Fabricator and Installer Roundtable: Sales & Promotion During a Crisis

[Music] hello everyone and welcome to our fabricator and installer roundtable today our topic is sales and promotion during a crisis what we hope to cover is how the Copa Bank and pandemic has changed the way you're connecting with customers we've assembled a panel of countertop fabric hairs and a scholar they're going to share their ideas and best practices for connecting virtually Also learning about what new policies they've implemented within their showroom for Virts are for in-person meeting and meeting all of the changing expectations that we're all experiencing through this time we do hope that each

of you will leave today with new ideas on how to promote your company how to connect with your customers both in person and virtually before we get started I do want to point out that we have started to do webinars much more Regularly you can see on the screen we have a schedule of upcoming opportunities for learning these are all available through the webinar live and then will be available on demand after they've completed within West West joan university you can research the calendar of events on our website we always keep that up to date

with our upcoming schedule and you can also refer to the natural stone university where you can find recorded of versions of past Webinars here are today's panelists I am Sarah Gregg with the natural stone Institute I will be moderating today I'm going to ask each of the panelists to introduce themselves just what's your name company a brief description of what your organization does Jeffrey come on start group of course Jeffrey grant I'm co-owner of the countertop factory Midwest were based out of Chicago I'm also a co-owner of the company 50 technologies where we're making Software

solutions for fabricators and a consulting company helping fabricators ignite their profits Thank You Laura Laura Carolyn when I'm on the corner of rockers located in Raleigh North Carolina we are accredited by the natural stone Institute and our special rule is residential and commercial we do not subcontract any of our team so we're able to bring to the table a moon craftsmanship that is managed from the beginning to the end of your quality Repair great Thank You Laura Michaela you michaela may still be trying to get logged in so we'll hear from her shortly Makayla is

with Murray oh um oh now I can hear you oh hi sorry I'm Mikayla with Mario and son we are a smaller fabricator in the Eastern Washington North Idaho area close to Spokane we do custom residential and a little cubic work alright great thank you we look forward to hearing what everybody has Been working on and how they're improving their sales and promotion strategies in this crisis so first we're going to highlight some member survey results we've been doing surveys regularly and use that content to kind of decide what topics we're going to cover in

our webinars and then other resources that we put out for our membership will hear experiences from each one of the panelists what they've tried that hasn't worked what has worked Some recommendations for you and also participants again are encouraged to ask questions via that chat box within the GoToMeeting control panel you two weeks ago we launched our second covet survey to gauge how our members were doing with the pandemic we had another one that started in April and ran through the month of April and this one is more specific to what's going on recently what

we wanted to find out is You know if people had clothes if they have reopened if they had furloughed or laid off employees had they rehired them our results showed that most companies are open some of them still at a reduced capacity maybe they're working from home or maybe they're just working part time for some of the employees some of them are still completely shut down most did not need to layoff employees according to this most recent survey so that was very promising those who had had laid Off employees had plans or had already brought

most of them back about also interesting to see that most of the respondents had received PPP loans so that should help with things moving forward but specific to today's topic of sales and marketing during a crisis what we found is that a lot of companies are using social media many have implemented new tools to aid in virtual showroom visits and meetings with their clients many are also using email email the People who selected other generally were doing multiple things so that was really good to see that people are experimenting and seeing what works best for

their business there were a select few that we're not using any digital tools and they may be here now to learn what options exist within the fabricator installer space so now we're going to move on to our discussion we've have four different questions to cover each question will be timed for ten minutes And once we get close to that ten minutes we'll try to wrap things up and move on to the next question and the first question that we have is why are the biggest challenges or changes you've experienced in regards to government regulations employees

may be working from home or not feeling safe amongst all of the risk with the pandemic supply chain issues of vendors and suppliers so just a basic touching Touching base with how your company is dealing with the coded pandemic and I'll start with Jeffrey sure of course I think as most of us you know employers our number one asset and when this Cobra 19 came about the first thing that we started making sure we were doing was communicating being completely transparent we try to do that normally but we really tried to be extra cautious and

extra communicative with our team because it becomes scary you know all of Us are working hard to take care of ourselves and take care of our families and we like to think that going to work as a safe haven and koba 19 disrupted that a little bit and so for us it was about making sure we spread out amongst our facility we kind of moved people around the different shifts we took everybody's temperature in the morning we took everybody's temperature in the afternoon we made sure that if anybody didn't feel well that they would ask

