I overshot my expectations with a new order for heat and ac products
I recently went separate ways with my long term business partner.
We started off as friends at a homeowners solutions convention and ended up setting a partnership business 3 months later.
Before then, I was stuck in a dead end job I had been trying to walk out of. This opportunity turned things around. However, two years into the partnership, we were dealing with mistrust and misuse of company finances. With my finance background and the desire to uphold ethical values of a professional entrepreneur, I couldn’t take it. Sold my shares and set up my company. We had employees who would handle everything, here I was trying to juggle everything alone. My first and most expensive mistake was to promise my old and new customers to wait out a new shipment of heat and ac products I had made. But because of the miscalculation of the arrival date, the products ended up arriving halfway into the winter season. I lost a lot of orders on boiler installation equipment, central heating assembly parts, furnace parts, HEPA filter, programmable thermostat, electric heat pump, and smart HVAC. My aim was to become a distributor so I wasn’t really prepared for other market needs like actual boiler repair or installation of hot water boiler so I didn’t even need to hire an HVAC repairman. So I ended up holding onto my supplies until the season passed. I was banking my competitive edge on supplying whole home heating equipment and improvised electric fireplace suites for the modern homes. I was glad to learn that I wasn’t the only one facing supply chain issues since my former partner also faced stock outages due to stock mismanagement by the employees I left behind.