About Us
Around The World In 28 Days
Around the World in 28 days
Beginning October 13, 2007, Randy O'Hara and Brad Latner had the pleasure of traveling around the world in 28 days…literally. The purpose of the trip was to meet existing and prospective vendors supplying current products, as well as to look for suppliers of new product possibilities. In addition, Randy and Brad pursued other international-related business.
2 of 600,000
After a day of business in Hong Kong, the adventure continued with Randy and Brad attending the Canton Fair Trade Show in Guangzhou, China. "Big" was an understatement for this tradeshow. Over 600,000 people attended the show during this 1 week portion of the Canton Fair. For two days Randy and Brad focused on the immense selection of exhibits of industrial and mechanical construction related products. They identified many new potential mills and product possibilities.
28 days-13 cities- many companies
In total, Randy and Brad visited 17 companies in 8 cities in China, 4 cities in India, and 1 city in Israel. They also logged short stops in Thailand and Germany as part of their flight itineraries.
It was a new location almost every day. It was travel by every means-planes of varying sizes, high-speed trains that clocked 300 km/hour, buses, taxis and cars too numerous to count. Daily travel times ranged from the usual 4 to 9 hour car rides to a whopping 28 hours from China to India. Trains, planes and automobiles were all part of the 7 airports, 3 countries and a final "hang onto your seat" high adventure 2 hour car ride to the end destination in India. Several other trips along the way averaged 20 hours in length.
The trip was successful and several new business possibilities were identified. During the China leg of the trip, Steve Hall joined Randy and Brad. Steve facilitated a thorough quality assurance review of many of the mills that were visited.
General impressions
China is evolving quickly in terms of the ongoing amount of industrial, commercial and infrastructure construction activity. To be succinct, construction in China is HUGE ! India appears to be a country a number of years behind China in terms of development, but India is accelerating construction in many parts of the country, both in the public and private sectors. Israel seems vibrant and a great deal of activity and construction is evident across the country. In all three countries, and wherever Randy and Brad visited, construction activity seemed strong.
Travel tidbit
It is commonplace in many countries for travel-air travel in particular-to occur 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. All airports are busy all the time. Traveling within countries or to other countries across time zones with departures at 2:00am, 3:00am, and 4:00am were tough on the sleep cycle but feedback from regular travelers seemed to indicate that this was the way to get around.
In summary, a great trip and Randy and Brad were delighted to arrive back in Canada, safe and sound, on Nov. 9th. A real experience indeed and a fresh appreciation for other cultures and for the many things we have here in our everyday life in North America.
Photo is from a mill near Beijing with 2 representatives from the mill on the far left and far right and from the left - Steve Hall, Brad Latner, Randy O'Hara and John Zhang, our local resource located in China.
Why make these trips you make ask...
The payback from international trips is enormous - including developing and maintaining vendor relationships and negotiating prices and payment terms, carrying out product quality audits and working with vendors to implement recommended changes and improvements, sourcing new vendors and new products, continuing to develop packaging and logistics capabilities and addressing banking and legal issues to name a few. In a nutshell, to effectively find and maintain good quality, reliable vendors that can provide competitively priced products in a world wide marketplace on an ongoing basis, successful companies must invest the time, energy and costs to go and see them and work with them at a detail level. You just can not effectively manage the process from thousands of miles away.