CK Daily Updates

Happy Friday! We’re officially about 13% of the way through 2024 – can you believe it? If you set goals at the beginning of the year, are you making progress? Cheers to a great weekend!

In This Issue: Which Commercial Stole the Show? 🏈 | Keystone Wall Plate | Switching Bandwidth and Packet Forwarding Rate Explained | News to Start Your Day

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The CK Daily – Which Commercial Stole the Show? 🏈

Happy Friday, folks! Football season has officially ended since the Super Bowl is behind us. Like many others, I watch the Super Bowl mostly for the ads. Every company tries to fill its commercial spot with as much creativity as possible, which makes for some hilarious and memorable commercials!

What were your favorite commercials from the Super Bowl? My favorite was the Dunkin’ DunKings! Dunkin’s marketing plan was outstanding as they released several more videos this week, including Dunkin’ ‘The DunKings – Extended Cut’.

And, if you have some time and want to watch any again, here is a list of the top 10 commercials from USA Today.

Have a great weekend!

Chris

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Product Spotlights & Updates

Keystone plates offer maximum versatility because you can add, reduce, or simply change the connections needed on the plate. They offer the best way to install a variety of today’s wiring and cabling. This is the perfect solution for terminating your in-wall wiring.

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Learning Center Article – Switching Bandwidth and Packet Forwarding Rate Explained

When you’re purchasing switches, you can find a lot of different numbers posted. They all have important meanings, and they all inform your purchase. If you aren’t already deeply familiar with each metric, then it’s worth taking time to learn the essentials.

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Today’s News to Start Your Day:

• Starbucks opened a new cafe designed to be more accessible and inclusive for customers and employees with disabilities. Changes include tweaks to the stores’ lighting and acoustics, as well as lower counters.
• OpenAI announced Thursday it has expanded beyond text and images to offer video-generation AI for the first time. The new model, called Sora, allows a user to type out a desired scene and turn it into a high-definition video clip.
• Microsoft will release four specified video games on alternative consoles, presumably both the Sony PlayStation 5 and the Nintendo Switch.
• DraftKings posted quarterly results that missed Wall Street estimates on the top and bottom line, but it increased its revenue by 44%.

Happy Friday Eve! We hope you’ve had a great week! Do you have any upcoming weekend plans you’re looking forward to?

In This Issue: Lessons Learned: Don’t Idolize A Solution | Rack Adapter, 23″ to 19″ | Benefits of AOC HDMI Cables | News to Start Your Day

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The CK Daily – Lessons Learned: Don’t Idolize A Solution

I have been writing about some of our “lessons learned” over the last several months and today I want to talk about “Don’t Idolize A Solution”.

For a very long time, I have tended to represent concepts with phrases. I have about 18 or so of these phrases now and somewhere along the way, someone called them Craigisms. One of the early Craigisms was “Don’t Idolize A Solution”. It came about when a staff member put off the responsibility for solving a problem that was in front of them by saying, for example:

In the case of a recurring problem with a vendor – “Well, we just need to move to a new vendor for this item”

In the case of a newly stained couch – “Well, we need to replace that piece of furniture anyway”.

It’s EASY to imagine a wholesale change being the answer to the problem at hand while HARD to think about how to solve the problem IN FRONT of you and execute on that solution. And generally the “idolized solution” is WAY harder than just dealing with the actual problem. I am not going to call it laziness because I think we all have the tendency to find a way to avoid doing hard things.

It is much easier to choose to do hard things when you know that you are building something better.

Many people, myself included, avoid hard things if the outcome is not meaningful to them. At my house, I may walk past a piece of trash or a kid’s toy lying in a flower bed 100 times if the mulch is patchy and needs refreshing. “It’s already a degraded situation that needs attention; what does the foreign object really matter? I will deal with it when we refresh the mulch.”

Wait a dang minute! You are telling me that I have to spend thousands of dollars to get rid of a toy lying in the flower bed? Really??