Them not to come into work with zero repercussions we continue to pay them and the reason being is that you know somebody if they weren't feeling well but they know they need to come in today to make money to pay their rent they might make the decision to come in and then that could potentially negatively affect everybody in our facility so that has been a really positive for us because I think about communications gotten better if you're not creating Culture in your company then I think there's a lot of fabricators that might have experienced that

their employees didn't want to come in and this is a great time if you want creating culture or if you work you can increase that opportunity your your employees want need to want to come in every single day not necessarily just to have a job but to have a career and so I think if you're trying to look at the positive side of things this is an opportunity to Really dig deep build culture within your company and get your boy is really endeared to your company into the to the family that you're trying to create

and I think the only other thing for us is that our vendors have been terrific they've also been very communicative so when we used to receive deliveries every single day now maybe we're receiving deliveries three or two times a week and the amount of inventory that they have has been less So that certainly is a challenge for us that we work through but it's about communicating with our staff and with our customers Thank You Jeffrey Laura thank you I echo what Jeffrey is saying that's been the position and strategy that our company as well has

taken here in North Carolina the government has allowed us to be considered essential as we fall into manufacturing category and so immediately you know just as Jeffrey has Echoed the livelihood of our employees our little time and so we gathered immediately as we always have a weekly round robin type of meeting became more of trying to et's look that we're all in this together and actually each team member we actually took an oath among each other and then it appears say that if you're not feeling well you're gonna home we immediately implemented taking the temperatures

as she walk in to sale - well we delegated to a team member and Everything so even records from day one the temperature and the time that they were taken at if something was to happen that we could track down you know give that to the medical professionals if need be we have also implemented a reference periods in fatigue precautionary because not just among our employees but we also had to show our clients that put them at ease and so we we actually created this form that have two residential as well as commercial And really

it has the team member who is actually going to be visiting at particular jobs to show them the temperature has been taken that they haven't been after to anyone family member or anyone that their awareness like a little chart and each employee signs and I just scan that to those particular clients and that has gone over very well as far as our employees within the shop we also Implemented immediately a zone for each person and this included everyone in the company that they would take a zone within the showroom all the way to the warehouse

all the way to the parking area where the gates are and everything would be disinfected and it still continue this is one of the things that it was a big challenge initially but now it's just becoming like safety first it is something that they just come in naturally and actually it's been a very Positive morale booster for our team because it allows all the team to be together for like the first 30 minutes so that has been it's challenging that actually we're seeing the results of being communication with the team and also allowing them to

express any anxieties or concerns that they may have as far as our vendors what we're seeing is that perhaps the supplies and as the variety as in the past but I think that'll start moving forward hopefully By fourth quarter fantastic I love that to hear that you're building camaraderie and in some culture like Jeffrey had mentioned within your group just in the disinfecting Park so that's really Thank You Lora Michaela if you have anything to add yeah we've had from the beginning we had quite a bit of challenge with government regulations just making sure we're

compliant as we display our work between North Idaho and Eastern Washington so both of those states Handled the situation very differently we had to make sure that we're serving our Idaho projects because construction was considered essential there but it was deemed non-essential in Washington so we had to manage a way to be able to stay compliant within our state but still take care of the projects that needed to keep moving in Idaho so we had to layoff most of our employees but we kept a small skeleton crew of employees who really wanted to Be here

we're committed to making sure that we were doing so safely so we could continue working on certain projects but staying compliant well straddling those two states was definitely a big challenge we had to make sure every day that with the changing regulations we were doing everything necessary and then some to make sure that our employees were safe our business was safe you know and that we were doing what we should be within the community but keeping housing Going where we could with employees again having to layoff so many of our employees was difficult of course

but fortunately we were able to bring them back during phase one we did give everybody the opportunity to stay home for an extended period if they wanted to a lot of our employees are a lot of everybody of course is really concerned about the coronavirus just being in any public area like that you know so we did want to make sure that our employees Felt there would be no consequence if they needed to stay home for longer just felt safe too so we gave everybody the opportunity to come back fortunately all of them did so

we're back to full capacity now but just making sure that we have regulations for our employees - both in the office in the shop and on the jobsite so we've made sure it set one person from each install crew for example is the safety captain basically so they're responsible for making sure That our procedures for kovat are being met daily and on every jobsite if anybody if there's another trade on-site they're the person that's going to make sure that either they leave or the other trade will leave so just staying vigilant about keeping on with

what we've set for for the new procedures with suppliers we've got an exceptionally big challenge with a we've got a new machine sitting in the shop that came in A container from Italy right well everything was shut down and we also need an Italian tech to come set it up which is just not possible right now so that's another challenge we're hoping will be resolved soon yeah you've got a lot going on over there Michaela that's a lot to keep track of and and yeah that's interesting with the Italian machinery and not being able to

