Good morning everyone and welcome to our fabricator I'm sorry this slide has not been updated to our distributor roundtable our discussion topic today is sales and promotion during a crisis so we'll start by talking about how the Copa 19 pandemic has changed the way you're connecting with customers so we've assembled a panel of three distributors in our industry and they're going to share ideas and best practices For connecting virtually implementing new policies and also meeting the constantly changing expectations and regulations so I hope that each of you will be able to leave the presentation today
with some new ideas for how to promote your company and how to connect with your customers both in person and virtually before we get started I wanted to point out some other upcoming webinars that we have available you can refer to the calendar of events on our Website for more information about these events some of them are not quite up on the event calendar yet but they will be soon and you can look forward to attending some pretty exciting events that we have coming up including a virtual stone summit and a virtual presentation of our
tucker design awards in august we have three panelists today all representing distributors within the natural stone industry and ask each of them to please introduce themselves and Share a little bit about their company where they're located and about their own role within the company in the industry so we'll start first with Kevin please good morning Sarah I'm listening it's Garage Anna coming on the video and she's our head of marketing and so dealing with video and on-the-fly situations and obstacles there it is I'm Garage Anna coming today so anyway my name is Kevin Mahoney and
I'm with real Stone systems I'm the vice president of sales we are located with warehouse and offices in Detroit Troy more specifically suburb Denver and outside of LA in Ontario California we supply veneer natural stones in the industry and we sell through distribution and some markets we sell direct so we have a whole we sell commercial residential and exterior and interior products just happy to be associated with the natural stone Institute thanks for having me on today of course very glad to have you Kevin Daniel good morning my name's Daniel wood and I work with
lurvy supply we're in the Chicago market we have for wholesale locations and one retail location which is attached to one of the hosts of locations we have a sod farm and a trucking company so we're a material distribution company for the land these architectural industries and my role within it is I'm a natural stone Consultant and material consultant Asheville stone it is our biggest product line and I am a past president of the PSI NS I was there Awards Committee and thank you all so Daniel for being here today and serving on this panel for
us I don't see Rachel yet so we will keep going guess I could do a quick introduction of Rachel of course Rachel Jones is the marketing director for triton stone group and their primary location is in New Orleans but they have other locations across the country as well and they are a distributor selling slabs to they mark it with natural stone and other materials as well so we look forward to her input when she's able to join us here so the agenda for today first we're going to highlight some results of a member survey that
we've conducted as it relates to the Cova 19 pandemic well hear the experiences of each of the panelists so we'll pose the Question each panelists will have an opportunity to answer we do strongly encourage you to ask questions within the chat box and once the panelists have completed with their answers then we will go to the questions and answer those on the same slide participants again on the chat box it's within the GoToMeeting control panel and you can ask questions throughout and if we don't if they're not directly related to the topic on the slide
they may be more Relevant to a future slide then we will answer them a little later on so if we don't answer your question right away hold tight it just means that we are likely using it from are going to be answering it later on so first a little bit about our customer survey that we have recently conducted a couple of weeks ago about three weeks ago we launched our second kovat survey and its purpose was to gauge how our members were doing with the pandemic we had Conducted one in April as well to find
out how people were doing and the results showed that most companies are open though some of them are at reduced capacities so some have completely shut down but those that have been reduced maybe they still have some people working from home or they're working split shifts but for the most part people seem to be back to normal we also found that in the most recent survey most companies indicated that They had not laid off employees but the ones who did had brought them back already or had plans to bring them back very soon so just
to give you an idea of where everybody else is at in relation to you of course every location in the country is pretty significantly different it was also interesting to note that most of the respondents to the second survey had received PPP loans so that's a promising helpful way for them to keep doing business in this time but Specific to today's topic of sales and marketing during a crisis what you're seeing on the screen is the results of that question so what we saw is most companies had have been using social media probably upping what
they had already been doing and also doing virtual types of meetings and showroom visits with their clients also using email quite a bit to maintain contact and stay top of mind there was some that weren't using Digital tools at all so that was interesting to see in the people who chose other generally we're doing a mix of some of these things plus more so now on to the discussion we'll pose each question and have ten minutes for each slide and then we'll move on to the next question and the first question we have is what
are the biggest challenges or changes you've experienced in regards to government regulations employees vendors and suppliers do you have people working From home are you experiencing some supply chain disruptions government regulations have been constantly changing and it's been a struggle for a lot of people to keep up so we're gonna start with Kevin first please to just share what your company has experienced with regards to this pandemic exam regarding government regulations clearly difficult to understand and keep up with no different than doing your taxes but unfortunately our leadership CEO Have really embraced that on a
