March 30, 2008: Stakeholder Updates

As I reviewed the condensed version of the Report to the Stakeholders that's going into the next Where We're Going, I noticed something funny about the numbers.

Specifically, "sales were up by 20%" is a silly number. We did well, but not that well. I suspect I typoed on an editing correction after everyone here had checked the copy. I'm blaming myself.

Anyway: (1) Apologies for the error. (2) All y'all who are supposedly showing such great interest in these reports aren't paying critical attention, because if we had really had a 12% increase in gross (which was the number in the original report) on a 20% increase in sales, that would indicate that our overall efficiency had dropped markedly as our sales went up, and if that were the case, I should have been pointing that out and saying what I'd do about it. But nobody called me on this . . . I caught the error myself, a month and a half later. Come on, people - you're supposed to be keeping me honest.

So what ARE the right numbers? Well, we are now almost closed on 2007, and our gross was better than I was willing to claim when the report was first written . . . looks like it will be close to $2.88 million. This is actually about a 14.8% increase over last year. Our sales were up by about 14.1%. Our increase in gross was slightly better than our increase in sales. This is good, and can be attributed first to an increase in licensing income, and second to "hmm, we probably did get a bit more efficient."

The numbers in the posted report have been updated.
-- Steve Jackson