install that I wonder if there's other companies that have had you know similar Challenges we do have about a minute more before we were flipping to the next discussion did anyone have any questions please feel free to ask them within that chat box if I don't see any coming up I'm just going to kind of recap what I heard our panelists share already number one it's incredibly important to remain transparent with your employees to build a culture of trust a camaraderie suppliant supply chain issues are a big thing that's affecting a lot of our Company's

policies to allow employees to stay home when they're sick without repercussions it sounds like all three of our panelists have implemented some sort of policy for that just letting people know if you're sick stay home otherwise it affects the group as a whole we do have a question here how are you handling customer in-home visits for either measuring or installing how are you doing things differently I'm actually going to table that question Jason thank you for that because we have a topic on that coming up in two slides here but thank you that's a great

question and we will cover that very soon the next question we have is how are you staying top of mind maybe it's the traditional media radio TV maybe you're trying new things more emails more social media I'm curious to know if you've increased or reduced your advertising that you had already plans I'm gonna start this topic With Laura okay as far as how we've been staying on top is through our social media through our website but also we have a electronic newsletter that we send to our clients and just how we're doing taking clients by

appointment only we're also doing the Instagram to kind of keep that going but as far as our advertising everything that we had commitments for 20/20 we've continued that but actually have paused it from that point on not knowing how the Outlook from a business standpoint the financial impact our employee impact we put a pause on that for the rest of the year and haven't had any you know we can't see the results of that yet but my hope is that it's just a little hiccup that we'll get back to them to a new norm of

what that may be thanks Laura Mikayla we've kept our steam advertising plans we do a print ad in a local magazine social media has been our biggest strategy to stay on top of mind And we do a good amount of Facebook and Instagram but we've definitely focused on those a lot more just making sure people know we're still here just differently we can still help get things going for them how about you Jeffrey so we've got a full-time social media and marketing coordinator and I would tell you precoded you know we were probably posting every

other day pretty consistently maybe every once a while we go two days in a koban environment right Now we are posting every single day and every single one of our media channels you know all the normal Facebook Instagram LinkedIn Pinterest house we're doing advertising on Facebook as well that has been really positive for us and we're really kind of doubling down on that I would tell you that there was a large portion of the population that Creek Obon was already buying things online my task out of ten people nine eleven told You that they were

buying on Amazon because it's eaten inconvenient and I would tell you now an environment where so many people are working from home or staying at home because because of this pandemic I would almost tell you it's probably nine and a half it's not almost 10 out of 10 people that are buying online and so we have to start mimicking that and we have to adapt as fabricators and its business owners to make sure that we're making it very easy for our Customers to buy from us we have spent a lot of time over the past

60 days revamping our website so we had a company called Marquette who's well-versed in our industry they've built our website about a year and a half ago and then over the past 60 days we've been enhancing it and we're about to launch a new part of our website where people can go on online and actually book appointment the calendar whether they want to do a virtual call And we're really just trying to make sure that we're taking advantage of all these people that are in front of their screens more often than they ever have been

great thanks Jeffrey so I'm hearing a lot of social media we're even doing some ads to help boost the exposure for those social posts even further maybe a little less of the traditional advertising that you maybe had planned earlier in the year we do have a couple more questions in the chat box again I'm Going to hold those as they're more relevant to future slides I would just like to add sir I think at this point and every business is going to be a little bit different and I think that you know nationally most businesses

are going to be down while some areas might not be affected all that much you know Chicago michail up and you know in Washington those areas are affected I think this is the time though to not give up on your marketing efforts Because there's gonna be a lot of people that do that and I think this is your opportunity gain market share you know there's a lot of eyeballs right now looking and I know for me personally and I know the people that I talk to you know we didn't go on spring break vacation we

don't have any vacations planned in the median future and so we're spending a lot of time at home and what ends up happening is that we're doing a lot of home projects and As crazy as it sounds we're restaurants weren't considered essential but but you know hardware stores and box stores where if you happen to venture into any of those there were a lot of people right and a lot of those box stores their sales were actually up because people really were spending money on home projects so get your name out there make sure people

know who you are and that you're open for business and that you want their business people want to Spend money you just have to go ask for it some great inspiration Geoffrey not just trying to survive this but come out ahead moving on to the next topic what digital tools are you using to connect with customers we've heard that people are using virtual showroom visits what software are you using people are doing more online quotes our panelists will share that they're finding people are Coming to their appointments a lot closer to being ready to buy

