Many of you would like to earn income from a pool related activity. I have put together a little template that I think could be beneficial to those interested. My first thought was to market this formula for success in late night infomercials for the low low price of six payments of $29.95 but in the interest of helping others in the pool world in this time of economic hardship I am presenting the material here free of charge and under limited copyright offering anyone who is the original reader of this material on AZB the opportunity to take advantage of this formula without compensating me in any way. (Anyone acquiring this material from a location other than AZB or posting this material for their personal gain at other sites may be charged the original purchase price. It may be distributed freely for informational purposes only.)
How to be a successful Cue Case "Maker".
The very first thing is to save on research and development costs. This is pretty simple You simply take apart everybody else's cases and "borrow" everything you like from each one. Not only does this save a tremendous amount of time and money, it doesn't require knowledge or brain power you may lack anyway.
OK, now you have some idea of how to put together a cue case in the cheapest easiest way possible. However putting together cases one at a time out of quality materials requires way too much of your time and skills you may not possess. Now what? Find others to do your work for you. Ouch! By the time you pay for a place to do business, buy liability insurance, pay workman's comp, and minimum wage there really isn't much profit in a pool cue case. The US federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and actual costs per employee are close to double that. Worse yet for minimum wage you get a minimum wage employee. Some hard working kids and seniors but few hard workers in the prime of their lives work for minimum wage in the US. Looks like the dreams of riches as a cue case maker are gone. Ha, but wait there is another option. Recent articles reveal that garment workers in China make less than $.90 an hour and auto workers less than $2 an hour. You can take your operation to China and sidestep all of those pesky insurance, minimum wage, safety, minimum age regulations, all of the things that add cost to the price of things made in the USA! Perhaps only pay the people doing the real work for piece work and bypass paying them an hourly wage at all. Now things are getting good!
Now we are getting somewhere. But there is still another fly in the ointment. The cost of raw materials is expensive. A side of leather tanned in the USA using quality cow hides, the safe chemicals that don't continue to break down the leather for years to come, and US labor is more than all of the other costs of "borrowing" ideas, Chinese labor, and Chinese operating expenses combined! Fortunately as always there is a fix for that too. Chinese leather looks every bit as good as leather processed in the USA. The workers may be exposed to chemicals that will ruin their health and the leather may continue to deteriorate due to the chemicals continuing to tear down the structure of the leather but so what? The cases will look beautiful when they are new and if they hold up great, if not you have your money and are gone.
(side note by the author: I bought a beautiful belt mail order recently. Heavy double layer leather and triple stitching. The price was suspiciously cheap but the American made belt I had been wearing for over twenty years was starting to show it's age. As suspected the belt was an import from "an emerging nation". The belt looked great though and I started wearing it. One month later the inner layer is broken in several places. Somehow I don't think this belt will be around twenty months much less twenty years. The good thing is I didn't pay US prices for third world crap though, I did get what I paid for!)
Speaking of money, now it is time to market your case. If you give it a Chinese name and proudly label it made in China people are going to balk at paying the prices that they can get a custom made case for made in the USA by a skilled craftsman working in his own shop. The cure for that is at hand. Don't call it a production sweat shop case made for a few dollars out of questionable components, call it a custom case and we can sidestep where it is made! Will people buy a case with a Chinese name for real dollars, maybe not. Fortunately we can always use a "borrowed" name to put on our cases too. A nice solid all American sounding name, something like "James Bartman" or similar. Maybe you are American, maybe not, doesn't matter.
Now the best part: You take these cases to the good old USA and you sell them for the same prices that many people building top quality truly custom cases charge. The mark up per case is fantastic and you can churn these out as fast as you want to because you don't have to have actually even touched a case that bears "your" name! Your total contribution might be the designs you have "borrowed" from people that actually know how to build cue cases and have fresh ideas.
Many ways to market your cases. One of which is to post a huge volume of mostly babble on the largest pool forums in the world, AZB. It doesn't matter what you post or whose thread you are posting into about other cases or whatever, be sure your business ad with a huge picture of one of your cases is your signature on every post. Wait not every post, when you are really off the wall and off the leash better to not connect your business to those posts.
There you have it folks, the route to wealth and happiness! Well perhaps only wealth because if you have even a shred of self honesty you know that everything you have is based on the "borrowed" achievements of others and the people that actually do all the work for pennies. It might bother you a little that any illegal alien in the US makes far more money but that is the way it is in China and nobody should really be upset about working people of any age in any conditions for whatever you can get away with paying them. Remember that it is what you have that counts not how you get it.
