First of all THANKS to all of you for all the support and good wishes.
Now, let me apologize for what follows. It is long, kind of personal and perhaps boring. But I guess that I need to "vent" a little. Not in FULL, just a little.
These are, no doubt about it, very difficult times but with the help of good friends like Danny, we hope that we can get back part of the investment we made on these electronic parts.
What hurts the most is that now there are 80 Colombians without a job.
This is the end of a dream. The end of a learning process for me and my 2 brothers. We've never made cabinets before. We made big mistakes during the process, of course. A lot of B stocks, for sure!!!.
In some threads there are people making jokes about us and about our quality. It doesn't surprise me because for some reason we, human beings, enjoy others failures and mistakes. On the other hand they are not 100% wrong. As I stated above, we made a lot of mistakes while learning the secrets of the loudspeaker-making business. (and yes, we even use irons to try to get that F$#@ing veneer to stop cracking
).
Some beautiful cabinets were shipped at the same time. And training those 80 people was really a difficult process, one that gave us pride but one that just when it started to get good results ended abruptly.
Our idea was to learn, we were ready to let some years to pass before we could become a "world-class" cabinet factory and then, and only then,make money. We didn't have the time to fulfill that dream but this is life and this is business. No compassion and sometimes no second chances.
Our family have been in the industry (steel and iron industrial parts) since 1934, we still have our parent company up and running (although the financial impact has been hard to digest and we are far from recovered) so we are "alive and kicking". Working hard, watching our children to grow, enjoying living in a beautiful country that is recovering on a daily basis from years of war and, personally, listening to music every day on my LS9's, made here in Colombia of course!!.(Thanks for your magic Danny).
http://cgim.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/vs.pl?vopin&1276121208&viewitem&o7If only you knew how much those LS9's ended up costing me!!!
(Good humor is also the key during these periods, let me tell you and making fun of yourself is always an excellent exercise).
I'm using this experience to teach my two daughters (16 and 14) almost everything about life. Specially one learning:
They were there when my friends here in Colombia laughed at me and about my idea of exporting cabinets to the USA and they were there when we started sending container-loads of loudspeakers. So they know by now that the only limitations that we have in life are the ones that we impose to ourselves. What a lesson!!.
Thanks for reading and again sorry for the long post.
Santiago
