Access and Quality: Solutions Providers, with Rick Milefchik
A Message From Our Sponsor:
This episode is brought to you by Access Elevator & Escalator supply, and Quality Elevator Products. Visit AESupply.com and QualityElev.com to learn more.
Intro:
This episode is sponsored by Access Elevator & Escalator Supply, an elevator industry supplier of a wide range of components for elevator and escalator maintenance, repair, and modernization. And by her sister company, Quality Elevator Products, which specializes in the manufacturing and distribution of elevator and escalator parts and accessories. Together, they are more than just parts suppliers—They are solutions providers. Now, let’s dive in.
Summary:
Rick Milefchik, leader of Access Elevator Supply and Quality Elevator Products, discusses the importance of creating positive customer experiences. He emphasizes the need for responsive, transparent, and personalized service. Milefchik highlights the impact of Extreme Ownership culture, where employees take full responsibility for their actions. He also addresses the challenges of short product life cycles and the necessity of adapting to changing customer needs. Milefchik’s companies focus on maintaining inventory to ensure timely delivery and value customer feedback to improve processes and services. The conversation underscores the importance of continuous improvement and customer-centric strategies in the elevator industry.
Transcript:
Rick Milefchik (00:00)
If you can make that experience a little bit better, you know, for somebody, they’ll enjoy that and they’ll remember that. When I was at Kone I had a situation. It was really kind of telling point that kind of got me thinking in these terms many, many years ago was it was late at night and we were really pushing to get an item out the door, trying to identify it for a particular customer.
It was probably a 15 minute call Finally figured it out. We were able to determine yes, we can get it out. So the customer on the other end, she says, you’re a lifesaver. But more than anything, she goes, I’ve never had so much fun placing a purchase order. Now, in a weird way, that was more valuable than the transaction of the sale, because it was like, okay, here’s somebody that at the end of her day was
stressing, trying to get things done, cause she had to go answer to somebody. And, you know, to, be able to accomplish that and to also give a positive experience. That was kind of the beginning of this thing for me.
Matthew Allred (01:05)
Hello and welcome to Elevator Tools and Tech, a special series from the Elevator Careers podcast, where we spotlight the latest innovations, tools, suppliers and technology driving the vertical transportation industry. In each episode, we sit down with the creators, engineers and solution providers who are helping elevator companies work smarter, safer and more efficiently.
This episode is sponsored by Access Elevator and Escalator Supply, an elevator industry supplier of a wide range of components for elevator and escalator maintenance, repair and modernization, and by her sister company, Quality Elevator Products, which specializes in the manufacturing and distribution of elevator and escalator parts and accessories. Together, they are more than just part suppliers, they are solutions providers. Now let’s dive in. Welcome
to the show. Our guest today is Rick Milefchik leader of both companies, a seasoned industry leader who’s helping his teams navigate supply chain issues, building meaningful partnerships and delivering real results. Rick, it’s great to have you on today.
Rick Milefchik (02:10)
And it’s awesome to be here. Great to see you again and talk with you again.
Matthew Allred (02:14)
Likewise, I enjoy every conversation. It’s been a few years since we first met and I’m loving just watching your journey, watching you build these companies and obviously navigating some challenges along the way. So I wanna talk a little bit more about the growth, about the challenges and the ways that you’re taking those on.
Rick Milefchik (02:36)
Absolutely.
Matthew Allred (02:37)
So one of the things we talked about in the past, you had mentioned the buying experience as a competitive differentiator. Can you walk us through how your team creates those wow moments for your customers?
Rick Milefchik (02:49)
Yeah, I think not just our group, so many companies have a, process, you know, an order comes in, you process the order and you go through that, you pull it, pack it, ship it, it’s done. And you go to the next order. And it is very transactional. And of course that is what we do. And there’s the nature of, you know, necessity out of that. But
I want our the people in our organizations to look at what a customer does with us and what we do in turn with a customer in a way that they would with their personal lives. You know, that they’re, each one of us has a buying practice, whether that be for groceries, whether that be for gas services, whatever it may be that drives us to our
particular choice of where go and what is it that does that? And I don’t think many people think about that, but it is something that, you know, are we price driven? Do we go because it’s the cheapest? Do we go there because our time is valuable? We can get in and get out. Is it that, you walk in and they treat you like a king? You know, different people have different, drivers that,
draw them to a particular place in their personal life. And I don’t think people in the business world are a whole lot different. Certainly there’s restraints based on corporate policy as to what somebody has to do or where they have to go. They may have to get multiple quotes. There’s different dynamics, but for the most part, people still want, anytime you have that interaction, they have to go do something.