daily basis understanding the changes from the PPP to what the local regulations are and the different all 50 states that we cover in it and how we approach that and how things change so we've been on top of it on a daily basis and it requires definite focus the challenge was you know finding the time and making sure that the Cascadia message across our organization was consistent and that our people were in compliance with not only Regulations but best practices above and beyond the regulations sometimes - and what we felt was best for the customers
so that in our employees as far as safe the most important thing that safety sometimes wasn't considered in the local regulation so we had to go above and beyond that we got in our employees one of the challenges was immediately we didn't know what was going to happen what was going to happen as far as survival so there was there was some Furloughs as we bring people back and have plans to bring everybody back we really take a look at their situations and we have some employees that say have children and day care issues and
things like that so working through I just what is important - real stone but what was important to our employees and the safety and health of their families - was a challenge in making that work with everything that we have to accomplish on a daily basis from a supply chain Standpoint we felt pretty comfortable with where we were in fact our procurement team and we we secured products from all over the world about seven or eight different countries but our procurement team in our warehouse locations allowed us to state about 90 to 95% sold and
I want our normal supply is and in fact we were able to pick up business and even now we're nearing it on a weekly a daily base of similar products that are out of Stock so we were fortunate now and we're starting to see some of our vendor supply countries start to ramp back up so for us it's really managing large commercial contracts and orders and inventories and staggering those with the job timelines the appropriate so that's the biggest challenge really getting in the minutiae and micromanaging the details of supplying the product locally based on
what our chain is we're not out of anything but We're managing inventory to maximize company benefits great thanks Kevin so much for sharing all of that Daniel what have you been your biggest challenges or changes one of the first things we dealt with and and we did a lot of the same things cabin chat is regarding our facilities our employees trying to go above and beyond even if it wasn't find by an agency to create a safe play for customers um no well probably most importantly our employees well I'm one Of the things that was
a moving target was in the state of Illinois the definition of what was an essential service not a service the moving target though are all our whole fill wholesale facilities they'd open and continue service contractor a retail facility did close with month of April but we have curbside pickup online ordering and that was kind of overwhelmed so we did everybody on you keep everybody busy we didn't peepee Pete loans for all three Of our company far more company dollars I so and then did have a couple employees that did get kovetz they had them that
created labor issues with a bill our ability at our facilities we make honey then we have a couple employees some of their relatives were diagnosed but they felt it was appropriate inquiry themselves and it not works tried to be also all that but it did create a little bit of shortage of staff because Nort Relation how this play out our senior management said when this all started you know we're not sure what this is going to look like we're not going to address anything for salaries anything and after forth or business I knew all the
contractors had a lot of backlog we were probably going to be good for that and then we everybody know and we'll see what it looks like that fortunately for us we've been busier than we ever could have possibly some of us did work Remotely I'm one of those individuals that lost that so I worked remote a lot as two of our some of our the people who do purchasing our management we didn't have a lot of virtual meetings with clients and I did have to go deliver samples on numerous occasions and sometimes that was to
the city where they only had one architect who would show up her day in the office and I would mask up bring my my hand way piece and everything and tried to be as Protective as I possibly could and respectful sometimes it was delivering samples to their personal homes because they were and we have had some supply issues biggest products that we sell out of all our natural stone they were shut down for two months so fortunately we take a real hard look at balancing inventory and how much cash underground with those ones that we
really need to let them know and on the fall it's already a fair amount of at least enough To get started and now we're waiting for them to continue we need their we did have some offshore reorder from all over the world issues and if those countries shut down and being able to work and supply that it's the least down a little bit we've been pretty good through all this great Daniel thanks so much for sharing so just to kind of summarize what I'm hearing is that real stone had a big advantage going in because
they were so Well stocked and so some of the materials that other people couldn't get they still had stock of which was an advantage to them real stone stayed open well the reason it had to close for a while but still did some delivering of samples and try to keep up with client communication throughout that time and of course those government regulations it's just hard to keep up with the definitions and the changing procedures for how to do business and how to keep Everybody safe I don't see anything in the chat box but again if
