From 500,000 miles flown to zero
GEORGE: Last year, between you and myself if we took our just your base miles flown, we did literally over half a million miles around the world. Multiple times, all different directions, missing each other at airports and just doing that.
GEORGE: Not because we want to do that and be away from our families. It’s just the nature of our business and overnight, we went from a local manufacturing type of company to a global company with manufacturing and partners around the world. So to go from that to almost at the halfway point in 2020, given the pandemic and everything, it’s just a crazy contrast to basically have flown zero miles this year or a few, to what we did last year.
CHRIS: It’s probably the biggest thing we’ve prided ourselves on over the years, it’s just our customer service. Our responsiveness. Our ability to drop everything and work as hard as we can to right any wrong or whatever it may be but just to service the hell out of any customer we have and part of that is that travel. Whether it’s a meeting, we’ll be there tomorrow. If there is a potential issue or question, troubleshooting needed, we’ll be there tomorrow and I’ll be on a plane there, I’ll be on a plane here.
GEORGE: You see this, that’s why I have it up over our wall. That’s the first year when we launched. That’s the backpack that we each had, and that year we did a little less we did about 200,000 miles each, but that represents what we do. You’ve got a problem on a Thursday and it’s in London, we will be there Sunday night to be there Monday. That’s kind of been our mentality all along and it will continue, but now it’s just more of a virtual approach to meet their needs.
CHRIS: It’s almost shifted us in a, I don’t want to necessarily say a way better, it’s made us respond in a different way. So now we’re Skype calling with electrical contractors, we have electricians on the phone, and we have the laborers on the phone. We’re trying to troubleshoot things like that. We’re on site working with installs and explaining how to install these massive one off, custom chandeliers that we would typically be overseeing the entire time during installation. We’re now doing that remotely. Where we essentially have one of their laborers holding up a camera, so we can talk with the electrician and walk him through how it all gets put together.
GEORGE: And it’s acceptable, it’s accepted now, it’s the norm. It’s not, hey we’re not getting on a plane. It’s become the norm but it’s beautiful to be able to ship from that and still have that mindset.
