TALES FROM THE ROAD 22 – DELIVERING ON TIME TO THE TREASURY

This was the project that helped me over the line, to achieve £1million of carpet tile sales to our export markets in a year. The challenge for every sales person is that as one excellent year ends, a new year starts and you are expected to do even better! It’s what makes it fun. And while international sales can sometimes create a highly pressurised environment, you can take a lot of the pressure off yourself through good planning and organisation.

In 1999, our Turkish distributor worked long and hard to win a prestigious 10,000m2 job to supply and install carpet tiles to the new Treasury Building in Ankara. British companies did well out of the project, with Liquid Plastics from Preston winning the contract for the exterior walls. Everything was on a very tight schedule, and it was that plus the size of the project which caused me to take a slightly different approach.

The top cloth (carpet) for carpet tiles is made in colour batches. In this case each colour batch allowed for the production of 2,400m2 of tiles. Colours from different batches are generally very close, but on those occasions when they are not (but still within industry tolerance) the difference between two batches installed on the same open floor can be quite marked. So the first thing to try and understand was the configuration of the new building: how many storeys, what floor area per storey, what partitioning was planned, and so on.  That way we could avoid any possible colour batch issues by ensuring that two different batches were never installed on the same storey, or at least not in an open floor area where there were no office dividing walls.

The products would be sent overland by truck, and we already knew that each truck would hold 2,400m2 of carpet tiles on 20 pallets each holding 120m2. So just about four truck loads. We were then pleased to learn from our distributor that the area of each floor of the new building was about 800m2 because it made the mathematics easy – three floors per truck!  Every pallet was to be clearly labelled with a floor number to make it easy for the contractors to install the right batch on the right floor. And they did.

Truck one left us without any issues. Truck two was similarly without a hitch. But truck three presented an interesting problem. Turkish truck drivers had a habit of just arriving at the factory when it was convenient for them, and clogging up the delivery yard. This particular driver arrived to take his load on a Friday afternoon when actually it hadn’t been scheduled for production until at least that day. So he had to spend a weekend living out of his cab using truck radiator water for his kettle because all the factory facilities were under lock and key. Must have tasted lovely! The finished tiles were eventually inspected and passed ready for shipment on the Monday, by which time this poor guy positively hummed!

So truck three was all systems go, when there was a phone call to my office from the factory. In his broken English, the driver had persuaded the warehouse team that he could only load the carpet tile pallets down the centre of his truck due to weight constraints, which would have reduced by half the quantity his truck would take.  “So why then…” I asked “…have two trucks left with full loads and no weight issues?”, which was met with the reply “Well he isn’t having any of it John”, so I walked down to the loading bay with my mobile phone in my hand, dialled the number of the Turkish haulage company, and asked the haulage manager to explain to his driver that he was going to take a full load or be turned away. I handed my phone to this rather smelly man who suddenly seemed to agree with me that it was possible a full load of 2,400m2 of carpet tiles was possible after all! Amazing. I pointed out to our warehouse guys that he was probably trying to secure a cash incentive to take what he was contracted to take anyway! I don’t think we saw that driver again after that day.

It was Christmas Eve 1999 when the final truck was loaded. I was already on my holidays with my feet up in front of the telly by then, so in order to get me over the line to my first £1million, my magnanimous boss, and his magnanimous boss both physically helped to load the truck so that it would leave, and be invoiced, within that financial year. Thinking about it now, they probably just wanted to cudos of telling their boss that it was on their watch that the company had achieved their first £1million export year!