When you show up at a new job, there are a lot of things you take for granted.
Or at least I took them for granted.
You arrive on your first day and you have a desk to sit at with a chair and a computer and all that sort of stuff. As we’ve been building the Quimbley’s factory and offices completely from scratch, we’ve discovered that those things don’t just appear out of nowhere. Shocking, I know! Desks don’t put themselves together!
When we moved into the building on the 1st of March 2024, everything was empty. We knew it would be, but the sheer scale of that empty space was pretty epic. At that moment, the reality of the amount of work in front of us really set in.
And I’m not talking about the amount of work required to start a business.
I’m talking about chairs.
Putting together chairs.
Yes, when you’re opening offices, you need chairs.
And those chairs don’t come pre-assembled.
So, what do you do when 25 to 50 chairs are arriving in boxes and you need them put together?
You call in Wesley.
Who is Wesley, you ask?
Wesley is one of our gofers who works his butt off to make sure we have what we need when we need it. If you need something picked up from a supplier? Wesley will do it. If you need a box packed for a customer? Wesley has it covered.
And you guessed it, if you need a chair put together?
Wesley will be there with a screwdriver and smile (most of the time).
So there Wesley was for days and days and days, sitting in our lobby, putting chairs together, one after the other. You’ve never seen so many chair components strung around an office before. We’d find random rollers and cushions on the floor next to ratchet sets and a bag of half-eaten McDonalds fries.
It was Wesley’s chair manufacturing service.
And we can’t forget the desks either. Dozens of desks made their way through that lobby, arriving in their appropriate office the next day. The desk where I currently sit was put together by Wesley, and I appreciate that fact.
I guess the thing I’m getting at is that when you’re building a company, even a really big one that is manufacturing card sets and games and wood carrying cases and artwork and books and all of that stuff, success still comes down to making sure the little things are taken care of, and that you have the right people taking care of them.
Obviously, success comes from good products and good relationships with customers, but that success would be nothing without all the people behind the scenes doing their jobs every day.
What would have happened if we had no one to put together our chairs or our desks?
Would we have succeeded if all the little things we take for granted had fallen instead on our design teams or our artists or our manufacturing team?
Probably not.
So, the next time you’re starting a massive company from the ground up, remember that chairs are invaluable.
Just like the people putting them together.