That’s part of their job. They want that experience to be number one. They want it to be easy. I don’t care who you are. And it, nobody’s going to say, well, I know I, I’d prefer the difficult way. No, they want the easy way. They want it to be easy and they want to be treated well. And they want to have an experience that is, relatively positive. Nobody wants to have to spend money on a need.
It’s one thing to go spend money on something you want. But in our industry, people are buying these things because they need them. They themselves, as a buyer, is a cost to their company. And now they have to go spend money. So everything, theoretically, is quickly ⁓ man, this is all negative right off the bat. And so if you can make that experience a little bit better.
You know, for somebody, they’ll enjoy that and they’ll remember that. When I was at Kone I had a situation, it was really one of the kind of really telling point that kind of got me thinking in these terms many, many years ago was it was late at night and we were really pushing to get an item out the door, trying to identify it for a particular customer. And it was probably a 15 minute call maybe.
Finally figured it out, we were able to determine, yes, we can get it out, so on and so forth. And the customer on the other end, she says, you’re a lifesaver, she goes, but more than anything, she goes, I’ve never had so much fun placing a purchase order. Now, in a weird way, that was more valuable than the transaction of the sale, because it was like, okay, here’s somebody that at the end of her day was,
stressing, trying to get things done, because she had to go answer to somebody. And, you know, to be able to accomplish that and to also give a positive experience. That was kind of the beginning of this thing for me. And that’s what we want our people. And I don’t think we I don’t think we succeed at it every day, every transaction of every day. I think we still have work to do.
But that is one of the goals, to be responsive, to be quick on the draw, to be upfront, be honest, be transparent.
Matthew Allred (06:45)
If you can have fun and help your customer have fun at the same time, I mean, you’ve you’ve definitely provided a wow for them. Wow, I didn’t expect that.
Rick Milefchik (06:53)
Yeah. And, and you know, to, do things in a simple way where we still send handwritten thank you notes. And again, that’s very old school, of course. We still send mailings out. We do some of these things, you know, 90 plus percent of it may end up in a garbage can. I don’t know, you know, but the handful of them somewhat for somebody to open up something and just say, Hey, thanks for the opportunity to work with you. Yeah. Handwritten, not a stamp, not a canned pre printed thing.
But they get that even if they say, huh, huh means they’re thinking about something. It threw them, but it threw them in a good way.
Matthew Allred (07:30)
That leads us to a next question which is, you talked about growing and getting bigger, but also getting better. I’m curious, I think you’re kind of talking about some of that. What does it look like in practical business terms and how do you measure getting better?
Rick Milefchik (07:44)
Yeah, we don’t want to do everything. There’s a lot more we could do. We could sell for a lot less. We could bring in a whole lot more. We could arguably be sloppier and do more at a faster pace. And I’ve used the term shortly after I took over here was, we’re going to slow down to speed up.
And we’ll take a little bit of a hit. We were already in the middle of a mess anyway.
Matthew Allred (08:11)
Clarify that just a little bit for me. When you say slow down, what I’m hearing is we want to make sure every order is correct. We want to make sure that we’re not sending you the wrong part to get it out the door fast.
Rick Milefchik (08:25)
Yeah, we were willy nilly. Everything got to do this, got to do this. This came in, let’s stop this. Let’s work on that phone rang. Let’s, better stop that. Let’s work on this. We were moving sideways, but we weren’t moving very forward. And, and that was just a culture that existed there. And, you know, some of the practices and the processes that, if they were in place, they weren’t being followed. and
many weren’t in place. And, and so, we’ve got to have structure and we’ve got to, you know, we’ve got to adhere to that structure and follow a process. It doesn’t mean we don’t move within the process, but we still have to follow the process. Just to say that, we’re, bigger or we’re getting bigger. Look at what we’re doing. Well, if we’re not doing it right, then it’s going to catch us. And you know,
Again, going back to those that the previous part of the discussion, the buying experience, if we’re doing it, if we’re doing things right, and giving people those positive experiences, that will continue to that traffic back and forth will continue to increase. And so the bigger becomes rather organic, and it just takes place naturally.