any of our attendees have anything to ask our panelists or anything to add to the discussion I do encourage you to use that chat box to get involved with with our conversation today our next topic is how are you staying top of mind we have traditional media that a lot of us utilize to reach customers email social media not so much with the distributors on radio and TV but curious about if you Increased or decreased your advertising that you had planned for the year did you increase the social aspects or the digital tools to outreach
and we'll start this one with Daniel please how are you at lower these staying top of mind well we kind of stayed the course with advertising we already had a lot of things in place and website we really tried to stay extremely neutral our messaging as things seem to get more and more political we really didn't part of That either direction we don't really do radio we did also have a campaign that was already in place or hyper targeting so that has been a beneficial actually he if we did this and sent this to this
person did we've seen a 25% increase in our email list which is interesting so I think as everybody was quarantine they were working remotely that a lot of people just came to our website Eden and clicked on do you want to have our email Sent on a regular thing so that was interesting also one thing that I noticed personally was hitting bran with so many emails with just Co bits off and I thought I could just a flood of emails is everybody's home working remotely and trying to connect I tried to be very sensitive to
when I sent something what the content was I had a value something that was definitely you need to try and put something in the subject line that would catch their eye and then just in General to keep keep them positive and everybody it was it was all kind of pretty heavy there for a while and just thanks Daniel and I can I can maybe speak for a couple of people when I appreciate you being sensitive to that because I was also one of the ones maybe a little too many kovat emails Kevin who how did
you guys stay top of mind during this advert eyes through radio or TV so for us and we do send out quite a few emails on a weekly monthly Basis to the different segments in our CRM we learn more about social media and post we tried to immediately when it's first starts just from a sales standpoint have to be honest that was a little bit bully for a day or two and I'm just like we got to get in front of people as fast as possible what are we gonna do and then you take a
step back from the situation and realize it's it's not about us and how we're trying to panic And survive but rather what are we gonna do to be there for people that need us that are still trying to figure this thing out too so we try to tailor the narrative of our emails and our social campaigns to kind of follow that along and just really have an underlying theme that we're available to our customers clients and people in the design community I'm trying to stay stuck on the top of mind and then we're gonna talk
about this another slide or two but We translated that into taking advantage of the natural stone Institute's CEU program and trying to just be there for people and touch as many people as we can and see if we could help we didn't increase or reduce our advertising we took a look at the budgets as the were and ours a really in house for different things that we do we also took the chance to sharpen our tool as far as what our messages whose it's going to the more segments of that and how our Whole team
even our sales team is interacting at social media and learning from that we created a in-house weekly peer-to-peer presentations regarding different social medias different forms of contact there ten minutes we would get together almost like a huddle break somebody would do it one day somebody would do it another day and then in turn the hope was they go forward and the social media the Facebook Instagram the world wide web is your mom or grandma Would say becomes something that we get better at and that was the goal because you really don't know whether it's zoom
GoToMeeting or all those things require repetition and practice so an increased focus on what we're doing how we're doing it blocking into a clean of it really narrowed down to no difference in Daniel we increased our CRM the amount of people we proactively won at increasing the design community the people that Were in our system while trying to manage the unsubscribes that we saw from all the emails that we were sending out we still are looking at that and whether our web traffic was up due to covet our lead web samples were up due to
covet or not that will shake out and we look at it all the time every week and every single day so just trying to some live thoughts you know it's not solved yet but those are things we think about day in and day out I wanted to share we had a pre meeting yesterday that are on Monday they had Rachel as well she had some bigger changes than others because coverings was supposed to happen in her city so they had some extra promotions planned during that so they had to really shift focus and did end
up decreasing some of their traditional advertising and like Daniel and Kevin did a lot more on social media at digital but again it's nice to see everybody's trying to keep Sensitive to the situation make sure that you're addressing the pandemic but not overly focusing on it so we do have a couple of good questions here one did either of you do any special promotions in light of the pandemic I guess I can go first I am not aware that we really did anything aside from trying to be more accommodating with curbside pickup online orders also
at our wholesale facilities we gave companies the option of having the driver pull up And one of our employees would come out and bring them the paperwork that give to the loaders we also did let them know we appreciated if only the driver did come into the facility not the whole crew obviously immunity we didn't really do any special promotions we just tried to be more accommodating danuel the promotion or that that cost aspect of the products when the retail falls off the cliff we didn't really didn't even think about That we were just trying
to manage still the commercial and residential business that was still going on and the value-add was we felt the promotion no different than Daniel in lurvy and we were kind of concerned because we lost all of April at our retail garden center how that was going to look for the year and now here five weeks or so later we're already up 20% it's hard to tell what's going on so we're grateful to have been an essential Service and to have been able to stay open and provide the community with the products and service that they
