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. Today we have a special guest, one of our premier dealers and strong supporters of our Amigo material handling carts, Kevin Adam. Kevin is a warehouse solution sales representative for Lift, Inc in central Pennsylvania. He started in material handling in 1979, right after graduating from Lincoln Technical Institute and has never looked back.

He has been with his current employer, Lift, Inc, for almost as long as I’ve been alive, 36 years. And Kevin is an eight-time Pennsylvania state bowling champion, a member of the Pennsylvania State Bowling Hall of Fame. Doesn’t end there because he is also the ABC national bowling champion, winning the team event in Corpus Christi in 1992. Kevin is extremely professional, charismatic, a joy to work with, and has always, as I said, been a huge supporter of Amigo material handling carts.

And because of that, we couldn’t think of a better person to speak with today. So welcome, Kevin, and thank you for joining us.

Kevin Adam: Well, Samantha, thank you so much. That was a very nice introduction. I appreciate the kind words and I appreciate the time you’re giving us to share our side of the story here with Amigo as well.

Samantha Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, I gave a brief intro, but Kevin, you have so much experience and we just are really grateful for this partnership and relationship that we have. Anything else that you want to share with our listeners as far as your role in material handling or even this bowling champion? This is pretty incredible. We didn’t know that about you.

Kevin Adam: Well, that’s the side life, if you will. It’s a part of myself that goes back to just being a young, five-year-old, going out with mom and dad in Pennsylvania here. There was a lot of bowling in the seventies. Heck, that would be the sixties, actually. So bowling was different in those days. It was a family fun recreation and everybody kind of did it.

It just led from one thing to another and honestly got me to understand competition through high school, out of high school, and so on, which of course translates into sales because there’s no second place award in sales. So you have to be competitive to be able to succeed at that. And being on the lanes is no different than being in front of the client.

Scott Chappell: I don’t think you even let everybody know that I was here, Samantha.

Samantha Taylor: Oh, Scott is also joining us!

Scott Chappell: Hey, thank you, Samantha. Hey, Kevin. How are you?

Kevin Adam: Not bad, sir. How are you?

Scott Chappell: We’re great.

Samantha Taylor: There was no doubt that you weren’t sitting in the room. Don’t worry.

Scott Chappell: Yeah, this is true.

Samantha Taylor: Your presence is always here.

Scott Chappell: This is true. So Samantha is a time right now that I should probably introduce how I met Kevin?

Samantha Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. I would love to hear.

Scott Chappell: So, John Oliviera, who is on one of our podcasts, we were out in Pennsylvania and he has his key dealers that he deals with. So whenever I go out and see John, we’ve always kind of reached out to Kevin and the team there at Lift, Inc in the beginning. I think it’s, and we’re going to talk about this in a minute, Kevin, but in the beginning it’s kind of like a new product, So there’s probably going to be a lot of questions.

But the relationship John has with our local dealer is probably what opened up the door. So Kevin, I guess the first softball we’ll throw your way is when John reached out initially and talked to you about kind of our product, this unique product, this material handling… motorized material handling cart, I guess just being a dealer, tell us what your thoughts are or what your thoughts were.

Kevin Adam: Well, you were very accurate with the comment about John. John is without a doubt, I say this all the time, said it this week at a little outing that we had here at the company, actually. John is by far the best independent factory rep we’ve ever dealt with. A lot of times factory reps are just kind of there.

They’ll send you emails or get you information, send you leads, send you quotes and so on. But they’re not really hands on. John is just the opposite. He comes to site visits. He delivers parts that are missing, that he might have in his inventory from another dealer. He truly goes out of his way to the extent that’s amazing.

And he’s always there with his staff, Willy and Gino, and he had reached out with a new product, with the Amigo line, and never heard of it, wasn’t familiar with it, saw a video or two of it and thought, okay. In our term and forgive me if this is not something you like to hear, but it’s a little niche-y, but it’s something that can really fill a need in the right application versus like a Chariot or a Columbia car, some of the bigger, heavier items that are of course, more expensive and more money.

So when the opportunity came up to take a look at it with John, I thought, sure, that’s do it. And yeah, it was great. And then of course you coming out and demoing and showing customers on site how this works. They get on, they move it around and everyone has a good time with it. It makes it easier to sell with all that hands on demonstration that you do for us.