Right this moment I have some rotting boards on my barn doors at home. They are getting worse and worse. I need to hire someone to fix them but do I? Nope. I keep thinking “I really would like to replace those doors with motor-operated garage door style doors …. And I would kinda like to put some porches over those doors so I could park out of the rain … but what do I want that to look like? I need to get an architect to design something … but that’s complicated and expensive.” So I do nothing. Do I have to do all that instead of a few hundred dollar board replacement? Really? No, I don’t. This is idolizing a solution. I can fix the issue in front of me and take the time to decide if I truly want the rest of those changes made.

So, all that being said, when I jumped back into the day-to-day of CK I realized that we had been idolizing a solution for years, and it was impacting our customers and our revenue.

“Let’s switch E-Commerce platforms they said. It will be fun they said.”

No, let’s not and say we did haha.

Since the very beginning of CablesAndKits, we have always leveraged software developers, whether on staff or contract, to build and maintain our website and back-end systems. In addition to always being the way we have done things, it has also always been a personal passion of mine. I am pretty good at seeing the needs of the business and turning them into development tasks to be done and I enjoy doing it. Over time we have built so many features into the website that were not standard on the average website. Things like the ability to ship on your own shipping account, multiple logins for different team members, specialized ways to display certain groups of products, etc. But, we were falling behind in some areas that had become standard features in off-the-shelf platforms. Instead of putting in the work to build those features we somehow decided we should just re-platform. It seemed to make sense so we embarked on a multi-year SEVERAL hundred thousand dollar journey to transition to a new platform – that never happened.

The decision wasn’t necessarily a bad one but we could have resolved the issues in our existing system faster, easier, and cheaper than moving to a new system. It proved to be impossibly difficult for reasons I won’t go into here.

It could have ended well but … it gets worse.

Not only did we idolize a solution by choosing to re-platform rather than fixing the issues in front of us, but we neglected the existing site the entire time we worked on the move to the new system. SEO, broken pages, poor categorization, and even our Google Adwords management to a degree. The list of things we were not working on for that period of time is quite long.

The neglect resulted in much of the revenue decline we experienced in the last half of 2023. It wasn’t the only cause but it was a significant part of it. It is SO easy to “take your eye off the ball”. (See last week’s email about “Don’t expect what you don’t inspect”).

In late September, all e-commerce, product, and marketing folks (plus me) started meeting daily. We DOVE into the current website and just started fixing stuff. We did an SEO audit and were horrified at how bad things were so we got to work on that. Adwords, product pages, categorization, site search, product pages, images, content, and the list goes on. We just SAW WHAT NEEDED TO BE DONE AND DID IT. No idolizing solutions. No excuses. We just plowed through stuff.

And today, almost 5 months later, we are still plowing. We have gotten more meaningful work done in 5 months than we did in perhaps the last 5 years.

“Disciplined people, engaged in disciplined thought, resulting in disciplined action” – Jim Collins

What solutions are you idolizing? Put one foot in front of the other and just get stuff done.

More to come …

Craig

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Product Spotlights & Updates

Rack adapters are used to mount standard 19″ computer and networking equipment into (not so standard) 23″ equipment racks. By attaching these brackets to your 23″ equipment rack you create a 19″ opening which is needed to mount standard 19″ equipment.

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Learning Center Article – Benefits of AOC HDMI Cables

You see all kinds of different technologies used for the widest ranges of communication. Among all of that, the primary way to send audio and video signals is via HDMI.

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Today’s News to Start Your Day:

• SpaceX has filed to move its incorporation location to Texas from Delaware.
• Shares of TSMC reached an all-time high on after Morgan Stanley lifted the price target on its Nvidia.
• From wasabi to fried chicken, Oreo has always pushed the boundaries of flavor combinations. With new variations popping up every few months and offerings ranging from the outrageous to the OMG. Check out the most interesting and unusual Oreo releases and limited-edition flavors from around the world.
• Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lunar lander launched from Florida on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. If fully successful, the IM-1 cargo mission would be the first U.S. lunar landing in more than 50 years.

Happy Wednesday & Happy Valentine’s Day! We hope you have a wonderful day full of love, chocolate, and sweet little valentine’s notes!

