Samantha Taylor: Welcome to the Amigo CartCast, the podcast where we roll through the ins and outs of material handling with Amigo carts. I’m your host, Samantha Taylor, here with my co-host Scott Chappell, and we’re on a mission to find a better way for material handling.

Scott Chappell: Thank you, Samantha. Each episode will explore the innovative features, success stories, and the endless possibilities that Amigo material handling carts bring to the table. Let’s roll into a world of efficiency, innovation, and endless possibilities. This is the Amigo CartCast.

Samantha Taylor: Welcome to another episode of the Amigo CartCast. During our last episode, if you missed it, we talked a lot about employee satisfaction and retention and how our Amigo material handling units kind of uniquely fit into that. A couple key things were brought up during that conversation with our guest, with Tim. Some that come to mind were customization.

So that’s how this episode evolved. And we have another guest… speaker? A returning guest, Tim is back!

Scott Chappell: A returning guest. He’s back!

Samantha Taylor: He is back.

Scott Chappell: He’s like Terminator.

Samantha Taylor: Oh!

Tim Estep: Very similar, very similar.

Samantha Taylor: He’s kind of tall like the Terminator.

Scott Chappell: Yes, he is. Yes, he is.

Samantha Taylor: Today, we would like to talk to Tim, and Scott, I want to hear your perspective too. Rather than employee satisfaction, specifically customer satisfaction. And we like to think, you know, all our customers are satisfied and we say yes to everything because we’re in sales… and we want to talk specifically around customization and what we’re able to do and provide.

So Scott, can you share with our listeners, I guess how did that start with customization on our material handling products?

Scott Chappell: So I think it’s important to go back to the beginning of time. And when I say that, we’re talking 2017, when we basically started to hit the road with our infamous Amigo Roadshow. And we were so excited at the time just to get out and have somebody want us to do a demonstration. Now you go, “What’s the big deal about that, right?”

“I mean, you guys sell products, you’re salespeople, and you’re looking to try to find… to increase sales.” Well, you can’t increase sales unless there’s a need. And you don’t know if there’s a need unless you visit a location. So we started out by just showing our standard products. So, for example, our Dex Pro+ deck is 50 inches long by 30 inches wide.

So once you get into a facility and you show somebody what you’re able to do, the next obvious question is, “Well, can you do this?” For example, we had a deck with no shelves and then people said, “Can you do shelves?” And we said, “Of course, we can do shelves!” You know, not that we’re promising everything to everybody because it’s difficult, but what we do in that instance is we show the products, we gain interest, and then at that point, if it’s something other than a standard product, we come back to our product people and we say, “Can we do this?”

“Are we able to do this?” So that’s kind of how the whole custom thing came about, Samantha, is that once we got on the road, once we did that, started the roadshows, we got out, people started asking questions and then the custom option was born.

Samantha Taylor: It was born. So since then it has definitely evolved.

Scott Chappell: It has. Not every company does customization. When you ask for custom things from companies that possibly produce hundreds and thousands of these items, that’s not simple. And if you’re listening right now and you’ve tried to maybe get a different color, you’ve tried to get a different seat on your lawnmower, those kinds of things from large companies, I’ve been told they just don’t do it.

Samantha Taylor: Right.

Scott Chappell: The neat thing about us and the neat thing about the previous episode with Tim was we talked about culture. We talked about flexibility. Even that was employee-based, I got news for you. As a company, it makes me very proud when I come back and I say, “We have people that want this, this, and this,” which is not standard.

And our people say, now they hem and haw a little bit like they can’t do it. You’d be amazed at the stuff we’re able to do, and we do it reasonably priced. Now with that being said, I think that plays into our last episode with Tim and his group on what have we done on our end to try to keep costs down.

And I think Tim, with his expertise, will also tell you. But I think that’s where we’re going to go with it.

Samantha Taylor: It is, you just pretty much threw that softball again to tee up Tim.

Scott Chappell: I feel like a quarterback.

Samantha Taylor: Oh? A quarterback, softball, what are we playing here? What sport are we in?

Scott Chappell: I don’t play softball.

Tim Estep: I was going to say, evidently not into sports.

Samantha Taylor: But I think you just tee’d it up perfectly to introduce Tim and how he plays in with customization. So, Tim, why don’t you share a little bit of everything that Scott just touched on, but more in detail too. Scott can talk, but let’s hear from the expert, shall we?

