There's no mystery in being in the business of performing a service, or making a product. The better you do this, the more the customer base.
Making a special, or unique product, is the same as performing a service. It does not go hand in hand, that running a business for the benefit of others is always going to be enjoyable, and lots of times, it's downright miserable.
Unless you're making one unique item, only certain operations can be 'batched' for economy. Other operations have to be performed, nearly start-to-finish on a single item.
Assuming we have a predictable overhead, knowing exactly what our bills are going to be at the end of the week, month, whatever, it's pretty easy to know how much product or service we need to complete, in order to make a wage and sustain the business. Knowing how to do this is not easy, but the difference in knowing it, and doing it, is what makes some companies survive, and others (and lots of good) fail.
As Brian said previously, it's so important to manage your backlog. The size of the backlog gives you the flexibility to 'pick and choose' the work in order to meet your target. If the picking and choosing is all the easy work, then the backlog of difficult, or complex, work builds, and builds, and builds.
When we all send our guns to the chosen gunsmith, we may have a very good understanding of what he's going to do, including knowing how many hours, or days, it's going to take. How much additional time it takes is where we go off the rails. Until one of them says to me "I just didn't feel like working on your gun" I don't know how I'll react, but I hope I react better than I do when I hear the exact same thing, over and over. What we inevitably believe is the most recent promise is the real one, the one before that was one with good intentions, and the one before that, by default, became plain and simple BS (I'm trying very hard not to say 'Lie')
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