I did spend a week in county Victoria helping out with a group of about 200 people completing various projects and helping out where they could with Bushfire Relief. It was a fairly emotional time, particularly in Marysville – to see the devastation in the town, had to be seen to be believed and felt. Look over the town from a nearby hill, it looks like a new estate with slabs the only thing really visible – sadly its all some people were left with. The terrain around the area is intriguing, I wont say nice because it is far from nice but it is interesting and makes you glad for what you have. It was cold and wet for the first few days we were up there, but we had a place to stay and a house to go back too, some people are still living in tents and caravans. The recovery will be long, houses can be rebuilt in time, but the scenery will be take a long time to repair. I would like to go back again, at least to drive through and see how it is going, and plan to do so on the way to or from the Winton V8 Supercar round next year I think.

Below are some of the photos that I took, didn’t take heaps, because it felt weird taking photos of people’s loss.

Also being quite busy getting my veggie garden happening, got all my plants in and dripper system in on the weekend of 17/18 October. I planted 4 Might Red Tomato’s, 8 Roma Tomato’s, 6 corn, 8 capsicum, 6 zucchini and some bok choy. The bok choy has been eaten by what looks like birds or caterpillars, same with some zucchini but not as bad and one roma tomato plant has gone missing. Hopefully by Christmas I will be picking home grown veggies. In a separate garden I have 4 new chili plants and a strawberry plant (which has sort of split into 3 plants) from last year. I will hopefully be picking strawberries soon – there is only a few but they are ripening – photo will come of gardens and the first fruits.

Thinking back about it and it all sort of fits in, our head company purchased a company in the US similar to ours here (similar but also very different). The talks very early on were about integrating the 2 companies and how this would go. So I put my proposal up about how this would occur and it was basically shot to pieces and they didn’t want to spend the money. No one had a better idea and basically 6 months on we have gotten almost no where down that path.

However, thanks to some major prompting over the last few weeks approval has been granted for my project to go ahead. It doesn’t mean a lot of work for us, however it does mean a little but it is my project and I am looking forward to the odd hours I may have to work to communicate with the guys in the US.

They have fairly regular “competitions” to win something, the most recent was to win a chance of winning a Million Dollars. I entered knowing that I would receive a phone call about getting their services – this didn’t bother me because I wanted to know how much roof restoration was going to cost anyway.

I received a phone call from them telling me I hadn’t won, but I was one of the lucky consolation prize winners and I had won $500 off any of their products (I think everyone would be offered this I am sure). I told them I would be home the next day with another contractor coming around and if someone could come around then they would be able to other than that it would be too hard to organise.

Eugene came around they got up on the roof and inspected the roof and said it was bad. He did a few measurements then came inside and started the whole sales spiel – how their product was better than everyone else etc. I told him I was just after a price – he proceeded to give me a price of $8,400. I said thanks but I wasn’t prepared to spend that sort of money. So he started the push and talking about making it into a display home with a sign up for 20 weeks and that I would have to provide names of 3 people and 3 before and after photos as part of the deal, for this they would knock off $1,500. He rang his boss to confirm that and it was fine at their end.

I told him thanks but I was just after a price and it was still too high to proceed with anything today. He wasn’t happy with no for an answere, so he rang his boss again to see if they could do anything else for me in regards to the price. I mentioned $4,000 (thinking there was no way they could offer it to me for half the price) as a decent figure, he told his boss that also. They managed to get the price down to $4,400 – the display home sign had to be up for 32 weeks, I had to provide names of 6 people and 6 before and after photos. I said its a good price but I am not signing up today it was never my intention too I was after pricing and that was all. He wasn’t particularly happy but he accepted it in the end, he rang his boss to inform him and this is where the fun really ramped up.

His boss (Phil Brooks) wanted to speak with me, he explained rather rudely that he had gone to extreme lengths to get the discounts he got for me (extreme lengths in 2 x 30sec phone calls is interesting) and proceeded to ask me why I wasn’t signing up today. I explained to him that I told the initial call operator I was only after pricing so I knew how much I needed to budget and that I wasn’t ready to put $8,000 on the table today. His rudeness then went to the extreme by telling me that he no longer wanted to deal with me and the company did not want my business – not sure what he said after that because at that point I hung up and nicely asked Eugene (the salesman who attended my house) to leave.

It actually gets better – about an hour later there was a knock at my door (I still haven’t got a door bell yet). It was a lovely lady with a Bramalco shirt on – what was she doing here I thought. Well she was actually from Bramalco Streamline (or Streamline Bramalco not sure which) trying to sell me a different Bramalco product – I told her my sob story about Bramalco then asked her nicely to leave because I wanted nothing to do with Bramalco ever again.

Since all this occurred my brother in law came over and doesn’t reckon the roof is too bad and says there are probably better things to spend my money on around the house than doing the roof at this stage and I would take his word over some Bramalco salesman any day.

What tipped me over the edge yesterday was a salesman from Corporate Express ringing about APC products. I don’t mind the cold callers, I can normally get rid of them pretty easily but this guy was persistent and was very annoying and actually didn’t even listen to what I was saying – I find that last bit extremely rude and didn’t appreciate that, probably should have spoken to his boss.

To make matters worse today I received another phone call from Corporate Express – this time it was a different guy trying to sell Lenovo products. Again he wouldn’t take no for an answer and was very pushy. He even started the spiel about the 30% government capital expenditure tax deduction – I have heard the spiel from a few people now, it goes something like this – if you buy capital equipment you get 30% of the cost back from the government. In a round about way that is correct – but its only a deduction we don’t actually receive a cheque back from the government for 30% of the cost.