another thing that I've seen a lot of as with my involvement in our CEU program is that a lot of companies are taking advantage of CEUs virtually via webinar so curious to see what our panelists experiences event with the digital tools and what specific software's they can point us to and with this one I'm going to start with Michaela please we have fortunately just recently launched a website with all of Our inventory live online which has been really helpful anyways but especially majorly right now being able to see material that's available without actually visiting a

showroom has been huge for our clients but we've really amped up the website in other areas to make sure that we have visualizer tools we've come up with a quote form that we didn't previously have that allows people to fill out a questionnaire put in their info attach a photo and a rough Layout and get a very quick quote that way having the appointment only environment like Sarah mentioned has really allowed us to prequalify clients far in advance and make sure we've gone through their project details and we understand what they're looking for so by

the time they come into the showroom it's a brief finalizing type of visit where they're already very committed so our our sales people are being able to use their time a lot more efficiently I'm focusing on clients that have already been through much of the process from home using the website and I'm just emailing phone contact more than usual but we're doing in-person visits in our showroom and we haven't done any of the virtual meetings in regards to your live inventory Michaela have you had challenges with making sure that the coloring is accurate we actually

spent a lot of time preparing that over the last year so While we're getting everything ready to launch this and we use slab Smith and slab clouds so the image resolution is significantly better than what you would get with a normal camera with the green screen and controlled lighting so they're actually able to zoom in very close to the slab and it's I mean the closest you can get to looking at it in real life and it's specifically high-resolution images of every slab from a bundle so they can flip through And choose their specific slab

there's a paint swatch match your event so they can select Benjamin Moore or Sherwin Williams in it allows them to pull exact colors from that slab that would go well together so it's it's very customer centric and that they can get the feeling of being in the showroom and walking through the slab gallery in person without actually being here very neat thank you for sharing that Jeffrey so what we've done is customers now can Go to a website and they can choose one of three ways to have communication with us one would be a virtual

sales call so all of our sales team is well versed in we use zoom and go to meeting customer can also schedule an in-home appointment if they want some people are still fine with us coming in or they can schedule a private appointment within our facility and what that allows is for that one singular customer to come in and we will have no other customers in our showroom And then go online we use a software called calendly they can choose the date and the time if that automatically blocks it off and that's a really nice

feature I love what Michaela is doing with slab Smith and slab cloud we do that as well Mikkel I'm sure you also have remnants but we have that as well for people who want small projects you know they can go in and just sort by remnants and and look once they're on our website we Use a tool called quote countertops and we have that actually embedded into the website and there's three components of that one is a kitchen visualizer one is a bathroom visualizer and then as they kind of design their kitchen or bathroom they

can ultimately get a quote now we only have limited colors on there that they can quote because obviously we want to make sure that we can get a sales person in front of them and start talking to them and selling once we get That customer we then use counter go which is a sales tool produced by more aware and we really use that just for the basic layout and the color and then what we use is then we transition to our last software which is the hot sauce selling software and that allows us to sell

all the upgrades for the customer you know when a customer comes in and they're redoing a kitchen you know yes they need countertops but you know what else they need they need a faucet they Need a sink multiplying they need a garbage disposal they need all that reconnected and so for us we're trying to sell them everything that they need to complete their project that was always important but now again talking in a koban 19 environment customers want less people in their house less companies to deal with right so if you can provide them with

all of these upgrades and options that customers wallet is open and they want to spend Money with you and I mentioned that earlier you just have to go ask for it so there are many times for us when we sell those upgrades we actually make more money on the upgrades number two the countertop so we've just transitioned all of this all of these technologies these solutions together to try to capture that customer while they're there looking you know at our company try to get the countertops that's great thanks so much Jeffrey it Looks like we've

got a question here love the positivity Jeffrey we've found that while some customers are using the money they've saved on vacations etc to invest in their homes there's another set of customers who are hesitant to move forward because of economic uncertainty how are you approaching the customers who are nervous to spend in a recession or potential upcoming recession that's a great question you know for us we are more of a Consultative sale versus you know kind of a hard push I think a lot of people think of you know used-car salesman so we're more consultative

but there are enough studies that will tell you that most people their biggest investment that they've ever made is in their house and so there's been enough studies to tell you that when you resell your house people looking at kitchens and bathrooms and so luckily for all of us that are in the countertop industry that's a very Positive so we really just kind of talked to customers about making that investment in their home and what you want to do with your investment is protected another thing that's somewhat unique about us is that at least in

