will often try and nickel and dime you into lowering your prices on them to the point where the profit is not that great. So if you are in it for the money only, you better forgetaboutit. Fortunatly, that is not the reason I make them. You really have to want to do it for a greater purpose than that. The persistance that is required to stay with it when things go wrong(they always will) must come from a strongly held conviction that you are doing the right thing and you will make life better for many when you are done.

An excellant example of this persistance that is required to stick with it through both thick and thin is Padman. Few here are aware just how long it took John Geurkink and his father to get padding accepted to the point where it is now. 30 years ago when John adopted this method of cleaning, the equipment was far less powerful and reliable than what it is today. Thru trial and error and much investment in upgraded components, the pad machines slowly got more reliable. The process took 25 years. It was only 5 years ago at the first Summerfest in Ohio that people in a large sense got to see what these machines could do. But the padders still had to stay out in the parking lot! The internet boards changed things. Using them to explain the benefits of padding to a large group of readers openned things up even more, as the OP Vs HWE debates got under way. John is an impressive debater, and combined with the demos (and pictures) that he was able to show that padding could compare in results to any HWE cleaned carpet and sometimes exceed them.It has just got better after that. With increasing sales, more money became available for further R&D, and the power levels started going up, from 1/3 HP, to 1/2 , then 3/4HP to finally 1 HP. The current conquerer is the result.

But without the persistance to stay the course those first 25 years, the last 5 years of major growth would not have happened! Today things move much faster and NOBODY has 25 years or more to get the final product to market anymore. Your competitors will often beat you if you took even 3 years these days, but it does show the need to be persistant enough to stay the course. It can still take a multi year effort to introduce some ideas before they become mainstream.My turboteck air duct cleaner is an excellant example there. Introduced over 5 years ago into the US market, I have sold almost 3000 of them to mostly to carpet cleaners for use with truckmounts. But with the 30,000 TMs operating in the USA alone, it should have been more than that. What held it back? Mostly video equipment. When I started in 1999, the lowest cost camera video equipment cost $2500 US to buy. Today I sell a system that retails for only $499US! With the price of my rotary airduct cleaning system costing less now than it did 5 years ago, cleaners are buying our video equipped systems for only $1499 these days. Not surprisingly, sales are on the increase once again as a result.This would not have been possible without the vision to see that costs would come down, and sales would go up. After all, what cleaner is not going to invest in a system that bring in an extra $25,000 to $75,000 per year working part-time that only costs $1500 or less to get into, and make $150/hr for their time? Thats what I thought.