In This Issue: Happy Valentine’s Day! | Cisco Meraki Cloud Managed Switch | 4K vs 8K HDMI Cables: A Quick Guide | News to Start Your Day

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The CK Daily – Happy Valentine’s Day!

Happy Wednesday & Happy Valentine’s Day!

I hope everyone is having a great week! Since it’s Valentine’s Day – I’ll share a funny story that happened last week…

I often leave my phone laying around and at times I’ll turn away for a moment and when I turn back around my little one is attempting to grab it and chew on it. Well last week, he successfully grabbed it and managed to call my ex-boyfriend. I was mortified!! I heard someone saying “hello? hello?” and when I looked at the phone to see who it was – I almost screamed! I hadn’t talked to this person in YEARS (almost 8 years!) and of course he answered.

I can’t help but cackle about it, but in the moment I was horrified lol. Nothing like a call a week before Valentine’s day to an ex! Has anything like this happened to you before?

Anywho – do you have any Valentine’s day traditions or fun things you do to celebrate?

Have a good rest of your week!

Ashley

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Product Spotlights & Updates

The Meraki MS225-24P is a cloud managed access layer switch that features (24) 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet ports as well as (4) 10G SFP+ uplinks. This switch supports both virtual stacking and physical stacking (compatible with MS210 series switches). Each switch includes dual stacking interfaces with up to 80 Gbps of stacking bandwidth.

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Learning Center Article – 4K vs 8K HDMI Cables: A Quick Guide

Both types of cables are HDMI, and they are used for ultra-high-definition video. 4K is known as HDMI 2.0, and the cables support video at resolutions up to 2150p (3840 X 2160), which comes out to roughly 8 million pixels in an image.

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Today’s News to Start Your Day:

• Microsoft Aptos is the new font for Outlook and Word. Read more about it here.
• Jeff Bezos has sold roughly $2 billion worth of Amazon stock in recent days.
• U.S. consumers will spend a record $6.4 billion on jewelry around Valentine’s Day this year. A decade ago, about 5% of engagement rings were colored gemstones – now, it’s more than 15%.
• Nvidia has surpassed Amazon in market capitalization. It’s a sign of how strong demand is for chips that can run cutting-edge AI, as well as the investor appetite for the companies that make the semiconductors.

Happy Monday! We hope you had a great weekend and enjoyed watching the Super Bowl. I know several of us look forward to the commercials. Which commercial was your favorite?

In This Issue: Football, Sweethearts & Pokemon | 25-Foot AC Power Cord | Why you should upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 Access Points? | News to Start Your Day

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The CK Daily – Football, Sweethearts & Pokemon

Happy Monday!

Did you watch the Super Bowl last night like I did? What a game! Looks like the Chiefs are trying to start a dynasty! I was rooting for the 49ers, my parents have been fans since before I was born, but the Chiefs, with that Taylor Swift magic, seemed to have pulled it off. I wasn’t too disappointed, the game was fun to watch. I’m not normally a football fan, but I do like to watch the Superbowl, in the past, it was for the commercials, but it seems that (even though great effort is given), the commercials aren’t as funny or remarkable. Does anyone remember those Budweiser frogs? I’m sure you do if you are of a certain age, haha!

It was a pretty busy weekend aside from football madness for our family. On Friday I took my oldest daughter to a sweetheart dance and she had a blast, mostly running around screaming with her friends as elementary kids tend to do when they get together. I did make an interesting observation, the humble balloon can entertain a group of kids for hours. There were some kids that I saw playing around with a 10-cent balloon for the entire 3 hours of the dance. The kids loved playing this game called “keepy uppy” where the objective is to keep the balloon off the ground as long as possible at any cost. It seemed like children were diving and crashing into each other everywhere!

On Saturday I took my wife out to dinner for an early Valentine’s Day meal and we went to one of her favorite restaurants here called Jack’s Public House. To round out the weekend, we went to church and then visited a local card and game shop and played some Pokemon with some friends. The card shop, Fandomie, was small, but pretty awesome and the owner was very friendly and gave out goodies to the kids as we played and traded.

