We started PosterBurner out of my old house.

It was just me, my brother, and one printer.

(If you missed that story it is here)

Then we started adding people and equipment.

By the end my house was a factory.

So we moved to a real office.

The office felt so big that I thought we'd never outgrow it.

But we did.

So we decided to buy our own production facility.

Here is what it looks like:

Once we signed the papers and the building was ours, the excitement quickly wore off.

It wore off because after 10 years of running PosterBurner, we had installed a lot of heavy equipment.

All that heavy equipment was on the second floor.

And we had to move it all fast.

I tried to think of something clever - like renting a crane to pull the equipment out of the window or building some sort of ramp down to the parking lot.

But it turns out I have neither the smarts or the skills to do any of that.

So we used brute force.

It was three days of smashed fingers, sweat, and the whole crew pushed to the brink of collapse.

But we did it.

We got our new office operational pretty quickly.

And the new space made a big difference.

We cut days off our average production time.  More than 90% of posters were shipping the next business day.

And that creates a cycle. 

There are more happy customers.  And those customers tell their friends about PosterBurner.

Everything was good.

But we are a small business.  And in small business there is a rule.  And that rule is that when everything is going great, soon something is going to mess it up.

And something happened that messed it all up.

I'll explain in the next post (which is here.)

Rick @ PosterBurner