The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.
-Albert Einstein
… since the last blog post! April 2019 to be exact! Think a lot has happened since then? It has certainly been a busy and interesting couple of years, and I know I am in good company when I say that if you (correctly) told me then what the next three years had in store for me and my business, there is just no way in the world that I would have believed you or even thought it was possible.
What am I talking about? I am writing now on a Sunday morning from my new home in Dallas Texas. We’ve had about 21 days in a row of plus 100-degree heat, and I’m pleased to report that my AC only went out once. We opened here in January of this year, and while supply chain challenges have delayed the installation of AC in our new facility until October, other than that the transition has been pretty successful. My wife Stephanie and I have been enjoying being back in a big city after 26 years in Wilmington, and our dog doesn’t miss the beach too much.
Our Wilmington facility continues to operate, and our plans are to keep it open. We also plan to open an additional West Coast facility within the next year. This expansion is driven primarily by our belief that speed of delivery is going to be an important component of what will make us successful in the years to come. With North Carolina, Texas, and West Coast (probably Nevada) production facilities, we will be a maximum two-day shipping time for 90% of our customers, and have some nice redundancy built into our system to handle production disruptions in any single location.
What else is new?
Lots! But to get the blog going again, I am going to write about something that I first posted back in 2018 in answer to a customer question “How does Queensboro get such great employees”. Back then (August 2018) I wrote about the 4P’s of a great employee – Productive, Positive, Principled and Proactive. In the intervening years our team has grown and strengthened considerably. We are still far from Perfect (still not one of the 4 P’s), but the 4 P’s have really helped us recruit and coach over the years to the point that we can say without question that we have the most Productive, Positive, Principled and Proactive team ever!
Dealing with all the fallout from COVID was unquestionably one of the most challenging things we have had to do over the 40+ years that we have been in business. But we have no doubt that having such a great team built around the 4 P’s was the most important piece of what allowed us to go remote where we could and continue to work effectively together, and then all come back together when conditions allowed while continuing to grow, improve and take great care of our customers.
Like any great tool, the 4 Ps are a work in process, and we have enjoyed refining them over the last couple of years. To get our blog restarted, I am going to share some of our thinking on where we now stand on these essential employee characteristics and how they impact the process of selling custom logo apparel and other promotional products.
So please look out for our next post, and in the meantime, please feel free to reach out to me any time at fred@queensboro.com with your thoughts, feedback, comments, and suggestions. Thanks for reading!