Most of the time we don'loose customers, we give them away.
This is a promised post to a post of a couple of days ago. The post was about losing a prized customer.
I realize we do some times lose a customer after making monumental efforts to keep them. some times it is the smarter thing to do for various reasons.
however in other cases if you look back, in most we GAVE a customer to a competitor. the following is a story about our two biggest customers, how we got them and how we keep them. We may lose them at any time but it wont be with out every grain of sand over turned tor solutions. I hope this may help some one who is having this problem.
Four years ago I arranged for the removal of a large (for me) amount of scrap from a guys property it covered the gambit and had obviously been accumulated over many years.
The guys I brokered to do the job did it well. I know because I was there every day over seeing the project. Not only did we take every thing but we cleaned up as we went.
It took about a week some of the stuff was in the swampy woods know to Florida residents and was shred, along with some decent scrap.
About a week or two later the gentleman called me and asked if I would take some computers he had in his garage. I went to his house, and he took me to a four car garage. upon opening the door I was amazed, It was full floor to sealing with every type of IT equipment and part you could imagine.
I know absolute 0 about e-waste, all I knew was I'm a fast learner. I searched the net for days and came upon a sight called" Scrap metal forum". at that time there were only two buyers of e waste if I recall correctly. Easy in Texas and a guy calling himself ewasted asking if members thought his moniker was ok or if he should change it, and if his company name was too close to that well known rip off company.
Bear with me I'm getting there.
Jeff is now my partner in Scrapping the change outs of two Fortune 100 companies.
$40 million dollar up grade for a total of around 900,000 lbs.
He had a contact inside, and thanks to the Scrap metal forum I soon had the knowledge about e scrapping. His contact asked if he was interested in bidding for their scrap. I suggested .10 per lb .12 if necessary we would arrange transportation. After a time his contact called him and said if we would go .12 he all but guarantee it would be the winning bid. (there were several other stipulations in the contract) one being a security clearance. turns out one of the company's was a military contractor the other a well know Banking corp. After a year of paper work and vetting I got the security clearance, he didn't. Perfect situation for a partnership, he had the contact but couldn't do it with out my clearance.
After waiting over a year on pins and needles we were informed the bod had gone to a company who was going to charge them $500,000 to haul them off, needless we were devastated and Jeff (my new partner) was confused and thought we were out of the game and basically said "well we tried " (Jeff didn't know me well at that time.)
I told him to send a letter of thanks to his contact and find out who THE Vp was in charge of acquisition ab disbursement for the corp and to keep in close contact with his guy.
I knew something was not on the up and up here and I also knew how Megan corps or rather some of the execs operate, how some times the wheels are greased and chronie capitalism.
another few months go buy During this time he was able to get the right names and I suggested he send a few letters of thanks to the right people with details of our bid.
As I suspected during this time not one load was removed from either location, so we fired off another letter guaranteeing the first load could be removed by us the following week or as soon as they wanted as we knew how valuable their storage space was to them. Two weeks later we hauled our first load.
This was a customer we refused to give to some one else or to let them take it away.
each customer has a value, it's up to you to determine that value and how much effort (grains of sand) you are willing to turn over to win and keep that customer.. mcw
P.S. Sorry this was so long but it is important that you understand most of our customers are not taken but given away to our competitors.