do yeah that's great so people stay at home but they still had projects that they're looking to do maybe more so now being home and seeing everything and spending more time in those spaces they're looking to improve them another question what behavior did you see from the a and D community we interact with the AV community on a daily and weekly basis in Fact that's it that's a huge component of our business is specifications that are driven by those folks and the behavior really was one of us step back we actually participated no different in
some not in the roundtable but watching a lot of ASID and iid a and other associations and what they were thinking and how they were reacting so the first step we thought was how do we present ourselves to make available for people that are staying still have projects Working from home and in supply whether it was delivering samples shipping them out to their homes and going above and beyond that way with information working through things without really a hard time line or a time line on things that we didn't know just just being relevant forefront
of mine to what does it mean interact with the end all these designers in in the future and what is that what is the function of design going to be and how is that going to Affect our relationship with our products in that A&E community as well so there was the immediate and then there was the big picture which we took in consideration in offering our our presentations and our CEUs over the past several months to the designers really worked well for us and we were able to get into ones that needed us and in
needed credits and or wanted to see some of our products and were able to put almost 3,000 people through our programs since the Kovach lockdown started yeah that's phenomenal you've done a great job with a CEU program and we'll talk a little bit more about that on another slide so the next question that we have is what digital tools are you using to connect with customers and if you can be specific please about what types of software you're using virtual showroom visits have you implemented more tools on your website like online Quotes we talked a
little bit on the last topic about webinar C use and Kevin can share a little bit more perspective and Daniel I believe can as well we'll start this one with Kevin please what digital tools are you using we were a couple processes for digital we went to zoom we experienced some digital problems when we had large amounts of people we had over a hundred people we had some quality issues we have a camera right now that I'm on and we upgraded Halfway through the program the camera and the speaker unit they're wonderful and they allowed
us to have one-on-one sessions and show that the beauty and characteristics natural characteristics of our product very well so that was a challenge so the tools there are tools and we wanna just we're still using zoom at the current time but you are constantly looking at your your data and how that controls that we did have virtual showroom visits where people Could come in we could talk about products with specific product shows and visits that were open to the public and then we had people scheduled those one-on-one we even were able to do new dealer
and distributor trainings from the showroom we have one rep did a wonderful happy hour where she shipped out snacks and little cocktail mixers and samples and you know 20 people opened them up early I'm on screen and we talked about Products procedures processes while we had a little bit of happy hours so creativity and fun what people are willing to do was was part of that we didn't really have an online quote system but we have a live interaction with our leads so if a lead comes through it's no different than somebody calling on the
phone and saying hey I need a quote on this so our team accident reacts to those our insight team and our outside team very Effectively in fact they like those give me the good leads they want the leads right and it's there they have to be able to close them and and they handle them in order to get more leads are for closers again Ross references those of you that are older and like good movies [Music] for us on a weekly basis and I was about three hours from our office but it was it was
almost essential that we were feeling connected us personally in our Team our ability to get in front of people the value of the the CEU was one of your tools Sarah is the CEO events and that would post our events is public and that would get people that were in the designing community they didn't know about us and they would sign up for the event and they would attend the webinar CEUs the webinar CEUs were given by Shea and myself Shea Ratner a longtime employee start and we were able to roll through really just one
we just changed And will start next week with the second one that we're going to give that has a two and then we found another one in stone tiles that we're going to give as well so having that four CEU and the ability to give these virtually was incredible for us we had people sometimes we'd have 150 registrants and we'd wind up with a hundred people on there was attrition or churn rate through that we coupled that with marketing marketing Did a nice job of piggybacking our product presentation so we had a Wednesday and we
still do it when actually today is you guys even though we didn't market this but Wednesday Friday format where we would go product presentation and CEU on Friday at noon Eastern Time and and by doing that what seem to have a rhythm so our existing customer base across the country we saw a lot of repeat people on the CEUs so they're Learning about best practices and and the next one stone institute and we'd see the same of the lot repeat offenders on our friday calls to it was exciting we started to have some friends and
we started to have different people from firms with different firms on our CEUs they would the next week three more people from the same firm would be on so that was fun to see and really at the end of the day just felt comfortable be able to connect and no Different than gym with the chat on this open up the chat and answer questions and be able to follow up afterwards we didn't know what it meant and the very first one we gave was in my opinion I gave it and it's my fault there was
