The History of Katy Spring – The Tractor

In a start-up business, almost everything is done internally that can be done internally, in order to save on costs and simply, because there’s no one else to delegate to when starting a business.  This includes tasks such as cleaning the restrooms, emptying trash cans, packaging products, painting springs with a spray paint can in a shoe box (because the customer wanted red springs) to less meditative tasks such as interviewing, meetings with customers and vendors, assisting with a spring design, running capability studies and so on; all of which Katy Spring owners have happily participated in throughout the course of Katy Spring’s existence.  Even some of these tasks that can be outsourced are handled by the owners now, such as mowing the grass…what? Yes, the twenty acres that Katy Spring occupies is mostly coastal grass and needs to be mowed, in the summer about once a month or so.  In 2017 the landscape changed quite a bit though when Katy Spring owners decided to develop about five acres of the property into two businesses; an RV and Boat Storage facility called; “West Katy RV and Boat Storage,” http://westkatyrvboatstorage.com/.  The other business is a business park, featuring business space for small businesses, starting at about thirty seven hundred square feet of build-to-suite spaces.  Katy Spring was the first tenant of the “Schlipf Road Business Park,” leasing out ten thousand square feet for finished goods storage to support customers that utilize Katy Spring’s Stocking Agreement;  http://katyspring.com/KS-Web-Stocking-Agreement-Option2.pdf. Even though Katy Spring has a landscaping service to mow the grass, occasionally it’s fun to jump on the tractor and take a ride, enjoy the outdoors and cut some grass. All sounds fun, right?  And it was, until the tractor got stuck. Ouch! When one usually gets something stuck in a field, what’s used to pull it out?   A tractor is typically the answer of course.   So getting one’s only tractor stuck is like driving in a small town and being hit by an ambulance in a town that has only one ambulance. The area the tractor was stuck in was wet.  The obvious solution is to wait for it to dry up then simply drive it out of the rut.  However, it rained more, a lot more and the tractor sunk even deeper, all the way up to the axel. So what now?  Of course, wait for it to dry again and get a bigger tractor to pull ours out, which we did and we love our neighbors for it. No lessons to be learned from this story really, unless I should state the obvious; mow when it’s dry or, if not, avoid the mud.  Stuff happens; we deal with it and move on as we have for almost nineteen years. Summer’s almost here and mowing season begins soon!