I usually don’t find myself taking a break because I have so much to do. It seems there are not enough hours in the day to get everything done. When you wear the sales, purchasing, shipping, tech support hats for a small company (plus I also have a 40 hour full time manufacturing Engineering position during the day, spouse, 3 children, 3 ,6 and 19 years old) the time seems to fly by and everything does not get completed.
Don’t get me wrong… I enjoy running my Maytag Neptune parts company. People often ask me how did you get involved with the Neptune washer?
Here's my confession... Actually, I kinda accidentally fell into it when a co-worker had a problem.
Her innocent Neptune failed to spin the clothes and she had a repairman come over to look at her Neptune. He quoted her $450 to replace the machine control board and door latch wax motor. She got frantic and told him to get lost and that she would take the control board to a guy at work to look at.
That guy was me…
I looked at the board… R11 was fried. After investigating and doing some research I found that there were a lot of R11 & Q6 burns happening. So after I repaired her control board I put together the R11 and Q6 repair kit. This was almost 3 years ago.
Side note: I designed a home nite lighting system I am working on to get to market and it seems the Neptune repair kit business has kept me so busy that I don’t have time to work on the lighting system. I absolutely love this concept and would love to see it in every home because it offers safety, security and convenience. Maybe I will plug the system in a later post… so stay tuned.
You could imagine that while helping Maytag Neptune owner’s with the door latch problem I started to get more questions like can you get other Neptune parts, what would cause such and such to happen, etc. It snowballed from there.
Now, I offer replacement machine control boards, motor conversion kits, door boots, every Neptune part at very good prices since I have low overhead. For example, I sold over 1,000 wax motors (part #12002535) in 2007 alone!
Recently, I partnered up with Tony Yeager, who created the “Tony Tool” which is designed to remove and install the Neptune bearings. This tool kit runs $425 and is designed for service techs. I had the idea of tool rental so I asked Tony if I could purchase a tool kit to rent out to Neptune owners. He reluctantly did so and now I have a fleet of Tony Tools helping Neptune owner’s save time and money replacing their bearings. Tony has put together a fabulous 13-minute video that shows exactly how to take machine apart, replace bearings…
I was selling the Neptune bearing & seal kits just fine before offering the Tony Tool. Mechanically inclined folks were using pipes and hammers to get the bearings out. Now, with the tool kit almost anyone can change his or her Neptune bearings. Check out www.neptunebearing.com.
I plan to keep adding new services to the Neptune business because I believe in continuous improvement and diversification. I also look for ways to improve efficiency as I am a one-person company and need to reduce the time spent on tasks.
I hope you enjoyed this post as I revealed where I came from and maybe I will reveal how the Target Security company name came about in a future post.
Have a safe and great 4th.!
Until next time...