a train wreck because presenting to a camera without faces appreciate this when you have a room and you can hand out samples and talk to people that's wonderful you gauge reaction it's interactive well you Can't see a single face and you can't hand them a product yeah I was stupid but that was fun we evolved and we all critiqued each other respectfully sometimes I'm sure my employees didn't behind me back but that's that is a genesis of where we started and where we ended up utilizing those CDU's and gosh we are thankful and going forward
we know the mindset is hey more people are open to these virtual visits and it's more cost-effective it can be respectful We don't know what people's wishes are even if this thing opened up the day wishes are as far as seeing us so we have to be respectful of that utilize our virtual tools thank you Kevin a lot a lot for us to consider there I love that idea of the happy hour kit basically that you send out with the drinks and samples everybody's feels a little bit more like they are actually together that was
all sharing good job Shay Daniel how about ler fees um yeah that's it was all great and one of the things that we did at our facilities was really shift some of our marketing budget to more self-help displays so that as people came to our sites and moved around they could maintain social distancing there was a lot of information already there for them that may have been previously delivered by an employee so we tried to really help make it easy for them to come and get the Information that they need and feel safe um we've
we're really already working on online quotes and debt just benefits elevated we were gonna maybe do a little bit more later in the year where we just push that forward but the program is already in place that investment was there they always offer a lot of webinar CEUs I did a bit more this one of the things that we that was in our benefit was we already had a lot of creating place every year we're always trying to Raise the bottom we didn't just finished dual every University every year where if speakers come in and
talk about particular topics we did that every week all through January in February finished that and had hundreds and hundreds of people different customers thank you know so that was really quite fortuitous and then in the end the webinar information that I send out always includes all the natural stone and classes number certified speaker all the Stuff for architectural record the ones that I personally done any customized so we just let him know there's lots of options here to get information we also have already had in place about a virtual showroom stuff so we have
product line specialists in all categories they already had interviews in the sense or programs about them talking about this particular type of stow in our plants our place in their yard and how to utilize them so all that Was readily accessible online we gonna try to remind them that was there another thing y'all got used to zoom anything else that's out there alone GoToMeeting sorry I'm so I think that is proven like Kevin said to help us realize you know we don't always necessarily mean to be in front of somebody but we can be in
this sort of format it's still not quite the same it is more cost effective and you do need to consider what how they want to Interact with us it's just one more tool that I think we're all going to be using on a go-forward basis and you know when you think about it it's kind of like duh why aren't we doing this before why would you set people all over the country and travel budgets and all this and maybe the in person thing is the thing that's really going to make these platforms on a go-forward
basis and have it be just as effective and have them feel just as good about interacting with Us and part of their team and partnership great thanks so much Danielle and I did want to just add a couple of things from Rachel they added a live chat feature on their website called avocado kind of an interesting name but she found that very helpful during this time also had implemented an appointment process where before it was basically you know walk in and someone will be able to help you but they did start encouraging the appointments and
Do you feel that they will keep that going and we have had a couple of questions related to you know which one of these tools do you think you'll keep up with as we move on but I'm gonna table that question for now since our times up on the slide because we do have a question that will dedicate a full 10 minutes to here in a few minutes so our next question what procedures have you implemented for in-person meetings are you requiring Appointments now how are you sanitizing is there certain procedures that you have in
place to make sure everything stays clean and safe are you requiring customers to wear masks are you guys wearing masks yourselves do your employees feel like they're in a safe environment and do you feel like your clients walk into your place knowing that they're going to be safe as well we'll start this one with Danielle please yes we we already kind of had a Program called lurvy Connect where people could make an appointment make sure that we connect them with the appropriate person and then what they want to come and see and experience with us
they have the best experience we also have conference rooms that they can schedule customers have our specialists come in they could utilize the flat screen route and tag materials a lot of that was in place we just reminded people about that again you definitely Ramped up a lot to much higher levels of cleaning sanitizing greater frequency we kind of evolved with that and then eventually the plexiglass over all of our walk-up counters in a hurry customers and and one of the villages or one of our bigger facility and dated that everybody had to wear masks
