Archives for February 2024

Happy Friday! The weekend is here – do you have plans? We hope it’s a great one! 😎

In This Issue: Homemade Biscuits 🧑‍🍳 | Cisco 3560X/3750X 715WAC Power Supply | The Right Ethernet for the Right Network | News to Start Your Day

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The CK Daily – Homemade Biscuits 🧑‍🍳

Happy Friday, folks! I recently started making homemade biscuits for my family each Saturday morning. This brings my family together for breakfast each Saturday morning before we embark on our weekend plans. After only a few weeks, my kids are looking forward to this time each weekend!

I didn’t expect how much fun I would have exploring different recipes. I initially reached out to some family members to get a recipe, and to my surprise, all recipes were different. So, I turned to YouTube for more recipes, and I found that there are plenty of ways to make biscuits! And everybody claims their way is the only way. 😂

Since I had never made biscuits, I was willing to try different recipes to see which turned out the best. It became an experiment to find out my family’s favorite recipe. As each week passes, the biscuits are getting better and better! I’ve found the following five ingredients create the biscuits we enjoy the most: all-purpose flour, sea salt, baking powder, butter, and buttermilk.

Do you have a favorite biscuit recipe? I’d love to try out more recipes!

Have a great weekend!

Chris

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Product Spotlights & Updates

The Cisco 3560X/3750X 715 WAC Power Supply is an enterprise-class of standalone and stackable switch and comes with an 8-foot black cord for operability. It offers high levels of energy efficiency, ease of operation, security, scalability, and availability.

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Learning Center Article – The Right Ethernet for the Right Network

An efficient Ethernet cable management plan, especially in high-density and challenging network environments, increases the versatility of network maintenance and operation. It also contributes to the system’s uptime and lowers operation cost, which makes your life a whole lot easier!

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Today’s News to Start Your Day:

• Lululemon will debut its first men’s footwear line and will soon offer a new casual and performance sneaker designed specifically for men.
• Universal Music Group and TikTok began Thursday the process of removing the label’s song library from the social media platform after the two entities failed to come to an agreement over what UMG alleges is unfair pay for its artists’ work.
• Meta will pay a 50-cent dividend, its first ever, and has authorized a $50 billion share buyback.
• Japan’s historic SLIM moon lander has powered down ahead of a likely mission-ending cold lunar nighttime — but not before grabbing some final images and loads of science data. Read more here.

Happy Thursday! Embrace the joy of today and savor the sweet moments because it’s not just any Thursday—it’s National Dark Chocolate Day! 🍫 Indulge your taste buds in the rich, velvety goodness of dark chocolate.

In This Issue: Figuring out the Figure Outables | Cat6 RJ45 110 Type Keystone Jack | Understanding Ethernet Cable Gauge (AWG) | News to Start Your Day

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The CK Daily – Figuring out the Figure Outables

Howdy folks, Craig here. I’ve previously written about my time away from CK and what brought me back into the day-to-day. At this point in the story (Sept 2023), we’d been losing money for months due to revenue being significantly down (up to 50%) and we had no idea why. The revenue left in the middle of the night and didn’t even leave a note!

I called a meeting with 4 people on the revenue side of the business on Thursday, Sept 28th 2023. Product, Marketing, and E-comm people. At that meeting, I said I was stepping back in so we could all put our heads together to:

1. Figure out what the heck happened
2. Fix it
3. Prevent it from happening again

Pretty simple right? Lol.

But the truth is, it kinda is that simple.

I didn’t say it was EASY, I said it was SIMPLE.

The truth is, business is like a factory or a machine that makes a product. Raw materials go in, things happen, and a finished product comes out. A business is a series of processes that, when executed well, will turn efforts into profits that keep the whole thing going, and hopefully growing, to the benefit of it’s owners, staff, customers, and community.

Let’s get into “how the sausage is made” in our business (or any e-commerce business for that matter).

In a business like ours, the process is broken down into 4 CRITICAL components:

• Engage ‘Em – People need to be aware of your existence. Adwords, Google SEO, Social Media, and other advertising. Word of Mouth / Referrals are also very important. We’ll never get a site visitor if they don’t even know we exist.
• Get ‘Em – When a potential customer lands on our site, they need to quickly understand what we do and why it should matter to them. They should quickly find the product or service that solves a problem, and it should be easy and compelling for them to click the add to cart / checkout button. If we cannot compel site visitors to buy, we are a museum not a business.
• Keep ‘Em – Once a customer chooses to do business with us they should have been so “wowed” by our delivery, product, customer service, and of course the little package of M&M’s in the box, that they couldn’t imagine going anywhere else the next time they have a need for a product or service we offer. This is what GROWS a business.
• Grow ‘Em – Once we have a loyal customer we should be looking for ways to expand the amount of business we do with that customer. What products do we offer that they are not aware of? What products do they buy elsewhere that we do not sell, that perhaps we should? Does the customer need a sales rep to help navigate the complexities of their projects and purchasing processes? By engaging with the customer at a higher level of complexity we are solving much bigger and more important problems. This is where customers tend to think of us as a “partner”.

As we began to dig in and take an honest look at the business we started to realize where we were weak, mediocre, pretty good, and strong.

Then we got to work.

More to come!

Craig

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Product Spotlights & Updates

The CablesAndKits Cat6 110 Type Keystone jack supports both T568A and T568B wiring with a 4 x 4 termination layout. To terminate use a 110-punch-down tool. This keystone jack is 8P8C and is completely backward compatible with lower-rated cables including Cat5e.

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Learning Center Article – Understanding Ethernet Cable Gauge (AWG)

When you have to put a network together, you’re going to compare a lot of different components to try to squeak out better performance without spending obscene amounts of money. Because of that, you’re likely to consider using Ethernet for many (if not all) parts of your network.

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Today’s News to Start Your Day:

• SeaWorld Entertainment, Inc. is to undergo a name change. The Orlando-based theme park chain company announced it will be known as United Parks & Resorts Inc., effective Feb. 12.
• Krispy Kreme launched its all-new Dough-Notes Collection. The four heart-shaped doughnuts are designed to be decorated with personalized messages
• Mastercard is launching a new generative artificial intelligence model to allow banks to better assess suspicious transactions on its network.
• Walmart is planning to open more than 150 of its large-format stores over the next five years. Some of the locations will be converted, but the majority will be new.