Matthew Allred (09:35)
Sure, and it’s healthier growth, right? You’re building on a strong foundation versus just building on a balloon or a cloud that’s gonna pop and you’re…
Rick Milefchik (09:45)
Yeah.
Yeah. It’s healthy growth and it’s something that, you know, that one you could be proud of and that people really buy, employees buy into that, you know, because, we don’t have a slew of returns. We don’t have a slew of complaints and, you know, these are the things that it’s like, no, we’re not having to stop to correct something. You know, and that goes back to and again, it’s a play on words. It sounds fluffy, but it’s sincere.
Let’s not fix something let’s correct it.
Matthew Allred (10:16)
Love it. ⁓ yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned that in previous conversations that COVID really exposed some flaws in the kind of the just-in-time inventory model and you had to kind of work around that and shift your own model. yeah. What were some of the things you did to overcome that, if you will?
Rick Milefchik (10:38)
Well, I think we, you know, the culture that existed was, we had a supplier for this, whatever this was, and we had a supplier for that, whatever that was. Well, okay. Suddenly they fell down, you know, and the mindset was, well, they said, we’ll get them here. They said, we’ll get them here. Well, when here never came, well, what do you do? You know, you got people.
Our customers, who have customers, they really don’t give a crap if my supplier can’t deliver. They’re saying, why is my elevator not running? You know, and so they’re going to the service company saying, well then find it somewhere else. And so, you know, that’s what we ultimately did is like, well, then resource it. ⁓ man, it’s going to be a little, it’s going to be more money.
Okay. So you’re not making as much margin, but are you still providing the product and are you making something, you know, a little of something’s better than a lot of nothing.
Matthew Allred (11:39)
Especially if you’re pleasing your customers, to your point, they don’t care where you got it. They just need it.
Rick Milefchik (11:43)
Well, and again, one of the advantages I think I’ve had over the years is working, you know, coming from an OEM, where I spent the bulk of my career, The processes there are pretty intense and the expectations are very high. And, you know, when you rely on those customers for a good
portion of your revenue. It doesn’t take many instances to fail and they just go somewhere else. And so again, you’ve got to survive somehow and you got to figure out ways to get around where you’re at. Yeah, resourcing was one thing and then figuring out, okay, let’s not get ourselves in this situation again. You put your hand on the stove, it’s pretty hot, don’t do that. So if we need it and we know we’re going to use it, then buy it, let’s have it here.
Matthew Allred (12:33)
Yeah.
Rick Milefchik (12:34)
So
From an accounting perspective, I’m probably not going to win most favorite employee award in any accounting groups right now because I love inventory and I want to have it. To me, it’s a positive risk to have the inventory versus the negative risk to just live hand to mouth. With the mindset
And not the mindset, just the general dynamics in the industry now. People don’t have time to wait. They don’t carry inventory. Their resources are less and they’re fewer. So they’re, flying by the seat of their pants. And so if you’ve got it, you’re halfway home. And, for me, it was okay. We got hit way too many times on poor lead times, not having the material or the finished product, let alone the sub components of the finished product.
No, I’m not going to do that again. So we’ll beef up and buy what we got to buy to improve delivery times.
Matthew Allred (13:35)
Yeah, I what I hear is you are taking ownership, you know rather than pointing out to the ocean and say, oh, you know what, it’s six weeks out on a boat in the Pacific. You’re saying, you know what, we’re going to take ownership of this. And that’s something you talked about in our last conversation, you know extreme ownership is the term you use as a core part of your company culture. And I’m curious how that mindset has changed the way not only you, but your team handles mistakes or customer issues or
or just any problem that comes along.
Rick Milefchik (14:07)
Yeah, we’ve invested heavily in our people. We send them to a company called Echelon Front, which is headed up by a couple former Navy SEALs. Very kind of a military mindset, but not entirely because it flows all the way down from whether it be military to business down to your home life. All of it can be affected by that and utilized.
Essentially what it is, is no, this is all on me. There’s no finger pointing. If a customer, maybe a customer did order something incorrectly, but you don’t say, well, you ordered it incorrectly. That’s one of the things with other suppliers over the years. Customer has got to jump through hoops to provide a ton of information just to hope that they get a credit on something.
Matthew Allred (14:57)
So.