we didn't company might be where everybody even the loaders out of the yard everybody has them masks available to customers our employees know they have The option to ask a customer prepare amazing so we just wanted everybody to feel real safe that was quite a priority still at that level now we get we also added ingress egress lane so incoming goes this way mr. Slaton Wow they kind of like out of everything that's been we also had curbside pickups available for those who wanted to do that and we still have that in place Thank You
Danielle Kevin Kevin I think you're muted I'm sorry my wife My wife was controlling the new button that's why she likes it so when everything first went crazy you know we locked everything down there was no admitting nobody was allowed in all the doors were locked even employees couldn't come and go as they please because we even know how to react most recently yesterday we were able to thanks to our operations team we're able to actually create a program for our whole team that's very clear and and We're all keeping each other accountable what's included
is sign-in at the doors for our showrooms where you get your temperature tested there's a bullet mask there we don't have a retail environment but we got people scheduling appointments here I had to schedule this appointment from 9:45 to 11:00 o'clock so that the sales reps in this area if they have appointments or have people coming in they had their blocks of time and so customers will be wearing masks In the facility I'll put my mask back on I'll wipe down this table after I'm done there's cleaner you can't see it but it's on the
table in front of me so the surface is respectful and how we stay keep our social distance e from each other those logical things we coupled that with understanding what each state regulation was and that was on a safety document that was published internally for us so that we know how to do business We are by appointment only here and we are considering our mindset is that everybody that we want to call on is by appointment only - there's no drop ins there's no I'm gonna go see this guy it's it has to be operated
from a totally respectful point it has to be on there on the calendar and when we talk about it on their week least they they need to talk about that my employees are salespeople with with us so that that's important for in-person meetings because Most of our impersonal meetings were out with distributors dealers architects and designers so we have to take the mindset that it's by appointment only we have masks gloves sanitizing wipes I think our folks feel safe and I haven't heard that we wouldn't put anybody in an unsafe situation in fact if somebody
feels unsafe about going somewhere we actually talked about if if you have a client or customer or contact is acting cavalier about this Maybe we should separate ourselves from them because they're clearly putting themselves at risk and we don't want any of our people being at risk but it potentially infect their neighbor or their grandma or their grandpa or their children at the end of the day that is the total focus from a safety and human aspect if we want to focus on and will continue to monitor the regulations as the yesterday's document eternally was
very specific and very thorough and and Just what we needed to move forward and have a clear understanding we'll continue to monitor that on a state-by-state city-by-city basis that's great so really you know the whole concept of a cold call and dropping in on somebody whether it's going out to the architectural firms or expecting clients coming into the showroom there's really not a lot of potential for that moving forward because we need to block the spaces Define the social distance and make sure the things are being Santa science in between yes yes indeed I experienced
a lot of where people just weren't open or they didn't want you to come in or you know they wanted you to just I'll get you later you know where normally I might be bringing out some printed format you know I was all loaded for bear and ready to go start distributing you know stacks of printed literature from our vendors and airy and Boom yeah making sure all that was available digitally and giving them links to those resources and reminding them that they were there how to find it so that they could get to the
appropriate information make the right decisions fire for beautiful items or we could ship them whatever they felt comfortable then before we move on to the next one we did have a good question here has there been an increase in physical sample requests since they Can't stop in and see them for us yes we have seen an increase that it goes hand in hand because we're only in three locations across the country but we serve all 50 states our web des leads to samples and more samples to the design community to the houses to their homes
so they can see those and they start asking what do I do with this just hang on to it or you know if you've made your selection do with it what you want it's just part of doing business but that Increase per sample request and an interaction has definitely gone up we've kind of seen the same sort of pattern and I think it was last year that I actually had worked with them to help us get a better sampling program it used to be we deliver heavy one by one stone I notice that a lot
of the design firms they were kind of like necessarily want that they just wanted a small chip that represented color and textures so I moved to they're kind of like our Educate Kitt's sarah that we put out for the university the NSI so yeah exactly so we had a it's like a wine box and we have four bike were samples that are half inch thick or maybe a little thicker internally like the dimensional stones that we carry and already and we're distributing a lot of those but I've distributed about groups to particular ones we've also
tried to improve our imagery we have a what those are gonna Look like homerun shots of when they're installed that's always kind of hard to get but try and sneak out it add those on whenever and wherever possible and store those so that people can be inspired of what they can do with those particular materials great ideas thank you thank you both we'll move on here to our final question what positive changes have come out of this pandemic we've talked about a lot of tools that you've implemented Or ones that you already had in place