our area we're the only fabricator that manufactures every type of product and so while we're working with them on natural stone sometimes you know they need different ranges of natural stone Or they need a different type of product and so we can really offer them everything that they need to fit their budget Laura Michaela anything to add in regards to that specific question about recession and spending we haven't had a lot of people really coming in that are uncomfortable with making the purchase like Jeffrey mentioned earlier a lot of people don't have a whole lot

of other options on what to do with their spare Time right now so what we're seeing in our area is everybody's really using this time to get projects done that they haven't in a long time so it seems around here that everyone's very encouraged to spend money on their home and I would add that it's been very positive in our environment because like everyone working at home we have five clients that have actually called us and said could you do it within the window that our work has allowed us to be home So from a

revenue standpoint it's been very enlightening very encouraged meaning to the team and for those projects that have been put on pause till the fall those have actually kicked in and offset to a positive revenue and I think that all the tools that both stuff in the key are using they're very inspiring so thanks and if anybody's interested in you know getting links or more information about the tools that people use please just ask in the chat Box box which ones specifically that panelists did share with me that they're willing to share those details there was

one other question that I'm that came in the chat box that I'm gonna ask now before we move on since we have a little bit more time and I do think that the next topic might take more time than our previous ones have done so the question comes from buddy is anyone expecting a lower valley in a few months due to a decrease in building Start in March and April I can start about 25% of our business is production builders and about another 25% its commercial and while both of those have remained very strong I

think we're certainly looking at that and and predicting that there might be a low you know we're talking every week going back to transparency to our builders and our contractors and asking them what they have in the pipeline now we are finding that our production builders here in Chicago are still selling actually surprisingly they're getting with only about 10% off their budget so that is positive and I think and particularly for us we're in phase 3 right now and if we can quickly move to phase 4 things start to get back to somewhat normalcy and

people continue to buy houses and the housing market interest rates are still low so I think we certainly should expect a low but I don't think it's going to be as bad as we originally Projected because things have started to open I can't oh yeah I echo that in our area there is software cast that we would have a slow August and September and so we're trying everything we can to keep that communication with all our architects RG sees their interior design groups just to offset that but our problem for some of the builders here

the custom builders is that they don't have enough inventory especially with The interest rate so low a lot of folks are moving up so they're putting their homes for sale I have our client who is ranked the number one real estate and he's had ten homes that he needed to sell and they didn't stay on the market more than a week and a half so that's a problem a good problem right that we all want to so I'm really encouraged by that somebody you know what you heard about in this end of the third quarter

is is real but I think I saw Russ seeing People want to move forward and get back to some type of normalcy so I'm very positively encouraged great thank you so much and it looks like Jeffrey's sharing some of the links already in the chat box if you are interested so this topic we've had a lot of questions with in the chat already about what procedures have you implemented for in-person meetings are you doing by appointment only we've heard from Jeffrey already that he's Giving a few options you can actually reserved the entire showroom if

that's important to you for safety are your people wearing masks how are you sanitizing are you requiring customers to wear masks do your employees feel safe going into homes and we can expand this not just for sales calls that also during installation and I'll start this one with Jeffrey please so yeah we talked about the first one already for lease from us everybody at My company of course is required to wear masks of course we provide all that everybody in the field whereas additional PPE including face guards and I think it's super important to make

sure that your staff feels comfortable and if they don't they don't feel comfortable wearing a mask at that point we toss them find out why they're not feeling comfortable most of time we get them through it and they're okay if not honestly then we have to tell them that They can't work right now because safety of ourselves and safety of our customers of the utmost importance the other thing that we did which was I thought was pretty neat was we bought one of those fogging systems you know it's a backpack system and we can spray

this antimicrobial solution all over everything and it lasts for about 12 weeks and anything that hits that solution automatically dies including any type of viruses so it Lasts every 12 weeks we spray down the backpack holds a gallon one gallon will do about 10,000 square feet so we've got about 65,000 square feet so we'll spend an entire day spraying down the whole facility and that lasts for 12 weeks and I will tell you that makes our employees so really good really comfortable it makes us feel good too and truthfully we tell our customers as well

and and so I think that's been super positive one of the questions that Had come up I think earlier was you know what are we doing that installs so we have an automated email and text system that goes back and forth with our customers and we're emailing throughout the project but the day before we're texting that customer reminding them that we're coming tomorrow and the timeframe we've now added an additional phone call wants more work for us we're calling that customer and just saying hey look we're still coming out tomorrow Just want to let you