Rick Milefchik (14:58)
And it’s like, no, that’s not really the right way that just leaves a sour taste. And so we expect our people it’s not just from us to our customers. My people in our customer service groups, they are my customers, our warehouse and shipping people and production people. They are the customers of
the customer service group. Purchasing is a customer of mine. We’re all customers internally of each other. And if we can’t take care of each other, we’re not going to take care of the external customers. And in order to really do that the right way, you and I may have a strong disagreement on something. You know, it’s really hard. It’s easy to say, well, I’m going to take ownership of it. Well, you’ve got to really think about what you’re saying, because that’s not that easy to do.
Matthew Allred (15:46)
When it comes down to it, right? It’s so much easier to point your finger and say, well, you did this, right? Rather than to look inside and say, okay, what part of this do I own? That’s the part that takes you really looking at your ego and your pride and you’re going, Oh my gosh.
Rick Milefchik (16:03)
It
It is and it’s like, okay, Matt, I don’t think I explained myself properly, or I could have done a better job of explaining. These are the kinds of things, because what that does is that also removes is a victim mentality. And it lowers the playing field. And one of the big things that they talk about in the Echelon Front and the Extreme Ownership is detaching.
You know, man, you’re right in the middle of something. You get off with an angry phone call. You know, somebody is mad at you. You have an employee conflict, whatever it could be. You know, just take a step back and just say, wait a minute, let me think about this. You know, you know, take a breath. You know, that’s today’s reality. Today’s, you know, thing everybody wants to do. You know, rapid fire response. And, know, in these type of situations, that’s maybe not the best. And so that’s really helped us develop a
a customer first mentality that, there is a truth. There is also truth. There’s the old cliche of customers always right. No, they’re not. They’re not always right. Right. You know, but it doesn’t mean that you condemn them for any kind of a mistake. It’s no, it’s like, okay, here’s what happened. Here’s what I see what happened. You know, can we agree on X, whatever X is.
You know, and what it does, it just fosters a much more smooth and level of communications back and forth and allows you to land at a good positive result a whole lot faster. We don’t spend time within our companies debating frankly stupid stuff sometimes, you know. You deal with issues and you figure out, hey, okay, let’s collectively, we’re going to do this.
One of the things, you we, changed so many things and to a point where, you know people’s heads were spinning. And, one of the things I continually had to tell people is, know, if you don’t agree with what we’re doing, that’s okay. I understand that. And, you have the right to come in and tell me why and what would be better. And we’ll put all that on the table.
Matthew Allred (17:52)
I can’t even imagine.
Rick Milefchik (18:08)
But the only thing I’m going to ask is that, you give the process a chance to fail. You know let’s follow the process and if it fails, it fails. Then that’s on me. If it took off like the rocket, we hope it would. We all did really good then. So if something goes south, then that’s on my head, you know, but we’ll never do something we can’t reverse.
Matthew Allred (18:14)
Right.
Yeah, well, and even if it goes south, maybe there’s this part or that part or something that needs to be tweaked, well, great, let’s collaborate, let’s tweak what needs to be fixed and let’s improve it together. And that’s really what I’m seeing you’re describing with extreme ownership. And what I’m hearing is, hey, we dumped a lot of things on the businesses and yet our team was able to grow and work through it. In fact, you even told me a story about one of your teammates who
said this used to be nothing more than a paycheck and now it’s become a career. I’m curious, how did you foster that across the organization?
Rick Milefchik (19:10)
I arguably one of the
things I’m most proud of actually. And this is one of our members at AES. When I got there, we were that again, you alluded to the COVID thing. Access was a company at that time that was so reliant on soft starters, pretty much a very narrow scope of one legged table of a product line that we lived and breathed by. And in early ’22, all the way into close to mid ’23,
There was a massive shortage in components for these soft starters and they were like gold. So the revenue stream was pathetic. And to a point where we were like, God, do we even continue to do this? And had just a couple young ladies at our office there that were working for us.
Relying very heavily on them and both of them pretty inexperienced and we reinvented ourselves basically with the help of the quality products, the opening of another office in Las Vegas. And this young lady just grabbed a hold of everything. We brought her to one of these Echelon Front seminars with us. She took
absolute 100 % ownership of what went on in that office and had a strong interest and desire to learn. And part of it was, she was new, but okay, you know, you’re clearly valuable. You’ve got a thought process. You’ve got, you know, you’ve got talents here. Let’s capitalize on these talents. What you don’t know, let’s kind of work on that.
