Experiance in Mid-Western

I used to work in a computer hardware distribution company. I was the east coast region sales and purchasing manager. There has an mid-west office in Chicago but business was very bad. My boss sent me over there to find out what happened to that market.

When I was there, I visited the local distributors, customers and went to their trade show. I found out the mid-west market is very different from the east and west coast. There are a little behind and people take time to accept new product. In addition, customers don't keep a lot of inventory. They buy very little or they buy after they sold. The mid-west market is very small. My company made a big mistake, they shipped all the hot sales items in east and west coast and sell it below market price to get customer which was a wrong strategy. In east and west coast, average invoice around $10K but in mid-west average invoice only $1000.

A month after I was there, I changed the product line and bring in the product which local retailers needed (which consider outdated product in east coast). I increased the selling price to market price and improved the customer service. In mid-western, customer care more about customer service than price. If you don't have good customer service no matter how low you are selling, they are not buying from you.

After six months, I was able to increase the revenue from $50K/month when I went there to $600K/month when I came back to NY.

A busy, non-stop ant in search of a better life.....