Hello, my name is Gary Shotton, and I hope that these videos, these teachings are helpful to you, and we sure enjoy doing them and the intent is to Inspire Better Business and today, we’re going to talk about “Old Equipment.” That’s interesting. You see, at different points in my business career, I had a different culture and a different attitude. And, for my early days I had picked up a kind of a negative approach to the way I would buy equipment. I would try to buy some of the cheapest, the most worn out. I would look for a deal. I would try to make a deal work even if it wasn’t going to work. I’m embarrassed the kinds of things that I would buy and try to call good. I tried to put a paint job on an old truck and make it look good. No matter how much paint I would put on it, it still was an old truck and so now that I’m a little farther down the line, I’ve been in business a little while, I see the folly of that, and I just really hope to correct that and maybe help you in your thought pattern. Obviously all of us are going to be faced with do I have enough money? How can I pay for a good brand new piece of equipment? There’s other teachings on whether you should borrow to do that. That’s not this subject. I’m just saying don’t create a culture, don’t have a mindset: “If I can get by with the bad and the worst kind of equipment. I possibly can by–” I’ve seen it over and over again, let me give you some points here, some real key reasons. I’m in a machine shop. I own this machine shop. Our pay to some of our workers and many of our workers are twenty to twenty two dollars an hour is not uncommon. And that’s a good wage in our part of the world, and we have our equipment build out on an hourly rate Many times ninety dollars an hour or a hundred and twenty dollars per hour. How would I know that? Well, we talked about it. That one hundred and twenty dollars an hour? That’s two dollars a minute. So, if this piece of equipment that costs about four hundred thousand dollars is going to be operating at its proper rate, I need two dollars a minute for every time I have an operator on it, and if I have it break down, it will cost me at least three different ways. It’ll cost me to repair it. I have to pay somebody to repair it number two. It will cost me the amount of production that I lost because it wasn’t operating right.  Now, we’re a little bit slower. We’re at night shift. We’re not so pressed, but many times we’re just doing everything we can to get our parts, our jobs out to our customers on time. We lose that time, and then number three of course. The newer equipment is better it works faster. They figured out new ways to run it, and we can actually make our parts produced them in a faster shorter period of time. Normally, with newer and better equipment, and newer and better technology, and our cutting devices that would be true in almost everybody’s point of business. Not just a machine shop. Let’s talk about it. I owned this moving and storage company for 17 years and at one point I was so desperate to buy a piece of equipment, I bought a piece of junk. That’s all I can say, it was a piece of junk. It looked bad. Not enough paint can make it look good to my customers. Some of my drivers were embarrassed to drive that piece of equipment, and it was breaking down. All the things I first mentioned about the machine shop happened over and over again to us. We lost production, we lost downtime, we lost the cost of repairing it, many times the cost of towing it, the cost of other expenses that just were a waste. An absolute waste, and in each of these examples I’m going to talk about the operator. If the operators– like on this equipment here, and on that in the moving business we had semis that went over the road, that went into truck stops and if our driver felt like he’s driving an old worn-out ugly piece of equipment, he wasn’t proud to drive into the truck stop, it affected who we could hire. If we hire somebody that comes into our business and they’re a quality machinist, they want to do a good job. And, if you have your equipment is always breaking down, or there are special things– and in our equipment here, there’s actually a hazard. There’s risks, people could get hurt. So we think that good equipment would also help employ good workers. A good worker is expecting to have a good piece of equipment. One of the statements that we would never say here, and I’ve heard it different times, is hey this equipment makes great parts. No, the equipment does not make great parts. The machinist makes great parts, quality parts, because the machinist has a good piece of equipment. My dad way back in the early 60s, late 50s, early 60s, he wanted and he had good equipment. No matter what it cost him, he worked at having good, and normally new equipment, and it made a difference. Other people wanted to use him to farm. He was a premier farmer with many people wanting him to farm their ground. A funny thing about farmers is that as they grow. They always have a statement that says, the only piece of ground that they still want to farm is the next piece of ground that borders their existing property. Well, dad kept growing that way, and he kept growing, but he would have good equipment. We’re here to help you. We want to help you in our shop here. We buy good equipment. We buy almost always brand new equipment. In my particular case, I’m along the line a little bit, and I can buy it or finance this equipment. And, it makes sense that why would I let somebody else take the good part, the best of this piece of equipment, and use it up, use the life of it and then hand it to me at half price? I want the first half of the life, not the last half. Well, I hope this is beneficial. I thought of one more. This is so simple, but you might have a secretary that has a stapler that doesn’t work. I mean, this is so simple it’s unbelievable. There is nothing more frustrating that to put a staple in a piece of paper, and the stapler crunches wrong, and you have to dig it out with your fingernails, it’s horrible. Buy them a new five-dollar stapler, that’s good equipment. They’ll appreciate it. Well if it would be in your heart to share this with others, we’d appreciate it. We hope this video and others Inspires Better Business. Thank you.