We’re building the company as carefully as the products.

Our products are designed to be assembled in stages, with training materials good enough that someone can learn a product at their kitchen table. That lets us offer genuinely flexible work — assembling at your own pace, on your own schedule, paid fairly with a model that rewards efficiency.

As we grow, we’re adding dedicated space for production, shipping, and receiving — a place to work for those who want it, while keeping the option to work from home for those who don’t. It’s a deliberate choice to build a company people actually want to work for.

Forty years ago, you mailed a new product to a magazine and waited six months for a review. Today a single influencer post — or a national retailer adding you to its recommended list — can turn into thousands of orders in a matter of days. That’s a wonderful problem, and a dangerous one: demand can arrive long before the parts, people, and space to meet it.

We’ve built around that from day one. Rather than chase the biggest splash we can get, we’ve grown our suppliers, our people, and our systems ahead of demand — so when the surge comes, we can scale into it instead of drowning in it. Disciplined, deliberate, and ready.

We’re implementing modern inventory-planning (MRP) software to forecast component needs against overseas lead times that can run four to eight weeks. We source materials and components globally, including custom parts made to our own specifications.

And we’ve kept investor-grade books from the very beginning — with a formal review by an independent CPA this year and audits to follow — because the discipline that impresses investors later is the discipline you build in early.

When you start a company, you do everything yourself — write the code, answer the phones, ship the orders. As you grow, you hand those jobs off. The hard part comes when you finally have to hand off the things you’re best at. Most founders hire someone good, but not quite as good as they are — a “9.” And because you know they’re a 9, you can’t stop looking over their shoulder. Do that across every role and you’re drained; worse, your 9s hire 8s for the same reason, and the company slowly loses what made it special.

With an 11, I had no urge to second-guess anyone, and I could fully let go. My first 11 was a technical writer who was simply better than me. I did the same with every handoff after that, including programming. As the company grew, the 11s hired 12s. In many ways, that was the whole secret.

Forty years later, building Synnovation, I’m doing it again — deliberately. We’ve brought on expert consultants where specific expertise matters: a University of Wisconsin business professor who teaches internet marketing now leads sales and marketing; a mechanical engineer guides product and manufacturing decisions; an industrial engineer owns inventory strategy across product lines. But the harder, more important hires are the generalists — people with the maturity and confidence to figure out whatever the next stage needs, from sourcing overseas vendors to writing the training that brings someone new up to speed quickly.

With a team of 11s running day-to-day operations, I can focus on what I do best: new products, and where the company goes next.