Disclaimer: This is just a template for success in the business world. It is of course not "borrowed" from any actual business model I know of or an implication that this is how any well known case maker is currently doing business. Please ignore the following emoticons. They are added purely because I feel emoticons dress up a post and for no other reason.
How to be a successful Cue Case "Maker".
The very first thing is to save on research and development costs. This is pretty simple You simply take apart everybody else's cases and "borrow" everything you like from each one. Not only does this save a tremendous amount of time and money, it doesn't require knowledge or brain power you may lack anyway.
OK, now you have some idea of how to put together a cue case in the cheapest easiest way possible. However putting together cases one at a time out of quality materials requires way too much of your time and skills you may not possess. Now what? Find others to do your work for you. Ouch! By the time you pay for a place to do business, buy liability insurance, pay workman's comp, and minimum wage there really isn't much profit in a pool cue case. The US federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and actual costs per employee are close to double that. Worse yet for minimum wage you get a minimum wage employee. Some hard working kids and seniors but few hard workers in the prime of their lives work for minimum wage in the US. Looks like the dreams of riches as a cue case maker are gone. Ha, but wait there is another option. Recent articles reveal that garment workers in China make less than $.90 an hour and auto workers less than $2 an hour. You can take your operation to China and sidestep all of those pesky insurance, minimum wage, safety, minimum age regulations, all of the things that add cost to the price of things made in the USA! Perhaps only pay the people doing the real work for piece work and bypass paying them an hourly wage at all. Now things are getting good!
Now we are getting somewhere. But there is still another fly in the ointment. The cost of raw materials is expensive. A side of leather tanned in the USA using quality cow hides, the safe chemicals that don't continue to break down the leather for years to come, and US labor is more than all of the other costs of "borrowing" ideas, Chinese labor, and Chinese operating expenses combined! Fortunately as always there is a fix for that too. Chinese leather looks every bit as good as leather processed in the USA. The workers may be exposed to chemicals that will ruin their health and the leather may continue to deteriorate due to the chemicals continuing to tear down the structure of the leather but so what? The cases will look beautiful when they are new and if they hold up great, if not you have your money and are gone.
(side note by the author: I bought a beautiful belt mail order recently. Heavy double layer leather and triple stitching. The price was suspiciously cheap but the American made belt I had been wearing for over twenty years was starting to show it's age. As suspected the belt was an import from "an emerging nation". The belt looked great though and I started wearing it. One month later the inner layer is broken in several places. Somehow I don't think this belt will be around twenty months much less twenty years. The good thing is I didn't pay US prices for third world crap though, I did get what I paid for!)
Speaking of money, now it is time to market your case. If you give it a Chinese name and proudly label it made in China people are going to balk at paying the prices that they can get a custom made case for made in the USA by a skilled craftsman working in his own shop. The cure for that is at hand. Don't call it a production sweat shop case made for a few dollars out of questionable components, call it a custom case and we can sidestep where it is made! Will people buy a case with a Chinese name for real dollars, maybe not. Fortunately we can always use a "borrowed" name to put on our cases too. A nice solid all American sounding name, something like "James Bartman" or similar. Maybe you are American, maybe not, doesn't matter.
Now the best part: You take these cases to the good old USA and you sell them for the same prices that many people building top quality truly custom cases charge. The mark up per case is fantastic and you can churn these out as fast as you want to because you don't have to have actually even touched a case that bears "your" name! Your total contribution might be the designs you have "borrowed" from people that actually know how to build cue cases and have fresh ideas.
Many ways to market your cases. One of which is to post a huge volume of mostly babble on the largest pool forums in the world, AZB. It doesn't matter what you post or whose thread you are posting into about other cases or whatever, be sure your business ad with a huge picture of one of your cases is your signature on every post. Wait not every post, when you are really off the wall and off the leash better to not connect your business to those posts.
There you have it folks, the route to wealth and happiness! Well perhaps only wealth because if you have even a shred of self honesty you know that everything you have is based on the "borrowed" achievements of others and the people that actually do all the work for pennies. It might bother you a little that any illegal alien in the US makes far more money but that is the way it is in China and nobody should really be upset about working people of any age in any conditions for whatever you can get away with paying them. Remember that it is what you have that counts not how you get it.
Disclaimer: This is just a template for success in the business world. It is of course not "borrowed" from any actual business model I know of or an implication that this is how any well known case maker is currently doing business. Please ignore the following emoticons. They are added purely because I feel emoticons dress up a post and for no other reason.