Back when I was 21, I took a leave of absence from my stone fabrication career to work on a small cattle ranch in Montana. That I got hired on at Midnight Canyon Ranch is both a miracle and a mystery because I didn't know the first thing about hay, horses, or cows much less the fine people who did.

And yet somehow, in what must have been a momentary lapse of judgment, they overlooked my qualifications (a subject I will return to later) and hired me to come work and experience the most beautiful land I had ever laid eyes on and a six-month series of adventures I will relish for the rest of my life. May it be a long one.

One memory is vivid in my mind. It was a rare, gray, rainy day and according to the ranch manager, who was convalescing in an easy chair after a very serious horse wreck, it was a perfect day to go and light the burn pit and torch some brush piles. So, I loaded a couple of five gallon gas cans into the new blue Ford pick-up and we (the ranch manager's wife, daughter and I) drove up to the burn pit to begin our prairie pyrotechnics.

Now, the only things I had ever lit on fire up to that point were camp fires and fireworks, so pouring fuel down into a burn pit that could have hidden the ranch tractor gave me "that feeling" in the pit of my stomach (another subject I will return to later).

After thoroughly dousing the brush around the perimeter of the pit, we walked back over to the truck where I then tied an old dirty rag around a rock. The rag/rock combination was a crude, cowboy remote-control fuse as it could be lit and thrown into the pit from a safe distance.

After the rag was thoroughly engulfed, I hastily chucked it before my sleeve caught fire, and swoosh, a perfect shot right into the pit and out of site.

Then...

Nothing happened.

After another second of nothing happening, I looked over at the manager's wife with a raised eyebrow expecting further instructions and she told me she was going to move the truck. I argued back that it was unnecessary (as if I knew what I was talking about) as we were well out of harms way.

Those of you who know something about the combustibility of five gallons of gas fumes know what happened next.

I turned and took about a step and a half towards the burn pit when out of nowhere...KA-BOOM!!! A thunderous explosion and fireball roared out of that hole in the ground like a bomb had gone off, instantly turning my legs to jelly and my ear drums to ringing garbage can lids.

After collecting ourselves after the shock wave had rolled up and out of the canyon, we inspected the truck's paint and were relieved to find that all persons and equipment had escaped unscathed.

Many of my business experiences have not ended so well, usually as a result of ignoring fundamental business practices.

Below are the two topics I alluded to earlier in the article. They are only the most recent.

First: Overlooking Qualifications - As this recession has wore on, the customer has changed. Instead of impatient buyers who need the price so they can write the deposit check, we have a lot of shoppers who want a price so they can either compare it to 13 other quotes, or...merely to realize that it's way out of their price range to begin with.

We wasted a lot of time, ink, and email bandwidth quoting and following up with people who were never going to buy from us and I am embarrassed to admit how long it took me to realize this dynamic and to implement a qualifying script that identifies the buyers and weeds out the shoppers.

Immediately upon doing so, our quote volume dropped by a half and we had a lot more time to follow up and close the buyers.

Second: Ignoring "That Feeling" - Too many times, customers have given signals that they were going to be trouble. Too many times, while staring at open dates on my calendar I have pushed that feeling aside and scheduled the job only to suffer the consequences later on. The drain on staff and the strain on my mind always turn out to be far costlier than the open date on the schedule would have been.

Looking back, I can still see the ranch manager, laid up in his easy chair with a hot pack on his neck and painfully looking up at us as we laughingly recounted the morning's work. He wasn't smiling.

Aaron J. Crowley is the founder and president of FabricatorsFriend.com, the exclusive promoter of Stone Sleeve fabricator sleeves and Bullet Proof aprons. He is also the author of Less Chaos More Cash. You can reach him by email at Aaron@CrowleysGranite.com

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