Scott Chappell: So along those lines, because you and I and John met at your location, we were at the back dock. This was probably 2018. We were at the back dock. I think we pulled the products out for you at that time just to see. And I think we only had shown you at that time. Since then, we’ve shown a lot of the folks there at Lift, but we showed it to you.

And I think if I recall, you had somebody, one of your customers that you currently sell all these other products to that you wanted to show. So then that’s when we kind of loaded it up and then we went out and did the demonstration.

Kevin Adam: It does ring a bell. Were we doing a demo of dock equipment that day with the trailer tractor trailer?

Scott Chappell: I don’t know. But that’s the time. Like I say, the first time we had met and we were doing something in that in that area. And this is after John, obviously talked to you and said, Hey, I’d like you to see this, because this is exactly how John does it. He says, I got something new. This is 2018.

We started in 17. Didn’t really know if this thing was going to work, but we did have the product, we had the van, and we were able, ready, willing and able to go see people. And if you’re a dealer, a local material handling dealer in your neck of the woods, what I guess, Kevin, you tell us what’s the benefit of being able to just show up and pull it out and show the product?

Kevin Adam: Well, you know, touchy-feely, as I sometimes use, it always seems to be better than just selling a piece of literature, just trying to describe something, because I could hit 98 bullet points and the 99th one’s the most important that I didn’t touch, and I learned a long time ago, people pretty much retain the top two or three items you tell them about. The more things you give them that are technical or different even it just loses, it loses its luster. So we have to find those few couple of things that seem to register and hit the right buttons with the client. But when I can bring it to a site, of course to do that, it starts with communication to the client. Typically I’ll send out an email, maybe with a video link, a brochure, a description of what the product is, and mention you’re going to be in town in X weeks, two weeks, whatever, and I’d like to reach out to them again. Then as we get closer next time, it’s typically a phone call. Have you’ve seen the video, have you seen it? Here’s where I think it might work in your application. How about we bring it in and show people? And then from that point we set up a time, a date, schedule it. You come on in with John and the band and we do onsite demos and I don’t think there’s ever been an onsite demo where people didn’t leave with interest. Something to look at and consider in different types of applications. So I guess a nutshell that would be the reason for the in-person demos.

Samantha Taylor: Our saying is you set it up and we show up.

Scott Chappell: We show up, that’s exactly what we say.

Kevin Adam: There you go.

Samantha Taylor: It’s what Scotty does is he shows up.

Kevin Adam: I like it.

Scott Chappell: We try.

Samantha Taylor: So who would you say, Kevin, when you’re looking at your book of business and you’re looking at your end users that you’re selling to, you’re going into their sites when, you know, you have that notification of the Amigo roadshow’s coming to town, we want to show off our product. Who is the first customer you go to? Well, how do you determine who could use this? As you said, kind of like the niche market of the small to midsize material handling unit.

Kevin Adam: Are you referring to the type of company or the type of personnel at a company?

Samantha Taylor: Oh, that’s a great question! I guess, what do you do? How do you determine that?

Scott Chappell: Or it could be an application. Or, Kevin, it could be an application question.

Kevin Adam: Sure, sure. Well, application wise, there’s so many applications that Amigo can be used in, but things such as delivering parts in, say, working cells. It’s at an assembly facility near our offices in Leesport, Pennsylvania. That electronic assembly that needed to get parts kind of an assembly line. But it’s not… it’s not a traditional assembly line like on a conveyor, but things go from station to station to station and they can drop trailers.

They can drop or take boxes from station to station, and it cuts down or people running around with pallet jacks, which might need certifications. It cuts out on forklifts running around places where they shouldn’t be around people and of course, they’re much more sizable than an Amigo, so the Amigo helps fill that bill. So I think of clients that do that.

I think of clients that have multiple maintenance guys with all their own maintenance cabinets and tool chests and realize that they put one of those on an Amigo trailer, they just take the trailer out to the site and to the equipment that they’re trying to fix at the production facility. So those are applications as well. Small parts deliveries, small order deliveries, anything that really require distance and/or light bulk.

When I say light bulk, less than pallet size pickups. So as I mentioned earlier about being niche-y, that’s a little bit of a niche. So it’s not like every… it’s not for everything and every application and every place.

Samantha Taylor: Who knows it better than the person that goes in there. You know, you know it, you see it, you hear your customers’ pain points and what, how can we help improve their efficiencies? So that’s incredible.