that maybe you weren't using quite as much until this happened but what sorts of things do you see coming out of this pandemic that you will continue to use and find value in we'll start this one with Kevin for us the amount of meetings in the talk time and even the inner team communication lends itself to moving forward some of our strategies internally to stay on task with how we're going to service our markets we Came up with local plans and we came up with away plans which would mean out of market and travel because
we've really limited that travel but really focused on markets where we have direct contact with on a daily basis so as things start to open up we've got a plan in place that services somebody that's sick hours away and we've got a plan in place for somebody that's in a three-hour radius of where you're at so for us that just meant we become more professional We've improved our game on servicing those people and controlling cost on travel and how we're going to be presenting products going deeper in in those home game situations and be more
effective in those away game situations as far as really in our messes virtually and sending samples and packages and images and what that entails so that we felt that that would is a wonderful positive change it's it's allowed us to really focus on that through this time We haven't wasted any time we didn't stop doing business we were we were talking about it every single day and what's going on what do we do next and and some of that some of our team would be like ice things changed so much well yeah we're trying to
figure it out we want to we want to be a viable company through this and come out stronger when everything takes bad guys just like Larry experienced parent seeing all those growths that's so wonderful for me To hear because generally our business tales behind that a little bit so I'm excited but the ability to look at new products that we were already looking at at bringing on but really escalate the launch times that those products are going to come out and the different segments that we service so we really work on becoming wider we deeper
at our existing customers but wider with more products at the same time and so we have several new products that we're getting Ready to launch in quarter to quarter three and and some in 21 so that was a great positive change and the ability to focus on those and have the meeting and collaboration time that's really more focused than it's ever been because there was downtime so the ability to fill it with the best possible things is how we really handled our time we were busier I'm exhausted we were if you're at home working you
hit your desk I am and your family pulls you away at 7:00 at night when you're still on the phone we were busy than we've ever been just reacting and acting and trying to handle situations and our whole team was the same way so just a sense of urgency and passion no different than anybody else in the stone industry just new products new procedures more effective procedures with some of the biggest positive changes that come from this thanks so much Kevin Daniel how about you with larry's yeah We've definitely learned how to be more efficient
create a safer environment recognize the importance of making people feel safe we're just kind of a weird distributor we're just insanely crazy about what we do and all our stone people with whoever deal with those product lines we send them to the quarry so they get to see them on the stone and know what's real and what's not and what cannon can happen and and we're just like that in Every nook and cranny that we are and and really focused on being well even though we're a really big company we're kind of the elephant on
the block at our market we're still a family-owned we're really focused on providing any the only environment truly value your partnership and the privileged have our family connected and you know those words those aren't just marketing words those are things we really live and breathe evening we also to do through anything You can see which employees are really up straight and we feel very blessed to an essential service in our particular area and so where we could be open and do what we need to do and be having a great year because of that we
realized we probably don't need as many meetings and we can be more efficient with Mindy surely some of that travel time and allow that to flip over and be more productive got an online meet also remembered that meetings are in person Are important as well okay that's our culture and PR and we also accelerated our e-commerce learn and we're gonna try to keep that a little more simple sometimes we try to be everything for everybody it's one-stop shop for what we do and it can get many products and really you know it's the Pareto principle
there's the 80/20 rule and most of those are the ones that make you the most money and sometimes we just simplify in that get too carried away But we're also always on the leading edge of trying to look for new opportunities that are great creative options for people wise cost-effective alternatives and all of that sort of stuff so I did have a meeting the other day I wanted to this fits quite well gentleman came in a vendor and I met a nice young guy from a worried endurawrap for about three years and we're kind of
nuts in our mission statement we value our vendors and our employees and our Customer all three it takes such and he came in to visit us and I met with him we talked for quite a while and just a wonderful young man who came in to get it out of college it's gonna be a great leader I was like you and that's he's tend to be an unsolicited email and I won't read the whole thing online in there that they no way and it said I get a very special vibe all value relationships more than
business then it's something that it's not common in My travels a part of them that's a pretty powerful statement of course Rhonda is mr. big money but to be able to provide that sort of experience with your partners is pretty remarkable well the last thing that I will say too is is that personally through all this now I've kind of learned a Penant chill out of it realized what's its really more important in life and maybe working so much is it's so important not having the Family all together and learning new recipe can be trying