know how we're testing Laura's doing the same thing hey we're testing our guys in the morning how are you all feeling are you okay with us coming our plan is to come in we'd like to spend just a few minutes with you reviewing the project and then you can go into a separate area we'll do our work and then at the very end we'll spend a few minutes reviewing the project with you so we have very little contact with the customer and that has Actually made our employees feel very good and it's made our customers

role I think very safe and they appreciate that we're doing the form great thanks Jeffrey Laura yes I could echo as well that we transition to by appointment only and it's been a very positive it actually goes more in hand-in-hand with our business model and with that every client comes in with their mass we just graciously mention it and we have not had anyone who has Refused to use that after each appointment we actually have it's on the door there's a sign as well as we follow up in a email and a phone call the

day before to letting them know that within an appointment everything's being sanitized so if we have a 9 to 10 the next ones at 10:30 and so the team has really kept a really good job of keeping those calendars so there's no overlaps and we also have shut down like the Production area where no customers could go there even though it's all disinfected but it begins with your team feeling comfortable feeling safe and then therefore they can go and advocate our team has we have a strict rule among all of us that if you do

not feel safe please say something the team going to different homes one job site it was pretty big project and they pull up names 11 Horse Park I get a phone call don't feel safe okay go on to the next One I called the Builder and say this seems like there's more than you open people understood so I think the communication and the safety nets that you put within your team then gets expressed and implemented as you go so it's been very positive we have sanitizers throughout the showroom and throughout the facility and it's worked

very well in Laura was it you that mentioned earlier about defining a zone and each each employee Is responsible for disinfecting that particular zone yes it's been really positive and if a one of the colleagues is out a particular day then the person next to that zone it's kind of like round robin turns over and they take their responsibility so every aspect of that and that's been real positive that we broke up in zones and that also includes a sales team and our office accounting so it's been really great and also for folks that normally

wouldn't Have the exchange on a daily basis as frequently it's been a morale booster for our team thanks Laura Michaela do you have anything to add yeah it sounds like we are all taking a very similar approach with internal protective processes it also has brought forward a lot more camaraderie between our employees we have a number of people who probably aren't as fearful about the situation as some others but seeing even those Employees really cooperate with our procedures anyways knowing that it's making their peers feel safe has been a really big bonding process I think

for all of us I think just going through all of this together and all of the uncertainty that everybody whether business or employee has felt has really has really brought everybody a lot closer together I think but just doing the same as everybody else with hand washing stations sanitizing Areas a lot more frequently than normal and just seeing each other taking that seriously has been really helpful for us great and I'm going to go back into the beginning of our chat here when we had a couple questions about this we did I think cover Jason's

questions on how you're doing things differently with these in-home visits have customers not wanted you in their home or do they not care and then in addition to buddy our buddy added to that handling the GCS and Homeowners who do not heed or state your company's Kovach guidelines and I think we touched on this a little bit but if any of our panelists could elaborate a little bit about policies I believe it was Jeffrey who stated that there's someone on each team assigned to be the enforcer the champion of these coded guidelines Jeffrey could you

maybe elaborate a little bit on that if we you know we do a lot of new construction and you know we go into a job site and there Are too many people on the site we will walk away it's not worth the health and safety of my staff as well as the other people that are in there so we're being very strict if we have somebody a customer we walked in and they're not wearing a mask we make sure that they put on a mask and you know unfortunately you know this this virus isn't going

away anytime soon and so trying to ignore it isn't going to work and instead of trying to fight it I think we All just need to kind of adapt you know to what the professionals are telling us you know I think all of us can go on our Facebook feed and see a lot of people that you didn't realize that your friends that currently got their doctorates overnight and our medical professionals and so on which is amazing I I am tending to stick to the true professionals of health care professionals and this isn't going to

go away for a while and so we all need to Do our part and so we just have a zero tolerance when it comes to any of the rules that we have put in place for the countertop a dream thanks Jeffrey Lora Michaela do you have anything to add to that question I think just mine go ahead mm-hmm we're just making sure that everybody feels that we have their back if there's any type of situation that they're uncomfortable with whether it's being here whether it's being on a jobsite that somebody is Not complying with what

we've asked them to do for their and our safety having each employee feel that we're gonna support a decision that they make without having to call it in or make a big deal about it if we're on a jobsite they they have the freedom to kind of step back and call off for the day or if it's in the show room and we have somebody come in for an appointment being comfortable being able to say you know we insist that for your safety and Ours you've gotta wear your mask though we haven't had a lot

