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 this episode of the Amigo CartCast. This episode is going to be very special and near and dear to my co-host Scott Chappell, because it’s something he’s very passionate about. And the question that we get a lot and we want to be able to answer today is if you have interest or you have somebody that has interest in seeing our product, how do we do that?

So, Scott, if you could share with our listeners on how they are able to see our product, what we’ve done to go to market and why you’re so passionate about it.

Scott Chappell: This might be my most favorite episode. Samantha, thank you. Thank you for that question. Thanks for serving that up. So the unique thing about our unique products are we are able to show our products two different ways. The way that’s near and dear to my heart is what we call our Amigo Roadshow, and I will explain what that is here in just a second.

The other way we do that is, believe it or not, we are set up to send out a product to you at your location for a 5 to 7 day trial. You can try it on your own with your people wherever you want to run it around at, that’s strictly up to you. If it doesn’t work, it’s a one way freight ticket back, which we’ve got the best freight rates in the country because we do a lot – ship a lot of products out and it normally averages about $200 a pallet.

So if a person has a product for 5 to 7 days at $200, you just think about it. Do the math. What is that? $35-40 a day for basically a trial just to see if it’s going to work? No obligation, of course. But the real way to see our products is our Amigo Roadshow. And I want to tell you what that is.

Samantha Taylor: I wish everybody could see the sparkle in your eye right now.

Scott Chappell: Oh, thank you. They say you can hear the smile over the radio.

Samantha Taylor: I think we can. Yes.

Scott Chappell: And I am smiling.

Samantha Taylor: You are smiling, which honestly fuels me. Like, it just makes me excited because I know this is something you’re very passionate about and you’re not the only one who is able to do this. So why don’t you tell everyone what is the Amigo Roadshow? And who else do we have to support?

Scott Chappell: So the Amigo Roadshow is a way, we started it in 2017, is a way that we load up our sprinter style van with products that will allow us to show our whole entire product line. And what does that mean? That means that normally through your local material handling distributor, your dealer, they have a customer that they say, “Scott, we want to show Customer X your products,” and we say, “We’re there.” You set it up, we…

Samantha Taylor: Show up.

Scott Chappell: That’s it. So when we show up, it could be outside in the parking lot, it could be in shipping, receiving. We might eventually take the products in to show more people. But what happens is we show up on our sprinter van. We unload all of the products out of the van. At that point in time, we’re answering questions.

It’s a question answer session because once people see it, the wheels start turning and they go, my gosh, we can use it in shipping, we can use it in maintenance, we can use it to haul cardboard, we might be able to use in production. The supervisor might use a people mover just to get back and forth if it’s a large facility, or if it’s a small facility.

We’ve had people that have had — employees, supervisors, managers — they’ve had a knee replacement and they cannot get around the facility anymore. So it just allows them to kind of be more active and go to work every day. So getting back to that, I kind of get off and get off on a tangent, Samantha.

Samantha Taylor: No, that’s okay. We want to hear from you. One thing I do want to add, though, I obviously don’t have as much experience on the road show as you do, but you brought up a good point of all the different applications. And so often we will get a phone call to say, I want to use it for this specific thing.

Let’s say it’s for maintenance, and we start doing the demo and we’re showing it off. All of a sudden it’s like they start swarming. People are coming out of the woodworks, wheels are turning and they’re excited about it. And they say, “Well, if Joe gets one, I want one, too.”

Scott Chappell: It’s amazing you say that because it’s almost like adults turn into kids. And at that point in time, if Samantha has one, Scott wants one. Now, I will. On that note, thank you very much for bringing that up. We did a demonstration at a huge facility in Utica, New York, and they actually had — we did it in the parking lot — but they had 13 employees.

We actually pulled all the products out. It was with our manufacturer’s rep on the East Coast. We pulled all of our products out. 13 people asked all these questions, which is good. It was probably 40 minutes. Our average demo is 20 to maybe 35 minutes. So it’s not a lot of time, folks. So we’re not going to waste your time.

But they asked all these questions, spent the money to have the people there. And then we loaded our stuff and we went on to the next one. So getting back, I kind of lost track a little bit, but getting back to the demo once again, we pull the products out and all of those people possibly could come and look at it.