to take a walk or exercise a little bit more on finding that balance all this because it helps me much more effective at work and I'm a better resource individual for my customers it's fantastic Daniel thanks so much for sharing that so before we move on to just open questions I just wanted to take a minute to try to summarize the biggest themes that we talked about today number one I think Efficiency is probably the big word of today in that everybody's learned how to be more efficient in hoping to carry over those efficiencies after
the pandemic is over number two safety and respect for the safety of others is very key making sure that your clients and your employees feel safe in what they're doing and the final thing is to simplify I like like what Daniel was just sharing with us we've really I think learned to value Relationships with our families with our co-workers with our clients and I love to see more of that I think that's phenomenal so before we close today is there any final questions I'm going to scroll back through our chat here and see if there's
anything that we didn't cover but if you do have questions you can feel free to unmute yourself at this time or share that in the chat box one question I see that we didn't cover Was any tips for colorizing you know when you take photos and are sending people samples digitally how are you making sure that the color and the texture are being represented well that's a good point I'm kind of a really particular about that and if you had many discussions with quarry's about their thumbnails in their imagery and getting good photographs of what
truly represents looking ellen beauty on stone and it's kind of hard so i'm we work Very hard to try and get as good of images as possible and included light certainly I fear your lighted a next time a day that doesn't wash it out too much or doesn't Brown it too much another thing that's important too that I talk about a lot is making her that um customers are aware of what the material is going to look like wet and dry a lot of people ride they but you're upset with it they don't think it
was the right material and I talk a lot about Making sure when you see an apple you mock up you discuss this or you find a mother thing make sure they're very clear on those sorts of things Kevin do you have anything to add porosity for us attention to our marketing materials and the accuracy of those pictures whether it's that cut scale what goes on the boundaries of the stone is so important and our customers see then we hear that even if there's the smallest of change regarding texture And feel for us because of our
scope and our reach it's always important and we always recommend before you make a decision because natural stone is so fluid at times an accurate for a recent lot number or something in a date run they you're going to purchase is always recommended at the end so they can understand what's going to go on now that's going to affect what they've got going so we would not a small sample to reflect that or Even do mock-ups in the warehouse and take pictures of that if people request that another value add decisions of course we'll send
out mock-ups but we would do mock-ups and pictures so let's see what what the layup looks like or the color range or the variation on different things so really a hands-on approach in a customer by customer we don't have as much as a retail application as we do design residential and commercial we do have some retail But those are more our customers customer so they have samples on-site to Kevin touched on one thing that is really important too is that they really understand the range and that's not only tonal it's textural so for example you
may have a material that has a sandblast surface and the density and porosity of it an absorption varies throughout all the veins in the quarry and even though it's all the same material the sandblasting may create larger pitting And bigger pores in one particular vein than another and that's all part of the range and the toning varies as well so we've had people say well I like the tone but I don't like that these pieces are more pitted than others so you really need to show and mock up the widest range possible to start with
and then that may be yet that's its full range it's the only way it's sold take it or leave it if you don't like this we'll have to find you something else or In a very rare case there are certain operations who may rain sample and allow you to select a more selective range it's not as common it can be much more laborious time-consuming price and lead times will definitely increase if that is even at all possible but it's it's really important that you talk about that because the last thing you want is for everything
to show up everybody's all revved up they're ready to install and all of a sudden oops here's a Surprise somebody's not happy and if we would have just took a little more time to make sure we covered this on the front end we wouldn't be at this particular situation well said the expectation thanks for those tips guys seeing no final questions we'll begin our clothes today just a reminder that we do have several webinar opportunities upcoming check the natural stone Institute's website their calendar Of events to find more information for these upcoming sessions and following
this presentation everyone's going to receive a follow-up email that will contain a recording for today's session in case you want to refer back to anything or share with other colleagues you will also see within that email a follow-up survey link please share your feedback on what you thought of today's session and also give us some ideas for topics that you'd like to see covered in Future sessions jim has also shared that link within the chat box so if you have a couple of minutes right now it doesn't take long please go ahead and just click
through on that survey or if you're in a rush since we are over time then watch for that within your email don't forget to sign up for upcoming webinars and stay engaged we we love to hear from you thank you again to our panelists Kevin Mahoney with real stone systems daniel wood with lurvy supply and unfortunately Rachel wasn't able to make it today but I did include some of her thoughts and experiences as I as I could she's with trade and stone so thank you to Rachel as well thank you for the privilege to be
here with you today and here for you today everybody have a great year it was really fun hanging out with all of you thank you very much have a great day thanks everybody