To where you can get to a point where that also becomes a valuable asset. So we capitalize on the strengths, we disguise the weaknesses, collectively get better. And basically you’re here, here’s the steering wheel, here’s the keys, you drive this bus for me. And she soared she’s absolutely soared. And I get chills when I think about that conversation of
hearing, I love my job. She says, when I got here, this was just, I needed a paycheck. But she goes, this is just what I want to do. This is my career. And that is like, that’s the handle that means, you know, and that’s one of the things I really do want everybody in our organization to be able to draw a line that when they come into the office, that’s what they do.
Matthew Allred (21:19)
That’s all.
Rick Milefchik (21:41)
When they leave the office and they go home into the, to what I view the more important part of their life, whether that’s a mom, a dad, a brother, sister, boyfriend, girlfriend, doesn’t matter. That’s the more important part of their life. You know, but if they dive in to the business part of their life and what they do and they take ownership of it and they soar like what I just described that improves
the more important part of their life. It’s not necessarily a hand in glove, but it definitely has an impact. And, that’s what I want. I don’t want people on a Sunday night dreading coming to work Monday morning. You know, I want them, you know, let’s face it, none of us come to work because we got nothing else to do. Maybe somebody does, I don’t know. But most people don’t do that.
They come there because they have to. if you’ve got to spend over half of your waking hours at a place, we should make it as positive as we can and let people then take that positivity home with them and come back in the next morning with that same level of positivity because that’s going to transcend back to the customer, back to that experience we talked about.
The domino effect is huge here.
Matthew Allred (22:58)
So absolutely is what I’m seeing. You change the internal culture, which obviously change people’s personal lives and their families. And then obviously that’s going to reflect back on how they’re treating customers. And obviously with this idea of extreme ownership, you talked about, you know, listening to the customer, hearing what happens, even when it hurts, right? Even when, maybe they’re unhappy and they’re pointing the finger and they’re, you know something didn’t work out. So I’m curious, how has that feedback and that willingness to just listen
helped you refine not only your products, your service model, and maybe some of your internal processes?
Rick Milefchik (23:31)
Yeah, we do on the AES side and they touch both companies. We do periodic simple little surveys. There are four or five question surveys and the intent is that somebody can complete it in 30 seconds. We don’t want to take 15 minutes for the survey. People, they’re not going to do it. And we actually take that information and we really look at it and we do listen to it.
You know, one of the things we did, we put in an auto attendant several months ago and I’m not sure it was the right thing to do. I’m not comfortable with it. So that was the subject of our last survey is, hey, how do you want it? When you call in, what’s your preference? A live person, auto attendant, a direct line. Are you open to chat? Are you open to this? What don’t you like?
And we’ve gotten some good feedback already. And it’s amazing to see that some of what we thought several months ago that we were doing, turned out to maybe not be what people want. And so that’s something we’ve already in a limited number of responses. We’ve already started the process of figuring out, okay, what other options do we have? We do want the feedback. I do, and it goes back again to the loyal buyer, loyal customer, not even a buyer.
You know, tell me where we are wrong. I don’t worry about, I shouldn’t say I don’t worry about it. I worry less about the guy that’s going to complain to me. Because that’s something that, okay, I’m hearing what I probably need to hear. Maybe not what I want to hear, but what I need to hear. I worry more about how many other people think exactly the same way.
and just quietly tip toe away and didn’t say a word, but went somewhere else. That’s the great unknown. There’s not too many things that scare me. That scares me because if that happens, that’s awfully hard to recoup.
Matthew Allred (25:32)
Yeah, yeah, because you don’t know, right? They’re the ones that aren’t saying anything. They maybe just vanish and it’s like, okay.
Rick Milefchik (25:37)
No, but they’re sure going to go complain to somebody else. So the word of mouth, it can work great for you, but it can really just destroy you.
Matthew Allred (25:40)
For sure.
Well, and especially in this industry, you know, it’s a tight knit as we all know, right? Everybody knows everybody, everybody talks to everybody. I am curious, you know, you had mentioned, you know, SEES as a customer, a supplier, a competitor, obviously said very, very positive things about them. But I’m just curious, how do you navigate those relationships while staying true to your values and growth strategy?