Scott Chappell: Well, the other… and the other side, Kevin, is we know people are busy. To us, our product is the most important thing. But obviously for somebody like yourself or the other reps for Lift, you’re doing other things. So can you just give us maybe four or five or six things that you promote on a regular basis, everything from what the first product is down to, you know, a smaller product?

Kevin Adam: Sure. Well, the company itself, Lift Incorporated, were started in 1971 just as a forklift service company. They didn’t sell equipment, they didn’t sell new equipment. They didn’t sell anything else, it was just forklift service. So fast forward now 50 plus years, and now that we’re in four branches and central PA, we have 250 service technicians that we perform service on everything from forklifts to sweepers to automation systems through our automation division, dock equipment, PMs, installations.

Those are some of our major items, speed doors, we do a lot of food applications and they have to cut off the cold air from going from one room to the other as quick as possible. As I said before, dock equipment, mezzanines, modular offices, pretty much anything that stores or moves a product in a warehouse or a plant or facility.

Scott Chappell: I think it’s also important because I’ve learned from you that you specifically do not even touch the trucks, the fork trucks. You folks, your group is on the other side, which is just everything in the warehouse except the trucks. Correct?

Kevin Adam: Correct. Absolutely correct. We have different divisions, forklift sales, aerial sales. So we do break it up. And quite frankly, many dealers don’t. But we’re much more into specifics in our group versus trying to know a little bit about a lot. We know a lot about smaller amounts of things. We can be more useful to the client in that aspect.

And we work together. So I’ll work with the forklift division of doing a warehouse. I work with the automation division if there’s a buyer with some automation along with the pallet rack, which I’m selling. So we work hand in hand as a team.

Scott Chappell: So then, not to have all the questions. Samantha, I’ll let you do.

Samantha Taylor: You were worried that you weren’t in the room earlier.

Scott Chappell: I know. I hear you. I just anxious, I’m sitting on my hands right now. I mean, I’m all wound up! So for the dealers that might be listening, what would be the reasons, if there are any more than one or whatever, but why would they want to maybe promote our products? What would be the advantages with all the stuff you just said?

And that’s pretty all high dollar stuff. Why do you think a person would want to promote our products?

Kevin Adam: Well, the more tricks you can, you know, put in your hat with customers that you grow and hopefully grow together with, you become more valuable to them. If you can, I don’t want to say one stop shop, be someone who can give them many solutions to many issues. So the one thing about the Amigo that I like very much is once we get one in, which we’ve been fortunate to do that a number of times, the repeat sales are pretty quick and pretty often and you know, whether it’s a $5,000 item or $100,000 item, we love taking orders as we’re supposed to.

And once one is in there and it sells itself well, the next one comes with less sales effort, but just as valuable for yourself and ourself from a sales and service standpoint. So it is definitely a it’s an ongoing process that you start small like anything, and hopefully you just keep growing that growing the volume.

Samantha Taylor: So you had mentioned a little bit ago just all the different products or companies that you kind of go and sell, represent. With all of the different industry trends and technologies that are out there, how do you determine what’s going to be best for the customer?

Kevin Adam: Well, once we have a feel for how they do things now and how they like to do things, try to find their pinch points of how can we make their life easier, more efficient and more fluid by using the types of products that we offer? So, a salesman’s best attribute is not speaking, it’s listening and hearing what the person says and hopefully then guide them with some options as to what might be the best thing for them.

Samantha Taylor: The one of my favorite questions to ask and I just have to know for our listeners, can you share what has been your most memorable client, maybe not their name specifically, but like why were they memorable? What was unique about it?

Kevin Adam: I’ve been thinking to try to come up with a great one, like a memorable one, and I guess part of 36 years and literally thousands of clients, maybe it’s good that not one jumps out because that means, you know, you’re doing your job with a lot of people. But there was one client that… let me give you two answers to that.

I’m going to give you one on a side of memorable from a not good standpoint, and I’ll tell you one a memorable on a good standpoint.

Samantha Taylor: Yeah, give us the tea.

Kevin Adam: So the first client, and I’m going to leave their name out, but they’re very, very high tech, very known Fortune 50 company, heck, that when I heard I had to go in for an application, and interesting enough I did talk about an Amigo there with the client, and I was expecting to see Star Wars. I was expecting to see George Jetson.