But as far as that show goes, we are just demonstrating product, We’re demonstrating how to operate it forward and backwards. We’re demonstrating how to release our trailer on our Dex Pro+ or demonstrating how our hitch works on our Dex HD. We’re demonstrating how you plug it into the wall because that’s how they charge these.

Samantha Taylor: Also how serviceable it is, how easy it is to maintain.

Scott Chappell: Most definitely.

Samantha Taylor: We’ll review, like, freewheel mode. There’s a lot of… just features and benefits to highlight during these demonstrations.

Scott Chappell: That whole presentation really is whatever the customer we’re seeing wants it to be, right? Yeah, we can talk product all day long, but it’s only when they ask the questions, we answer those questions and then for their specific application, maybe they need something customized, maybe they need a little longer trailer, maybe they want a couple of shelves, but we don’t know this.

That’s the beautiful thing, everybody, about our Amigo Roadshow, is nobody knew this when we pulled in the parking lot. So once we show it all this stuff surfaces. Now I’m not going to say everybody buys. I wish they did. But I will tell you the ratio of people that buy once they see it is much higher than if you’ve never seen it at all.

What we will do then is once we answer the questions, normally what happens is our local distributor requests a quote from us because their customer says, “How much is it? How fast can you get them?” Hey, Samantha, by the way, if somebody wanted to buy one, what’s our current lead time?

Samantha Taylor: Current lead time, because it comes right out of Michigan, is four weeks. We ship direct to the customer or the distributor if they prefer that. But we have a four week lead time, which in the material handling world is unheard of.

Scott Chappell: I was just — my next question to you is going to be, have you heard that some products in this industry are 26 weeks? 30 weeks? It’s amazing. Yes, it’s amazing. Especially when they had that whole microchip, all that shortage. The neat thing about us and Samantha said it, but I think it needs to be said again, is we are made in Michigan.

The other cool thing is we now have manufacturing on site. We bend, we weld, we assemble. It’s exciting. I think it’s exciting.

Samantha Taylor: It’s very exciting and it makes it easy. And like you said, when there’s other supply chain issues, we’re very forward thinking in how can we ensure to meet our customer demand at that four week lead time and ensure that we’re delivering the product on time.

Scott Chappell: 100%. When we give that lead time to people, they just… jaw drops. They just go, really? We can do that. I mean, that’s their question because they’re so conditioned to at least 15 weeks and so on. You know, the other thing that I didn’t mention is that simplicity. And I will just tell you, we do a lot of trade shows, we do ProMat, we do MODEX, we’ve done Fab Tech, we’ve done Pack Expo.

The really cool thing that people say at our booth and they basically say, “No disrespect,” but they say, “your product is so simple,” and we show the simplicity of our product at this Amigo Roadshow demonstration at this 20 to 30 minute, because it is simple and it’s effective. And if it works for them, most of the time people end up getting them.

Samantha Taylor: Absolutely. So another thing I think that we want to maybe share because you hear the Amigo Roadshow, we show up, back in 2017. That’s when we started this Amigo Roadshow, right? That’s when you started going out and showing the product.

Scott Chappell: It was fall. It was. It was September of 2017.

Samantha Taylor: And what was the weather?

Scott Chappell: Are you trying to get me to make a mistake? I think it was…

Samantha Taylor: I wouldn’t know.

Scott Chappell: I think it was 50 degrees.

Samantha Taylor: Sounds beaut– the crisp air. The leaves were falling. It was magical, painting a picture.

Scott Chappell: It was almost apple cider season.

Samantha Taylor: Wonderful. Get a little cider donut, apples. You’re on the way. So from there, you saw the benefit and success of this, to showing our product. Fast forward now to 2004 where we are at and we–

Scott Chappell: 2004 or 2024?

Samantha Taylor: Fast forward to–

Scott Chappell: Are we going back in time? That was a fantastic movie. Somewhere in Time, filmed on Mackinac Island. That’s in the state of Michigan as well.

Samantha Taylor: We love Michigan.

Scott Chappell: Yes we do.

Samantha Taylor: So fast forward to 2024.

Scott Chappell: Yes.

Samantha Taylor: And we have quickly realized how fast we’re growing and how many people want to see our product. So as much as I know you would love to be on every single demonstration in the roadshow, and travel, you know, 365 days a year, you can’t even show all of it yourself. So we have been so fortunate to be able to grow our internal representatives, to go out and partner with our material handling reps and dealers to show our products.