I understand that suppliers are only trying to cover their own asses but where have they been for the last 5 years, I never (and now will never) deal with Corporate Express for IT Products (I don’t believe we even deal with them for stationary supplies, despite the fact they are just around the corner) because of the total lack of respect show by 2 of their sales people.

For us the cost is the most important aspect when making a purchasing decision and 90% of our IT equipment purchases are done online and 95% of those purchases are completed without a problem. We have in the past had excellent relationships with local suppliers who supplied product as well as support for the product, but today the support is provided by myself and we aren’t required to pay the additional price which is being asked for by these types of suppliers. We still have regular contact with at least 2 of these suppliers they understand our needs and regularly are able to provide pricing which is very close to online suppliers for large scale printers and wide format printers in particular but sadly for basic parts and PCs they are unable to compete with the online retailers and Statice Ice.

Apart from the issues with the Corporate Express guys, I have had ERP system vendors contact me, mobile application vendors contact me and other hardware vendors contact me 99% of them we have never had a relationship with in the past. Our 2 locals suppliers make contact about once a month to make sure we are still operating and to generally have a chat about business – they are phone calls I enjoy, because they aren’t trying to force me into buying anything.

update: Corporate Express rang again today – that is 3 times in 2 days. I told them to take me off their contact list and don’t want to be contacted by them again – the guy was reasonable about it – lets see if they ring again
another update: Corporate Express rang again today – I told the guy it was the fourth call in the week and he didn’t seem to think it wasn’t too bad – I told him I didn’t appreciate it, he assure me they wont ring again.

Why? We had a major job finally completed which I believe was about 16% of total sales for the month but even without that sale we would still have had a month which would have been in the top 3 months of recent times (last 4 years of records I have).

Will it continue? Yes and no, we are pretty much in a niche market, we service sections of the large mining trucks that are used mainly in open cut mining operations. We have customers including OZ Minerals, BHP, Rio Tinto and others. I mention those three because they are regularly in the news. Many of our customers have made announcements that projects are being put on hold including construction, exploration and some have even started to reduce the amount of ore they are digging up. They are doing this because the current price of many of the metals they are digging up has reduced so much that it is costing more to dig holes than they are getting on the market for their product. If they are stopping the actual mining process this is where we start to get hit. If they used to run 20 trucks 24 hours a day, and now they are running 10 trucks 12 hours a day that is a significant reduction is hours the trucks are doing therefore their maintenance schedules are being extended. To add to that they have trucks parked up which have parts on them they can remove and replace once maintenance is due further extending our maintenance schedules. Luckily for us we are able to be very price competitive against the OEMs which makes us a better proposition than the OEMs – also as we manufacture many of our own parts our costs aren’t really increasing but as the OEMs import into Australia and the reduction in the value of the AU$ vs US$ we are able to further stretch the $$ savings we are passing onto our customers.

I believe we will continue through this current greed driven mess and come out a stronger better performing company through the processes we are currently implementing. We are currently in the process of integrating one of the other companies within our group within our systems to be able to seamlessly compare data and grow both of our businesses beyond our current scope. It is going to be a fairly major focus shift for us from a service driven company to also focus on general parts sales, but I believe with the correct planning and people in place we will be able to significantly grow our business to within 5 years double sales – but only if the right people are recruited to drive the parts sales side of the business. However we can’t let our service drop or else within 5 years our sales could stagnate which isn’t a good thing either.

As a side note, OZ Minerals are in an interesting situation at the moment, they are $1billion+ in debt and due to markets crashing and in turn base metals pricing crashing they cant afford to repay their debts, they are currently awaiting the outcome of the Financial (or Federal I cant remember which) Investment Review Board (FIRB) investigation into a total purchase by Minmetals (a Chinese government owned company). Of course this will release OZ Minerals of the debt but will also hand ownership of one of the biggest mines (Prominent Hill) to overseas ownership.

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With no one in the house all day a get home to an oven and have to try and cool it down before I go to bed. To make matters worse it appears my air conditioner isn’t working properly.

It appears that the main area is working but I don’t appear to be able to switch any of the bedrooms on

I hope to get some to look at it but I am sure the techs will be very busy so I might have to wait awhile.

We still have another 6 days left of 35+ degree temps so hopefully I don’t get too hot in that time.

I have a good panorama photo I took at work Friday that I will post up if I get permission.

Now onto some other notable events during the year:

January

February

March

April

India fills the sky with more junk 10 satellites launched at once – I guess they need to keep up with the demand for call centre bandwidth somehow

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

2008 Notable Deaths
Stephen Walker
Ashley Cooper
Clinton Grybas – an awesome TV and Radio commentator – his knowledge of his subject was superb, to bring a man such as Rex Hunt to tears whilst doing a tribute to him on radio shows the respect he had earnt at such a young age.
Sir Edmund Hillary – we claim him to be an Aussie, but he is a NZ Adventurer
Heath Ledger
Roy Scheider
Charlton Heston
Isaac Hayes
Michael Crichton
Mark Felt
Kerryn McCann
Richard Marsland
Jane McGrath
Mark Priestley
Allan Scott

I may add to my lists over the coming days if I can think of anything else.

If I don’t see you over this festive season, I hope you have a great Christmas and happy new year, stay safe but enjoy yourself.

We were bought out by a US based company that is basically buying up a number of businesses in a similar market to us to get better of economies of scale. The other companies are more parts orientated whereas we are more service orientated so it will be interesting to see how things go. It has been less than 2 months since the changeover occured and we have had fairly poor sales since, so it will be interesting times ahead I think.

Personally I think it can only get better once everything is worked out and how we work with our sister companies into the future. Well I am looking forward to it at least – might be able to organise myself a trip to the US to visit the parent company – one can only hope.