Rick Milefchik (26:14)
I think that’s just the transparency of things and it’s just being very open. There’s things that I believe, you know, I think Rich down there at SEES does, he runs a wonderful company. They are probably the most like us, if you will. They do some things that we don’t do. And that’s a business decision that frankly, that the investment we would have to make to go and do some of what we utilize them for, it would take
way too long to recoup investment. And so, you know, I do feel like if there’s somebody that does it better than us, I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. I’d rather just work with somebody and if I can help them and they benefit and then we in turn can benefit, are we making money hand over foot with some of that? No, but there were, because of our geographical situation with the multiple offices.
we’ve got things in locations that people are, they’re going to come in and get because they can. So it’s beneficial to us. It helps them. There’s things that we both do that we probably get some orders that they didn’t. They get some orders that we didn’t. There could be different reasons. It could be that experience that they give is maybe more positive to a customer than what maybe we did.
It could be that they’re right down the street, kind of hard to ignore. It could be that they priced it a lot better, or we priced it a lot better in the various dynamics. But you look at that and you say, okay, you know, but I look at that and say, all right, we, we quoted this. Why didn’t we get it? You know, they went somewhere. Now, you know, somebody either found it faster. They found it. Did we not have it? Okay. That has a lot to do with it. Were we priced too high?
If we had it and we were lower priced, okay, there’s something else that tells me what, what was it about that experience that they missed? I want to understand that. And there’s a level of, you know, I don’t want to, And this is again, I have to be respectful too, cause I don’t want to talk negatively about the career of sales salespeople. Cause obviously that’s what I grew up with here in the industry, but I don’t think the industry.
wants a stereotypical or traditional salesperson. I think the industry wants somebody that says, here’s the value I can bring you. But the deliverable has to be that value. It can’t be because somebody says I deliver value. The customer determines that, not us. And I think
you know, back to SEES think that, you know, again, two like companies, very similar. I think we do a lot of similar things. They do more than we do in some things. We do more than they do in others. We use them for those things. They use us for some things and we play in the same sandbox and compete for the same customer base in others. And I think as long as we have that respect for the people in those companies and the company itself.
All of that stays above the table and it’s like, you can almost have a lighthearted, know, dang it, you got that one. Okay, I’m going to get the next one. And that’s okay. I think that if you don’t win, you lose and you got to get better. That’s opportunity to get better is the way I look at it. The more we know, the better we get.
Why did we lose that? I don’t know. Okay, well, right now then there’s a gap in our process.
Matthew Allred (29:35)
What
Can we do to get better? And that’s really the message I’m seeing overall from this conversation is that, we’re trying to get better and trying to provide a better product, a better availability, a better customer service. And it’s a journey. We’re learning as we go. I think that’s, it’s not like it’s a destination, right? It is a journey. Keep going on the journey.
Rick Milefchik (30:00)
It is. is. You know,
I’m on my 43rd year in this thing and I learn things every day. I really do. And, know, yes, I oversee both of these organizations. I’ve got a lot going on, but I still place purchase orders and I still process sales orders. I still talk to customers. I like to do that. I like to take orders and process orders. That keeps me
one engaged at a customer and supplier level. It also gives me a sense of empathy as to what our people are dealing with and what they go through. I want to be able to know how everything that we is the process? Is our system, is it really a smooth fluid system or is it’s really a crappy system? You know, and you know, everybody’s got an opinion.
And they’ll tell you if you ask them, you know, but you also have to go be willing to go and find out. I like that. And, by doing that and taking that approach, I’m constantly learning a ton of things. And not just about what we do and about products and people in the industry, but the way the industry is changing and shifting and what people want and,
what we thought they liked, maybe they didn’t. we thought they needed, maybe that’s not necessarily as important. And we’re dealing with it on our website right now. We’re trying to push as much out there. Well, I’ve got a fantastic web developer that’s talking about all this web language, SEO and all this other stuff means crap to me. But he keeps telling me, hey, this is important.
I’m trusting that it’s important, you know, and he’s shown me data that says, okay, yeah, I get it. These are things again, 30 years ago didn’t matter, you know 20 years
Matthew Allred (31:50)
So must be right.
That leads me leads me to kind of our last couple questions here And you you hinted at this already, you know, the elevator industry is evolving, you know, there’s shorter product life cycles obsolete parts fewer field resources What what would you say is the biggest challenge your customers face today? And how do you feel like you’re stepping up to meet it?
Rick Milefchik (32:14)
You talk about the life cycle side of things, you know, years ago, a product and I’ll go back, you know, when I started at Montgomery Elevator, you know, an escalator was set to last 30, 40 years and the, products inside those escalators, I mean, there, it would be years upon years before they’d be replaced. you know, so you had time.