Scott Chappell: We have.

Samantha Taylor: So we are able, no matter where you’re at listening, we are able to demonstrate our products across the country.

Scott Chappell: We can, we most certainly have.

Samantha Taylor: And we do. So, I think we would like to hear from Scott, and part of our mission is to, of course, Improve Lives Through Mobility. Since our episode today is on the roadshow, the Amigo Roadshow, this might be a difficult one for you to narrow down, but what has been your favorite Amigo Road Show to support our mission of Improving Lives Through Mobility?

Scott Chappell: Oh my gosh. A favorite road show? I don’t know if I have a favorite because there was a point in time that I was on the road every other week and I really, really enjoyed that. It got to be a lot. Yeah, it’s hard. I mean, if you’re a traveler on the road right now, you know what we’re talking about.

But the exciting part was, one, was we were growing a brand new product line that nobody’s ever seen before. Two is when we started it, it was the sky was the limit. So when we started with zero sales, all of a sudden now you’ve got 10,000, you’ve got 20,000, you got 100,000, and you have all this growth. So the fact of the matter, if you say if you have a favorite Jeez, you put me under the gun, I will tell you this because this just took me to somewhere else.

There’s a company in Wisconsin that makes these fans that go over top of your hoods of your stove. And I met a young man. He was young. I’m not young, but he was young and he was putting on 30,000 steps a day. Now he’s young, so that’s cool. He can do that. But I will tell you, I met him in the parking lot when we did the demo and what he — and they were moving cardboard — and what he said is he says, “By the time I go home at night after 9 hours,” because it’s a nine hour day, he says, “my feet hurt terribly.”

So they chose to purchase a product, I think for efficiency, but it may have been also they hear their employee say, “Oh my gosh,” yeah, “it can make it a lot easier for me.”

Samantha Taylor: I was kind of hoping when you said it was in Wisconsin, you would say it was for cheese.

Scott Chappell: Yes. This was not — this was not cheese.

Samantha Taylor: But I’m happy for him that he can hopefully go home and rest a little easier.

Scott Chappell: Yeah, big deal. We’ve done a few pharmaceutical companies on the East Coast and they were large facilities. I’m talking 500,000 plus square feet. And I think the unique thing about it was when we took the product in and yeah, we met with the plant manager, we met with the manufacturing engineer, whoever it was, the supervisor, then we showed the actual worker bees that are actually in the facility and these people get on it for the first time.

And I will tell you– the cool thing about Amigo one, another cool thing about Amigo is we have these smiley pins that people wear and we’ve had them since the beginning of time, right? And it’s just an Amigo– a smiley pin, yellow and black, black and yellow, with an Amigo– it says Amigo on it. And what we tell folks is once they ride the product, they’re going to smile.

And I have, I’ve been yet to see somebody not smile. So I don’t know if it’s one as much as we’re asked to go to a facility, we demonstrate, we show the actual employees what the products are doing. They automatically get it and they go, my gosh, it’s going to make my job easier today. It’s going to make my job better today.

And I would say that’s probably the biggest thing I get from all the demos that we’ve done is that the actual person that’s using it gets really excited about it and they see a benefit and we’ve improved their life.

Samantha Taylor: Scott, thank you so much for taking the time to share with our listeners how we demonstrate our product. I hope everybody was able to hear the passion in his voice and the twinkle in his eye.

Scott Chappell: Could they hear it? Oh, they can’t see it. You’re right.

Samantha Taylor: They’re visualizing it, yep. They’re driving in their car or getting into work. Whatever they’re doing, they can feel it. And I think that, that is telling. Alright, so that concludes our episode of our Amigo Road Show. If you would like to set up a demonstration to see our product, please get in contact with your local material handling dealer or representative.

Scott Chappell: You can also reach out to us.

Samantha Taylor: Reach out to us, and–

Scott Chappell: We’ll get ahold of them.

Samantha Taylor: Absolutely. We’ll get you in contact and we will, what, what do you say?

Scott Chappell: You set it up, we show up.

Samantha Taylor: You set it up and we’ll show up.

Scott Chappell: We show up.

Samantha Taylor: We show up. That’s right. Anything else?

Scott Chappell: Keep it 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.