I expected to see all of this high end automation and just cutting edge and stuff that would be blowing my mind away. And I walked into the warehouse and I looked and I went, my God, they’re pushing carts. They’re using ladders, like it was so far from what I expected. So it’s funny how sometimes image does not translate.

Now, on the opposite end of that scale, and this isn’t the memorable one I was going to go it, but just dawned on me, another account of ours that is known for economical stores. So when you go to their store, it might cost a dollar let’s just say that. But there’s a lot of those companies that do that and I expect to see what I found at the other location, which would be just carts being pushed around, lot of manual labor, a lot of people walking around and I walked into their facility and it was completely automated.

Samantha Taylor: You never know.

Kevin Adam: So I think, well, I think what it shows is the expense doesn’t equal what it costs, because if you’re spending $5 million to automate something, but you’re saving $6 million in insurance costs and labor and whatever in return and everything else, you’re ahead of the game than if you spent $2 million and you have all those extra costs coming in.

So you have to kind of walk in with it with an open bag, that aspect. The other client I want to tell you about from a memorable standpoint, a customer came to us with an application where they were using a very, very small size pallet. 30 inches deep. Throughout their industry, that was a standard and they decided to go to a more traditional 40 by 48 pallet and this client had pallet rack that was designed for these 30 inch pallets.

Well, in the industry, if there’s any dealers listening or customers, you can’t put a 48 inch pallet on a 30 inch track because there’s way too much overhang. And working with our wire deck people, we took those existing racks, we spread them out, we put an interior wire deck and we converted their existing rack into something that would work with the new pallets and literally saved the client $1,000,000.

Samantha Taylor: That’s very cost effective. Yeah, absolutely.

Kevin Adam: Yes, and fortunately for us no one else came up with the idea. So… and that’s all because working with teammates like with John Oliviera, this was a John Oliviera project with Speedrack, with National Wire. So this is one of the values that John brings to the table. And it does the same thing with Amigo.

So when he has something that’s new in your case six years ago, we’re going to listen, pay attention because he’s got… he has people who we consider teammates. We don’t consider a vendor the way most dealers do. We truly do look at them as a two way street. We want to help you because you’re helping us. It’s not a one way thing.

Samantha Taylor: Before we conclude, I would also love to hear Scott’s favorite customer story. We like to add a little, maybe from the Amigo Roadshow, a time you and Kevin were on the road. So tell me, Scott, what has been your most memorable?

Scott Chappell: Thank you, Samantha. I didn’t know if we’d ever get to this point, but thank you very much. No. Hey, Kevin, I don’t know if you can remember this or not, but what’s unique for Amigo so far, being so fresh and so new with this product line is we go to a lot of trade shows, and when we go to these shows, we get a lot of leads.

And we had an instance in Pennsylvania at a furniture manufacturer, and this is the reason it’s not necessarily the sale, but the message of this story is we had, I believe, the lead for this furniture manufacturer. And John and I did a demonstration and then because it was your territory and John thinks highly of you, we brought you in.

And the exciting part of this story is after I think we did our PO, you, once you got in there because of the Amigo, I think you were able to secure a sizable sale of pallet racking and that just goes to show you that one thing can lead to another. So the reason I mention this today is if there’s any other dealers listening, your comment to me has really stuck with me is I think after the fact I said, “Hey, Kevin, thank you for helping us on this order.”

And you said, “No, Scott, Thank you.” Because previous to this, I don’t think you had sold that company anything like that. And it was just our itty bitty Amigo. It was the four Amigos that I think opened up the door for you. Do you remember that?

Kevin Adam: I do, actually, and you’re absolutely correct. We did a substantial amount of business with that firm as they were relocating and putting in a new warehouse.

Samantha Taylor: That’s fun. Well, thank you guys for sharing your story. And thank you, Kevin, of course, for your time today. We really appreciate this call and being able to learn a little bit more of what a day in the life of a dealer rep looks like.

Kevin Adam: I appreciate the time and effort. Samantha did a great job hosting, or hostess. Scott, It’s good you came along for the ride. It’s nice to hear from you.

Scott Chappell: I know! Yeah, I was glad I could be available. I think we have a tagline. Samantha.

Samantha Taylor: We do! Well, until next time.

Scott Chappell: That’s correct. Keep it rolling.

Samantha Taylor: And that wraps up another episode of the Amigo CartCast. We hope you enjoyed 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.