Don’t forget, Valentine’s Day is around the corner on Wednesday!

I hope you have a great day and a wonderful week!

Cris

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Product Spotlights & Updates

The high-quality 25-foot AC power cord, C5040300, is designed for powering a wide range of electronic devices. Constructed with 14 AWG wire, it guarantees safe and efficient power transmission while minimizing resistance and voltage drop. It comes with a 5-15P plug, a standard NEMA configuration commonly found on power strips, surge protectors, and various electrical devices.

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Learning Center Article – Why You Should Upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 Access Points

If you have a wireless network, you need access points that enable users to connect. For a long time, WiFi 5 was the industry standard that governed how wireless networks functioned, but today, WiFi 6 is here and available. Upgrading your network to WiFi 6 offers some major benefits, and it could change how your entire operation functions.

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Today’s News to Start Your Day:

• McDonald’s has always been innovative. Since the fast food chain was founded in 1940, it has regularly switched up its menu to keep customers coming back to try something new. But not all of the dishes became permanent fixtures that you can still order today. Remember Mighty Wings, McDonald’s Pizza or the McDLT? Scroll through the gallery here for a blast from the past.
• The most expensive home for sale in the U.S. goes up for $295 million in Naples, Florida.
• Amazon has won the exclusive rights to stream an NFL playoff game on Prime Video next season.
  Aware, an AI firm specializing in analyzing employee messages, said companies including Walmart,
• Delta, T-Mobile, Chevron and Starbucks are using its technology. Aware said its data repository contains messages that represent about 20 billion individual interactions across more than 3 million employees.

Happy Friday & Happy Superbowl Weekend! Who do you think will walk away with the win? Chiefs or 49ers?

In This Issue: Free Things! | Cisco ISR 4000 Blank Faceplate | Does Copper Cabling Still Have a Place in Data Centers? | News to Start Your Day

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The CK Daily – Free Things!

Happy Friday, folks!

I’ll be attending a conference in a few weeks. One of the things that my kids look forward to is the swag that I pick up at the various booths during the conference. I always see a lot of the regular, useful swag, like pens and microfiber screen cleaners. But those don’t excite my kids. They get excited by things they can throw (squishy balls or pucks) or snuggle with (llamas, anyone?)!

What are your favorite swag items? What swag do you use regularly?

We’re exploring new swag items to give out so we’d love to hear your ideas!

Chris

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Product Spotlights & Updates

This Cisco-compatible ISR 4000 NIM slot faceplate is specifically constructed to cover the NIM slot in Cisco’s 4000 series integrated services routers. This allows your router to improve airflow and run better for a longer period of time. Not to mention, it makes your router look a little more attractive. This Cisco accessory is compatible with a variety of models.

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Learning Center Article – Does Copper Cabling Still Have a Place in Data Centers?

More than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced every day. That’s a mind-boggling number. Equally impressive is that roughly 90 percent of all data in the world was produced in the last two years. That second statistic will likely hold true even as years pass.

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Today’s News to Start Your Day:

• Wendy’s is delighting its fans once again with an announcement that the eatery is debuting a brand new Frosty flavor next month – Orange Dreamsicle!
• Hawaiian Airlines is rolling out complimentary Wi-Fi via SpaceX’s Starlink onboard commercial flights this week.
• Delta Air Lines’ popular airport lounges are getting a more exclusive tier, in the airline’s latest push to cater to high-spending travelers. The first “premium” lounge is scheduled to open in June at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, and at 38,000 square feet, it will be the largest of the carrier’s lounges.
• The Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2024 was revealed Thursday night at NFL Honors in Las Vegas’ Resorts World, three days before Super Bowl LVIII. Read more here.

Happy Thursday! We hope you’re having a great week. If we can be praying for you this week, please let us know. Also, we don’t say it all the time – but thank you for being part of our CK Daily family!

