We Had Visitors Again This Week.
Actually, there have been quite a few in the last several weeks. The mayor of Kenosha, Keith Bosman took a plant tour two Wednesdays ago along with the Executive Director of the Kenosha Chamber, Lou Molitor and the CEO of the Kenosha Boys & Girls Club, Wally Graffen. Our state senator, Bob Wirch, did the same last Friday.
Of course, we did a little primping…although we keep our place clean visitors or not…and were pleased with the positive responses from all our guests.
The number and diversity of the visitors got me wondering what had prompted them to want to see inside our operations. We’re not new to the community. Our facility has been in operation for over a decade, and we’ve won enough awards in the last couple of years that these folks certainly know who we are.
Maybe they were all just in need of some good news for a change about business conditions in our area. That has been hard to find of late.
Well, they came to the right place. There’s plenty of good news at Xten.
We’ve been adding new customers and new projects from existing ones on a fairly regular basis, and all indications point to that continuing. Representatives of a major car company are trolling the aisles completing their due diligence. Another prospect we’ve been talking to for over 5 years seems ready to make a change. We are making space on the factory floor for new equipment and we’ve begun hiring a few new people.
In some ways, you could say this is what a business is supposed to look like…but hasn’t in our industry for several years now.
The change wasn’t accidental. Like many of our competitors, we were forced to draw in our horns a couple of years ago, but thankfully we didn’t go into hibernation… to beat an analogy to death. We kept focused on the need to grow, even when growth seemed the last possibility.
We were convinced growth would result if we focused on doing more of what brought customers the greatest value. Some solid analysis revealed that the more services we provided the lower we drove the customer’s net cost. Lower net cost, not just lower piece price, thus became our message, one we’ve moved to brand through our Multifacturing™ positioning.
Yes, we still have a valuable group of “parts-only” customers. But we figure that’s because we haven’t done a good enough job of convincing them of the additional gains they’ll realize by entrusting us with more production and distribution responsibility. But we’re working on it, and if recent history is any indication, we should have some more good news to report soon.
Sincerely,
Matthew Davidson
