Posted by Steve O'Dea on Wed, Jun 09, 2010 @ 10:53 AM
In W.P. Kinsella's book "Field of Dreams" which was later made a movie starring Kevin Costner, one of the famous lines was, "If you build it, they will come." This saying was the driving force for the protagonist, Roy, to build his baseball park in the middle of an Iowa cornfield. It was a pretty good movie and a better book. Isn't that usually the case? Well, here at Pacer, we have been slowly building our website and our product offering in hopes that people will visit in droves. We have a long way to go but we are making progress. Our newest section contains pre-made battery cable assemblies.
As soon as we turned the "Open" sign on in this battery cable store we began to get more calls and orders for folks needing to upgrade or update their cables on their boats, cars, trucks and forklifts. As one of our newer customers commented to me, "this is exactly what I was looking for. No more excess pieces, no more failed crimps." That pretty much sums it up.
One of our new customers had us make a battery cable for his 1949 Ford Woody. He was so excited about getting exactly what he was looking for without making a compromise. He also told me that he was going to the "World of Woody Rally" in which he could not wait to tell all of his fellow "Woody" enthusiasts about where he purchased his battery cables.
On a typical day, our battery cable department makes anywhere from 400-800 battery cable assemblies. Often times they are fulfilling orders for any of our OEM customers for their custom assemblies. They are also ensuring that we have adequate stock of the battery cables listed on the site. One of the advantages our cables have is superior flexibility. We use very fine stranded copper conductors in our cable, and that flexibility helps when installing in a variety of spaces.
When we get an opportunity to make a custom assembly for a special antique vehicle or for a race car, the guys get excited. Perhaps it is the typical monotony of doing the same thing over again and when they get to do something different and know about where it will go, they enjoy the possibilities. I guess we all do in a way. When much of your market is recreation or industrial applications, the little kid inside still wants to build in the sandbox, but with full sized earth movers. Or with antique cars, race cars, all terrain vehicles or, well you get the idea. Remember we don't get to ride too many snowmobiles here in Florida. We can however make the battery cables for them so that they perform at their best up north.
Posted by Sheila Knott on Mon, Jan 18, 2010 @ 09:56 AM
By: Steve O'Dea - Pacer Solutions Expert
According to many spell checking vocabulary programs, the word Blog or Blogs is a word to be flagged and checked again. I find that kind of telling. When the programmers at the largest computer software firms in the world (you can guess who they are) were inputting the vocabulary in their databanks a decade or so ago, the word Blog did not exist. In the last fifteen years, with the explosion of technology, the flood gates have opened for new words to enter our everyday lexicon. Social networking sites (heck, even the word site!) have joined the fun with examples such as Tweets, and turning the word "friend" into a verb on Facebook.
These new words have brought opportunity to connect with more people and new ways to promote our businesses. For a company like Pacer Group, who manufactures superior wire and cable, it can help find new customers and industries. We set up customers for wholesale wire and cable prices, and someone blogs about it. We help a customer with finding a gauge for his Mainship 39 boat and he blogs about us on Yahoo Groups. We tweet about a racing team on Twitter and they begin following us. This is really a fortunate turn of technology for all of us if we embrace it and use it. At this point human skill must come into play. In order to utilize these methods to our best advantage we must be willing to change and grow. We must monitor how this instant information is working or not working for us. This is no easy task nor can the questions be answered quickly.
While we are introduced to new words, finding meaning and how we can make them work for us does take some planning. This is a challenging task for a wire and cable website finding its way on the internet. At the very least we need to be open to new ideas and ways of doing business in this age. We would love to hear about some of your success stories (or horror stories) in our comments section. Unfortunately, I still need spell check, but no amount of technology will change that fact.