Matthew Allred (32:34)
for sure.
Rick Milefchik (32:39)
because of repetition and continuity to learn things and somebody could describe it. I know what that is. I’ve seen that 20, 30, 40, 50 times already. Well, now with the life cycle of these things being so short and look at your phones, the obsolescence of phones, computers. I mean, we’re dealing with a couple of things on
you know, making sure we get computers upgraded because some aren’t compatible with Windows 11 now, you know. So there’s these changes in and out of our industry that happened so fast that people don’t have the chance to really learn and have a continuity of familiarity with this stuff. And so, you know, if we’re struggling with that on the supplier side, what
Is it like for a new generation of industry personnel coming in who, okay, you’ve got now there’s kind of a, the shift is kind of taking place in the industry where you’ve got people that have been around for many, many years. They’ve seen all the old stuff. They’ve seen the new stuff come in. They don’t like it, but they know how it works but now you’ve got even a whole new collection, both at the field level.
And I think a lot of the companies do a great job of training, but all right. Are they going to go back and train on an old Mac operator that is being obsolete? That’s been obsolete for years and parts are hardly available. Or are they going to tell the sales guy, go modernize and get it modernized? You know, that’s the quick answer for everybody. Well, you modernize it. Okay. Fine. Great. Now, but that one isn’t available. We got to go to this model. So the, the life cycle we use, what we used to call a bathtub effect.
You know, and that’s kind of, you know, where it comes down and you’ve got this whole long space of, of continuity. And then it kind of swings up at the other end of the bathtub when things start to change. And then that cycle repeats itself. Well, that bathtub is getting a lot shorter now. And so it’s people don’t have the time and the opportunity to learn because of repetition. And then as I mentioned, the new generation coming into the industry, they don’t know what a lot of these.
Okay, you hear terms of Dover, Westinghouse, Mac, Montgomery, all of these companies that have been swallowed up by somebody else, but there’s still a lot of product out there. You know, okay, who had Dover, who had Montgomery, you know, so right off the bat, you’ve got those questions and you know, you’ve got a buyer, okay, where do I go for this? Where do I go for that? And so what we try to do is we’re trying to make sure we put as many things out there in as many ways as we can.
You know, yes, we’re investing very heavily in our website. Knowing that that is the way of the future and many people, they don’t want to talk to anybody. They just want to point and click their way. You know, okay. Tell a guy, tell a mechanic that who just got off of a job and he’s got greasy hands, but he’s got a catalog sitting in his truck. He doesn’t really give a crap about your website. He just wants to pick up that
We’ve invested heavily in reprinting catalogs and we still send out catalog mailings and flyers and leaflets. We want to put whatever information we have in our hands or at our disposal in as many differing hands and mindsets as we can. the more we can put, if we could put the same thing that’s in a paper version, that’s in an online version.
and at the hands of a company that may have somebody that’s been there a month or been there 30 years, met them at both ends of the spectrum. And we try to, okay, I’ve seen people where, what’s part number? If I can’t help you, if I don’t have a part number, well, wait a minute. If they don’t have a part number, let’s help them find a part number.
You know, it seems silly and but that exists. And, you know, I think that, you know, by doing what we can do to provide a level of help and assistance is only one, it’s the right thing to do. It’s a decent thing to do, but it’s also good for business.
Matthew Allred (36:59)
For sure, for sure. I mean, it sounds like you’re obviously meeting customers where they’re at. You’re trying to help them get to that next step and improving as you go and learning from your lessons. You know, nobody’s doing it perfect, but it’s again, it’s back to the journey, taking taking that extreme ownership and just moving to the next level. So Rick, thank you for joining us today and sharing your insights for our listeners. If you’re looking for a reliable partner in the elevator industry, check out
Access Elevator Supply at aesupply.com and Quality Elevator Products at qualityelev.com. Two companies that are leading by example. And until next time, keep raising the bar.
Rick Milefchik (37:39)
Thanks, Matt. Appreciate it.
Matthew Allred (37:41)
Thank you, Rick. Thanks again for listening to Elevator Tools and Tech from the Elevator Careers Podcast. And please remember to visit Access Elevator and Escalator Supply and Quality Elevator Products. You can find them at aesupply.com and qualityelev.com. Until next time, stay safe.