of people push back but knowing that in those situations employees have the freedom to make sure that they're not forced in that situation it's been really helpful thank you and I just wanted to add that begins with the leadership it really begins from the top of having zero tolerance it is true this pandemic is not going away it's all around the world and we have to take care of our most coveted asset Which is our employees and if they feel safe I think that they're gonna go out and be great ambassadors to ensure that wherever

they go to a client location that they're going to speak so it all begins with the top down so things great great feedback great ideas thank you guys so much and we have one final question and then we will open it up there's some other questions that have come in the chat that are not directly related to some of the discussion Questions we'll cover those in the next slide but before we move on to just open questions can you talk about what new efficiencies you've established during the pandemic that you feel will improve your sales

potential in the future and we'll start this one with Laura please the best the most positive change has been by appointment only and I can say that as I look through all the appointments that were set up it has been a hundred percent committed Business so I'm gonna continue our whole sales team to by appointment only because you're having folks that aren't necessarily exploring they've already done the exploring exploration process on the web and now they're coming in with finalization so I look at that as very positive and very encouraging that's great Michaela being able

to do so much online during the shopping process is definitely something we were pushing towards anyways but this has Really boosted that for us and I think it's it's been such a positive change with really great feedback from our clients that we're gonna continue to focus more on making that even more customer centric and like Laura said the appointment only in our industry with the type of product really is a luxury service that we offer it's maybe kind of has always should have been that way so I think we're just finding more and more that

the walk-in environment you know Isn't very efficient anyway so I think we're gonna push towards continuing on an appointment-only basis in the showroom as well yeah that's an interesting points and I kind of discover throughout all of this Jeffrey so the number one goal of a business owner is to make as much money as possible and before you start telling me that I'm greedy the reality is if you really want to take care of your employees and then take care of your Customers your company has to make money right that that goes without saying and

I think one ends up happening when the economy is good and again if we look at a pre Kovan environment I think when I talk to everybody across the country everybody had a great first quarter up until you know middle of March and what you think is you're running lean and then when you get through what we went through you start realizing you know what maybe I have some processes that Aren't as efficient as possible maybe I have a future many people and so the best positive change that has come out of this for us

is how do we continue to run and even more profitable business not only you know our business is down about 40 percent now we know it's pent-up demand it's going to come back but the reality is that we're running profitably right now with 40% less revenue and that is that commedia is a big win on our Management team but how do we continue that how do we continue to manage labor manage our expenses and increase profitability I mentioned this a little bit earlier but I'll give you a little scenario I think most fabricators like their

cost of materials to be about 1/3 so if you had a basic 40 square foot kitchen with an eased edge and the material cost you $600 I think a lot of us would be saying okay I'm going to sell that job for $1,800 right and if The average fabricator makes 10% earnings you're going to make a hundred and eighty dollars on that job of course that's before paying taxes but now imagine that you went and sold an upgrade and that upgrade maybe you sold it for 250 hours maybe it was an edge upgrade you know

if you have a CNC doesn't cost you any money maybe it's some other treatment once you do that and maybe you pay commission to the folks that sell it almost all of that is Profit so now you made 225 dollars let's say you paid 10% commission so the person that sold it you made $225 in that upgrade and you only made $150 on the countertop so we have been focusing a lot on how do we make every job that we do more profitable right so I think those are some of the really positive changes for

us and I think if we look at every department how do we get more efficient and scheduling how do we get more Efficient in production we spend a lot of time at my company talking about remakes and reworks right those are the not-so-silent killers of profitability because every time you have a remake what is it effect cost a good labor opportunity costs customer wants potentially compensation right it's it's detrimental I mean if you go back to if you're only making 10% earnings on a job and maybe you had a remake of piece or maybe customer

service wasn't efficient As possible you showed up late to the job you install the job and now the customer says I want a five percent discount and the salesperson says Laura it's not a big deal it's only five percent but remember that's five percent you only made 10 percent earning so that 5% discount actually reduced your earnings by 50% we all can't afford to do that we all know this is a tough business so how do we become more efficient and I think this Cove age 19 Has allowed all of us I'm an eternal optimist

so I'm going to always look at the positives this has allowed all of us to kind of take a step backwards or take a step back I should say and kind of recalibrate and re-emphasize all the things that we know to be important to us to be profitable you and kind of a related question to what you're talking about Jeffrey from the chat box RuPaul Matt what are you seeing As ways of increasing sales with the dealer base we've been focused a lot on retail sales during this call but are you offering promotions is there