In This Issue: Lessons Learned: Don’t Expect What You Don’t Inspect | Cisco 3750X Series 24 Port Switch | FAQ: MDF vs IDF | News to Start Your Day

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The CK Daily – Lessons Learned: Don’t Expect What You Don’t Inspect

Howdy! Craig here. In my last email, I mentioned that we suddenly had a significant drop in revenue. Not to kill the suspense, but due to a massive amount of backbreaking hard work from the entire team, coupled with the Lord’s favor, we climbed back to a profitable position and are seeing a lot of positive momentum from our many efforts over the last several months.

I have been writing about some of our “lessons learned” through this season and today I want to talk about knowing and watching your numbers.

There are many variations of the quote “People don’t do what you expect but what you inspect” which is attributed to Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. I have often heard and said “Don’t EXPECT what you don’t INSPECT” as well. Either way, the point is the same – people (including ourselves) do not just naturally and consistently work on the things that you deem to matter the most for the sake of moving the business forward. It is very easy for all of us to work on what is in front of us (the urgent vs the important) and wander off the reservation so to speak.

I was just thinking about how to express an idea and what came to me was a picture of a giant game of Jenga, but where each piece of wood is a process. If each process is carefully considered to be important to the well-being and stable growth of the organization and is well planned, documented, measured, and watched, it becomes a very stable piece of the Jenga tower. As you start with building processes for every operational component of the business you stack the game higher and higher. As pressures or distractions come at the staff, if the processes are meaningful, well documented, measured, and watched, it will be hard to knock the tower down – in fact, no piece (process) will be “removed” from the game at all if the staff is faithful to the processes.

One of our core values is “Build processes that don’t fail”. This is so important to me. I hate to have an issue occur without taking the time to understand what went wrong and “permanently fix the temporary problem” (one of my Craigisms). If I see that a process could have prevented an issue, I very much want that process to exist and be followed. For the most part, the entire CK team values this deeply as well – especially those who have been around a long time.

One of the things we came to learn over the past 5 months is that while we do have amazing operational processes and VAS (Visibility, Accountability, creating sustainability), we were heavily lacking in e-commerce and marketing processes and VAS. Looking back into the past we have had a variety of ways we have approached things but we have not consistently built sustainable processes. We have changed the game, the rules of the game, the things we measured or were concerned with, have gotten distracted by shiny things, have had a loss of momentum due to staff changes, and the list goes on. Due to this, our SEO, Adwords, on-site merchandising, and several other things suffered to the point of extremely poor performance or failure. That reminds me of an old SEO joke – Where is the best place to hide a dead body? Page two of Google. We were there – with all the dead bodies. Our SEO was terrible. No wonder our organic (non-paid) traffic was so terrible. So we rolled up our sleeves and got to work.

This is one of the many things that we have uncovered in the last several months that have contributed to the drop in revenue. There are others, but at the root of just about everything is the ability to know what you are aiming for, know what you believe will get you there, and then be disciplined and diligent to work on the right things to drive in that direction. This is for sure one of the areas we were weak. But, as you may have guessed, we have made significant strides to correct this, which has resulted in amazing priorities and focus since!

More to come…

Craig

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Product Spotlights & Updates

Cisco 3750 X switches help maximize productivity by giving IT managers the tools to support enterprise applications and advanced traffic management. With an array of network modules and redundant power supply options available, these switches can be customized and scaled to support nearly any application.

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Learning Center Article – FAQ: MDF vs IDF

In the world of IT, acronyms are everywhere. It can be hard to keep up, so sometimes, you need to break down the acronyms to solidify what they mean and why they matter. Applying that idea, today, we’re going to talk about MDF and IDF.

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Today’s News to Start Your Day:

• McDonald’s has released its latest menu, which features a new wrap, three desserts and its first-ever food collaboration. Along with the two sweet treats, The fast food chain announced a partnership with the hot sauce manufacturer Frank’s RedHot, which is a fan favorite in the US, for its new McSpicy burger.
• Disney announced a $1.5 billion stake in Epic Games and plans to create a new “games and entertainment universe” together, building on Disney’s characters and stories, over several years.
• ESPN will launch its flagship direct-to-consumer streaming service in the fall of 2025.
• Disney is releasing an animated sequel to “Moana” this Thanksgiving.