Tim Estep: Well, I don’t know about expert. I appreciate that, but I think that Amigo through the years has done a fantastic job developing our catalog of standard parts that go with the material line and things. But to think that all of our products are cookie-cutter enough that they fit perfectly for everybody would be naive. So having the option to, you know, see a need and fill a need for a customer on – within reason, obviously – like you said, I mean, we can dream up some crazy stuff and we can at least quote it, you know.

But I think to give ourselves that flexibility to truly meet the customer’s need and fulfill their specific application with our product and things. So whether it is adding shelves or adding nets or, you know, or being able to daisy chain several trailers together like a train or, or things like that, that are specific to their application, I think is what really separates us in this field.

So in the manufacturing department, having onsite, we just added our big sheet laser and other equipment, which has added both time savings and cost savings in-house. We can now respond much quicker to customer requests. We can do quoting and stuff in house, which is a lot quicker than it used to be. I mean, all around I’m hoping the customer experience is nothing more than amplified in the fact that we can do it all ourselves and control that rather than having too many hands in the pie, if you will.

Samantha Taylor: I just want to like paint a little picture of the magnitude of some of the things you just said, like something as simple as quoting in-house and saving the time on that. And I just think about how easy it is for us to get the information to then pass it to you and the manufacturing team. And it’s, I mean, we have it within… if it’s not the same day, it’s within the next day pretty quickly of what that will look like. And then the from a time and customer satisfaction… like who knows if they’re looking elsewhere already while we are trying to get our ducks in a row.

So that has definitely helped and improve that satisfaction from the customer’s standpoint to be able to turn things around a little bit faster. I think Scott had also mentioned how we’ve been able to cut customization costs down, which is an important customization in any other product or field that you look at can get very pricey.

And in a world where, you know, eggs go up to $10 a dozen, let’s not spend all our money on a customization if we don’t have to. So Tim, can you expand a little bit on how we’ve been able to do that through the Amigo Manufacturing and just what do we kind of look at as a company?

Tim Estep: I think the biggest thing we were able to do was cut out the middleman, you know, and stuff. I mean, the more people or more companies are involved in the process, you end up with an increased cost that just is going to naturally go that way. Each person has to make a portion of profit along the way, and we’ve cut that out by being the start and the finish, if you will.

So, you know, in my manufacturing department and our machine shop, we can custom make, you know, rails and bend them into different sizes. We can custom make all the sheet metal. The only thing that we’re not doing in-house right now is powder coat and stuff. But we have, you know, great relationships with our powder coaters and that’s, you know, a very fast turnaround as well.

But we have robotic welders, we have our certified welders in-house. Within reason, there’s pretty much nothing we can’t do and within a reasonable timeframe, too. So again, when you add in multiple suppliers, that adds time. You know, customers don’t want to order product and be like, okay, it’s now April, we can have that for you in November. I think that’s an instant turnoff for a customer.

So, you know, having to be able to control a reasonable timeline and always shoot to exceed that timeline is what really sets us apart as well.

Scott Chappell: And you know, Tim, I didn’t even think of that. And you just brought up a good point. Our standard product lead time is four weeks. Now, in the material handling world, back when COVID hit, certain products were 26, 30, 50 weeks out. And believe it or not, our standard products, we stayed… I think the longest we got was like six weeks out because we had a few hiccups, but in general we didn’t.

Tim Estep: Absolutely. Yeah. And as we set ourselves up, you know, our manufacturing department, we’re actually set up to be a job shop for hire, if you want to say. So, you know, we can actually do this now, third party work for somebody else if they came to us. “Can you build this trailer?” kind of thing. But having the control in-house and obviously, you know, doing our own priorities and being able to have our employees who are out of this world, you know, with their attention to detail and what they want to do and doing it right for the customer.

You know, if we need to work additional hours or an extra day or whatever to get ahead to meet a timeline, it’ll for sure happen.

Scott Chappell: I know when I’m on the road and I’m in a warehouse and somebody asks a question, and even though our engineers and our product people here at Amigo think that I say yes to everything. I don’t say yes to everything. Just 99.9%. No, I do know that it makes me very comfortable that when somebody asks, I kind of know what we’re able to do, and especially with these new machines that our company has invested in and made that commitment, that chances are it’s going to be something we’re able to do in a timely fashion at a fairly reasonable price.

