Frustration!

[drcollie]

Its been a heck of week at the store. Suppliers are all over the place on missing times on order deliveries due to lack of raw materials and its making me crazy. I'll have what I am sure are good promise dates for customers and call and check 10 minutes before I fax and order in, and by the time they actually key the order we've lost the leather hides or there wasn't enough physical inventory to start with, which makes me look really bad when I have to call the customer back a week later and say 'its going to be another month'. Hate it.

But we're a hostage of the Recession and middling economy. A few years ago a supplier would have 10,000 s.f. of leather in stock of a particular color, now they keep lower inventories and might have 800 s.f. in stock (the average sofa takes about 330 s.f.). A dealer orders a sofa, loveseat and chair and its all gone. Argh! So I continue to try to do my best and be as accurate as possible at time of order, but I can't control the distribution or pull any strings to make things happen when delivery times slip....and I appreciate everyone's patience and good manners.

Speaking of good manners, I had two customers this summer that became adversarial with me and were shocked when I told them they would have to shop elsewhere. Respect is a 2-way street. One customer berated me for hours on the price of a Royal Pedic box and mattress over a two day period. How many times do you have to repeat "this is the best price i can give you" for it to sink in? When they get personal then its time for them to move on....(remarks that if I can afford an iPhone, then I can afford to give them a better price, etc.). Another customer insisted on calling the factory for every question, and then telling ME how I would handle the transaction, samples, cuttings, and guarantees that they demanded. Ahhhh....nope. Seeya! Poor manners, shouting, insults and threats will result in their order being cancelled/refunded immediately. Doesn't happen often, but I don't need the business bad enough to be verbally abused by anyone.

And speaking of Business, all in all I hear from the long-faced Sales Reps is that stores in general are having a hard time with sales and clammed up buying new stock, and manufacturers are still scrapping for new orders. I'm still (+) sales over the prior years and the reps seemed shocked when I give them a stock order, so I guess I'm doing something right. Its a pretty easy formula actually: 1) Don't put your business in debt, 2) Know your product line and if you don't know something, find out 3) Treat customers as friends 4) Don't get greedy on profits. 5) Be honest.

[Dgw9]

There are a certain small percentage (less than one percent, certainly) that are hard-wired to do things like get the best price or dictate how things must be handled (or can see blemishes no one else can or know who does the best job at anything) and they take their hard-wired routines to an extreme. We have one guy at work who described to me how the floor installers had gotten a part of his floor wrong. I saw the floor and had NO IDEA what he was talking about. He fought to get a new floor for two years--not because there was anything wrong, but because he thought there was something wrong. He is also undiagnosed obsessive/compulsive and must take odd measures to ensure his comfort at the expense of others. I rarely pass up an opportunity to mess with him.

In your position, declining their business would not be enough. I would always have to explain specifically why I was declining their business--and I'd make it a very detailed, specific and personal explanation that left no doubt that I considered them defective and/or deficient in some basic way. In doing so, it hampers their ability to make your words and actions seem OUTRAGEOUS when they tell the story to their "friends" or others who have to listen to them. Nobody really wants to tell a story where the other party told them there was definitely something wrong with them, because sometimes when you tell a story, you'll catch a certain look in the listener's eye that tells you something you didn't want to know--such as they agree with the other party!

Treasure the craziest customers--I'm sure they make the best stories!

[simplyjeff]

Frustration - What a great topic! The last several months have been full of frustrations that I never dreamed of when I started my business.

This past Spring I realized that the factory I had been using to produce my Simplicity Sofas furniture line was simply not big enough or efficient enough to process the increased orders we were receiving.

Our 4 week guaranteed ship time for our custom-made furniture had slipped to 6 weeks and was heading towards 8 weeks. On April 15, I informed the factory owner that I would be moving our production to another facility on June 15. I had extensive plans for an orderly transition that would minimize the pain of the transition for my customers. For a while we would be producing in both plants so that the customers would scarcely know that a transition was taking place. Hah!!!

The first problem that developed is that the first factory owner immediately slowed down production of our furniture dramatically. Soon we were shipping less than half as much furniture as we had been while orders continued to increase. The next problem was that the head upholsterer who had worked only on our furniture and who was extremely eager to join us in the new factory to get everything up and running quickly suddenly turned non-commital and wasn't sure whether he would come with us or not. He would not talk about why he was suddenly unsure. The next problem was that the information we were receiving from the factory was no longer accurate. We would be provided with ship dates only to find that the furniture had not even been started.

Finally on May 4 I pulled the plug, 6 weeks ahead of the carefully planned moving schedule. Over a 1 week period we moved all of the raw materials, machinery, patterns, and everything else about 1/4 mile away to another building with at least 4x as much capacity. Because of the early move, the new facility had not yet installed workstations, pneumatic lines, storage racks and many other essential things that should have been in place before we moved. Our chief upholsterer would not move with us so we needed to hire and train new upholsterers from scratch. (Several weeks later I discovered that our former upholsterer could not join us because he is an illegal immigrant and his employers were threatening to turn him and his family in if he came with us. They also promised him lots of other work which never materialized. He was laid off about a month ago.)

We were completely out of production for 3 weeks, beginning production in the new factory during the last week in May. Meanwhile May turned into the biggest sales month in our history, more than double the sales of the previous May. Customer wait times for their furniture climbed to 10-12 weeks before production could be reestablished.

From the very beginning the new factory was able to build products at triple the rate of the old factory. After a few minor glitches in the first couple of weeks, the quality of the product was even better than it had been. One of the decisions made was to go with Ultracell High Resilience foam (with a 10 yr. warranty) as the standard cushion foam rather than the polyurethane with a 1 year warranty we had used previously (which is the standard foam used by mid-priced upholstery manufacturers.)

Over 100 customers were impacted by these problems. We did not have a single cancellation. We did not have a single angry customer. The company's record of never receiving a negative review is still intact. As of last week all overdue orders have been taken care of and we are back to a 4 week delivery cycle. I am exhausted. For 3 months I practically lived in my office, doing 24 hour shifts several days each week. Every customer waiting for an order was constantly updated on the progress of the new factory and what we would be producing the following week. Every customer who waited more than 8 weeks for their furniture received a rebate check as compensation for the inconvenience they had experienced and often when they received their orders there would be a free set of throw pillows or some other unexpected gift. Overall it has been a very educational experience, and one that I never want to go through again.

Jeff Frank
Simplicity Sofas

[drcollie]

I feel for you, Jeff! I've never known a single factory move in the industry that even went well, its really difficult to do smoothly and without a hundred little problems coupled with a few really big ones. But you got through it and this time next year you'll really be humming along and glad you did it.