Hello WaxonWaxov,
Let me start by saying that I can assure you that none of us here at Fast Tracks are taking World cruises every six months! In fact after a very hard slog over the past five years all of us are still well below the incomes we were earning before we left our 'regular' jobs to start Fast Tracks. And yes, we (three brothers, one wife and a sister) all work full time - with my brothers and I typically working 12-14 hours per day, every day.
There IS a lot more to manufacturing the products that we produce than just pushing a big GO button, but I can understand why you would see it that way. The fact is, getting everything in place to make that go button work takes an enormous amount of time and effort. To make this business work at all, we don't have the luxury of just offering tools for a single scale. Instead we have to offer all of the popular scales - and at the present time that is over 2,000 different products, of which about 700 are assembly fixtures. Each assembly fixture has to be designed pretty much from the ground up to get it ready for the CNC machine. Yes, some scales can be scaled to other scales, but even with that the design has to be tweaked, checked and production files generated. For the first three years of business Tim did this almost full time until we finally started to have a fairly complete library of CAD files ready to cut - but even today we still get orders for fixtures that have not been designed yet. And that only covers the fixtures. The same process has to be repeated for the QuickSticks as well - and there are another 700 of those. And of course there are all of the supporting products. And in about a week we are going to be doubling all of those numbers again with our new Platforms and straight and curved track assembly fixtures.
As has been mentioned by others here, setting up a production shop to produce these products is not an inexpensive proposition either. We have all made a very significant investment so far, not in the millions, but pretty much all of our life's savings combined.
The fact is, our pricing is borderline as it is for making a reasonable return on our investment, and the only reason we can make this work at all is because the Internet allows us to sell directly to the end user. If we had to distribute the products that we manufacture through regular distribution channels and retail stores, we would probably have to increase prices by as much as 30% to 50% as everyone along the supply chain has to take their little cut.
Yes, Fast Tracks tools are a bit of an investment, but we believe they provide extremely good value for the money overall.
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