So it just adds, I guess, another tool in our toolbox of run on the road to doing the Amigo Roadshows.

Samantha Taylor: So I think that this has just tied everything together so well. I would love to hear a customization story. So Scott since you just brought up Roadshow, can you think of a time like… customer satisfaction, we were able to improve their efficiency in their material handling world. Do you have a favorite story?

Scott Chappell: I have a story. It starts like this. We had an aerospace company in Arizona that reached out to us and at the time we had not done a lot of customization at all. So my role here was to get everybody on board, and sometimes that’s not so simple, but they took our standard Dex Pro+ and our trailer on the Dex Pro+ and they wanted basically three shelves, our base plus two shelves.

And at that point in time we just started getting into the shelves. Then what they wanted, because the parts at this aerospace company were so delicate, they wanted us to put this nice, probably a half inch rubber foam kind of base on each shelf that would allow these parts not to possibly get scratched or damaged. Once again, this isn’t our world because we don’t do it every day.

But it’s a big deal to them, right? Just like previous episodes with trash. Well, this is what they were looking for. So we went back to production and our engineers at that time and we said, “Listen, they need a half inch. It’s like a 30 by 50 sheet.” And at the time, the guys are saying, “Hey, we can do it, but it’s expensive.”

And I said, “We’ll quote it. If they want it, let’s do it.” So in this specific case, the reason it was unique, Samantha, was because we have two shelves. We have to put this extra little rubber pad on there that they wanted. We had to put some extra special end rails on there, which we hadn’t done before that would keep their products on once again.

They didn’t know they needed this until they saw it. Once they saw it, they had special requests. And then once they had those requests, I talked to our people. Wasn’t necessarily a manufacturing thing at that time. But really, if you think about it, our pad had to go on it. It had to be adhered to. So we had to use adhesive.

Scott Chappell: I mean, it wasn’t something we were going to do a shoddy job on. So in that case, we were able to not only give them the shelves, put the end rails on to hold their products on, but we also supplied this little half-inch pad that was pretty pricey at the time. But that’s what they needed to use our products to do the job that they didn’t know they were going to move around.

Samantha Taylor: You wonder too, like, how many other places did they maybe ask or seek out or what were they using?

Scott Chappell: Good point. Good point.

Samantha Taylor: And we were able to say yes and improve their overall satisfaction as a customer. And I’m sure ultimately their employee is happy because they’re moving things a little more efficiently.

Scott Chappell: You just nailed that. You just hit it on the head. And that’s because we’re never going to hear how many places they went to because they’re not going to tell us that, right? That’s just not how that happens. But for us to be able to do it, I thought where you’re going to go with that is how many different applications are there in the– out there today.

Samantha Taylor: Oh my goodness!

Scott Chappell: It’s endless. It truly is!

Samantha Taylor: How many grains of sand are on a beach? Like, I’m sure.

Scott Chappell: It’s amazing, and so anybody that’s listening to this today, if you do have a special need, not that we can do it and hopefully our product people hear this because that way they know I’m not guaranteeing it, okay? Because I get accused of that maybe once or twice. But seriously, if somebody is listening today that has… they think they can’t get done, maybe it can’t get done, but it might be a situation where we might be able to do it.

Samantha Taylor: Absolutely. I think those are great stories and it kind of all ties in today’s theme not only of how customization can help improve satisfaction of our customers, but ultimately their employees. So I appreciate, Tim, you joining for another episode.

Tim Estep: Thanks for having me again. Yeah, it was great.

Samantha Taylor: Of course. And Scott, thank you for your stories as always.

Scott Chappell: I’ve got many.

Samantha Taylor: I know. And you know what? We’re going to have many more episodes, so.

Scott Chappell: I hope so.

Samantha Taylor: All right. Until next time.

Scott Chappell: Keep rolling.

Samantha Taylor: And that wraps up another episode of the Amigo CartCast. We hope you enjoy this exploration into finding a better way for material handling with Amigo Carts. Be sure to subscribe as well as go to myamigo.com/podcast to see pictures and videos mentioned in today’s episode.

Scott Chappell: Thank you for tuning in and until next time, keep rolling with Amigo.

Samantha Taylor: Until next time.

Scott Chappell: Keep it rolling.

Samantha Taylor: Keep it rolling.