anything else you're doing to increase those sales with the general contractors and in cabinet makers and other dealers that you have set up so for us we're not we're not offering discounts or promotions I think that's a slippery slope you know we like to tell our professional customers the kitchen bath There's remodelers and builders that we're already giving them professional pricing what we're really trying to do is make it easy for them to buy countertops from us so we're actually launching a program where we have we've made these customized binders and there's four of them

and each one holds 24 samples and we have two of them that are one is kind of stocked Granite's one our exotic Granite's one is quartz and one is some other products and we're Giving those to our dealers and then giving them access to our software so they can actually quote right in front of the customer with preset pricing and then the call comes right to us and then we can deal direct with the consumer and it's just made it really easy for the kitchen about Mueller because what we know is that they're really good

at selling cabinets and they're not as great at selling countertops but the win for us as fabricators is guess what Every time you need new cabinets I've done the math on this you need new countertops and so they need us and so instead of trying to have them put a 35 or 40 percent markup on there we're giving them kind of a set markup and saying instead of selling one or two countertops on 10 let's go sell eight out of ten and it's been really positive change trust Laura do you do anything differently with your

dealer base um no I I don't have dealers I don't have that Market that segment it's mostly interior designers architects and general contractors michaela you've had a lot of good feedback with our dealers specifically designers just being able to use our website to their advantage they can put material on holds that's exotic material that's exactly their slab from far away which has been really great a lot of designers I think all of the designers we know are still working from home in Our area so they're able to put together design packages electronically and being able

to offer that service has been really helpful but the website again has really been a huge advantage for all of our dealers in that way because they don't have to come here they can still feel confident selling our product you great thank you all for sharing that we are out of time for today we've got an opportunity now to ask questions also a Reminder that once the webinar is finished you will receive an email that has an evaluation and we'd really appreciate you filling that out you can also link to that evaluation within the chat

box right now that will give us the feedback we need to keep doing webinars that are helpful for you we do have a couple more questions that weren't addressed yet so I'm going to take a few minutes here to talk about those number one we have some questions about Cleanliness about the different materials that people are interested in right now are low absorbing materials of more interest today some distributors have advised that 0% quartz products may be of interest to fabricators any answers to that from our panelists we truthfully have not seen a change in

what customers are purchasing also in terms of materials I think it's less about the materials it's more about the experience for them I think it is a good selling point for some people even historically to want to make sure that they have something that's non-porous I don't think we've seen much of a increased demand because of the situation though and I echo the same I haven't seen any change we're still like there's high demand for quartzite natural stones as there are courts as well as centered stone so I have not seen any type of differential

differentials okay anything that Suppliers can do to help fabricators and installers right now we find some suppliers that are actually remaining closed still and they've been really really flexible our local suppliers have been amazing and going as far as to set slabs outside for customers to drive by and view after hours or because they're not allowing the public they're only allowing professionals in the showroom at this time so we've had really a lot of support from all of our local Suppliers oh yeah mute we also have 17 distributors here in North Col a North Carolina

and they have been more than customer service whether it's virtual accommodating our clients after hours just one-on-one so we are very positive have had a very positive experience with all our suppliers I agree with both ladies I would say though that one thing I think probably all suppliers could do a better job of is again going back to Transparency we know that inventory levels are not where you'd want them to be we know that you know delivery drivers were a challenge before and probably gotten a little bit worse so just making sure that you're communicating

with your fabricators and letting them know maybe what products that normally you stock aren't available and if lead times are a little bit longer just so that we can in turn talk to our Customers we don't know anything's different that we're communicating certain dates to our customers and the last thing we want to do is have to call them back and let them know that things are delayed probably avoided that on the front end all right fantastic I think we've gotten through all of the questions now just a couple of final reminders you can refer

to our website's calendar of events to see the schedule for upcoming webinars we've got other Ones if you are a stone distributor we can we'll be joined meeting next week to talk about the same topic we covered today the sales and promotion during a crisis and then also for restoration and maintenance professionals following today's presentation you will receive a copy of the recording via email um feel free to share that with your colleagues it'll be available through the natural stone University you will also receive a follow-up survey we would really Appreciate your thoughts on what

we're doing and ideas for topics for future webinars and it's also linked with in the chat box so please click through that if you've got a couple of extra minutes right now don't forget to sign up for upcoming webinars this being engaged with us on social media and via email call us if you have some ideas you think that we should hear and thank you so much to our wonderful panelists today I've really enjoyed personally learning How they're navigating a new normal during this pandemic and I appreciate them sharing the resources that they're using and

some successes and failures that we can all learn from so thank you so much to Jeffery Laura and Michaela and their studying today thanks Sarah for hosting great job great bye everybody bye