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.