In the story of every buisness, many lessons will be learned.

Here are three of said lessons:

How to Lose Friends and Alienate LGS Owners

It’s come to our attention that a number of operators, or prospective PhyzBatch-9000 customers, thought that the “non-disparagement clause” of our Lease Agreement was, for lack of a better word… icky.
The intention of this particular piece of legal voodoo was twofold:

1. We considered the PhyzBatch Operator/Producer relationship to be that of business partners.
2. We wanted to disincentivize potentially frustrated customers from venting said frustrations in the public forum, instead of coming to us directly.

This has, as you likely might have guessed, not worked out as well as we had thought.

The most obvious reason for this is that the ONLY way to stop people venting in public is to make sure they have nothing to vent about. The second obvious reason is that telling people NOT to vent in public only creates another thing to vent about.

Ultimately, the health of any market is determined in large part by the flow of honest, accurate and uncoerced information - far be it for us to stand in its way!

So - in the spirit of science, grace and good governance - we took out the clause and we admit it wasn’t our best call.
Good riddance!

If You and Your Customers Have the Same Goal - Don’t Stand in Their Way:

The second change to our way of doing things regards what we used to call “Usage-Based-Billing”.
This was an additional charge that users would incur after they sorted a certain number of cards each month. Users could select different plans with different per-card fee structures, based on the volume of cards they expected to sort every month.

Our thinking was as follows:

“Using the machine causes the need for maintenance. Maintenance costs money. More use = more money.”

However - it turns out our machines DO NOT increase in maintenance cost correlating to usage. In FACT it seems that these babies operate more smoothly the more they operate - like a prized racing horse or a commercial aircraft. It’s really inactivity that causes the most issues.

Funny, huh?

Because putting operators in a position where they are actively thinking “I need to use the machine less to save money” is the EXACT opposite of what we designed the PhyzBatch-9000 to do, we have eliminated all per-card fees! Secondly - because no fees means that each lease is technically unlimited - we also did away with usage-based lease tiers! Huzzah!

So sort! Sort until you simply cannot sort any more!

We solemnly swear that we will walk-backwards on any decision that can be proven to be a) hurtful to all parties involved or b) icky.

The Pursuit of Property

Lastly - we are currently in the final stages of polishing up our new Purchase and Lease-to-Own agreements. As any home-renter-turned-owner will (may) tell you: there’s just something more satisfying about ownership.

This has been in development for some time now and we’re really excited to offer our PhyzBatch operators the opportunity to own their very own machine. The path to this point has been lengthier than anticipated simply due to the myriad conditions, clauses and costs associated with transferring ownership of a machine that costs roughly as much as a quality used vehicle

Our present lease plans, as it turns out, are comparatively straightforward: we provide a machine and guarantee its useful operation. The cost per month is the rough total cost of these services, divided by the number of machines plus overhead. Boom.

Warranties, useful life guarantees, parts and labor, interest rates, depreciation, tax incentive programs, deductibles… More than just buzzwords to be thrown around at a power lunch - each of these conditions needs to be labored over and construed to ensure that the agreement works for all parties both in the short and also long term!

Unexpectedly, investigating these details lead to discussions that were ethical, and even metaphysical in nature: what do we really want to achieve with the PhyzBatch? What are our values as a company? What does it all mean, man?? This exercise delved up what we all know but too often gets left unsaid: we provide value for the TCG industry. Any plan that doesn’t do that is not worth doing.

Our new agreements will be released as soon as the ink dries on the last dotted ‘i’ and crossed ‘t’.

In the interim, be advised that any new lease plans can be upgraded to Purchase or Lease-to-Own, so no time will be lost if you decide to begin a lease now, with the intention of upgrading later!