Quality Counts
January 12, 2010
Heidi’s latest editorial about her great adventure being stranded in Burley, ID while waiting on car repairs waved a flag about quality in front of me. Seeing as how she had her car in the shop prior to her travels and it was ultimately this that caused the transmission to blow (it’s a long story, fellas), well, it prompted me to consider the word “quality”. What is quality anyway?
I can’t think of a thing that cannot be evaluated by its quality. Just the other day a streamer ran across bottom of my TV with misspelled words. With today’s technology and intellect, it doesn’t seem likely we should have misspelled words in news streams.
Our neighbor had a bedroom painted. The painter managed to get paint on the floor and yet he didn’t paint far enough down for the trim to cover what he didn’t reach. What’s up with that? And he left candy wrappers on the dining room table! His boss should be proud. Oh, wait, he was the boss. The quality of that job was a bit lacking.
When’s the last time you got a decent handshake? Last one I got the handshake was so limp I wondered if the person had any blood flowing through him. There have been times I’ve received a handshake so strong it was nearly a knee dropper. My dad used to say you could judge a man’s character by his hand shake.
We recently bought some new furniture and bar stools. The bar stool covers had an unusually strong odor so we took them outside to air out a bit. When that didn’t work we called the furniture store and were quickly referred to a customer service number. I asked the clerk why he couldn’t take care of this problem himself and he let me know right away it wasn’t his job. Talk about poor customer service. The quality of that new furniture was diminishing rapidly in our eyes.
A couple years ago we took a tour of the GYCB manufacturing site in Arizona. [Hold onto your hats, boys, just in case you’re plannin’ to make a trip out there for the grand tour. They don’t normally give - we were there for a special pro-staff rally and they made a few exceptions for us. Papers were signed and we were threatened with bodily injury and possibly death if we revealed any part of the process.] Quality plays a major role in everything done at the manufacturing plant.
During every step of the manufacturing process, we observed quality inspections from the way the bait is produced down to the ladies hand stuffing the bags. Each bagger had a tub by their table and by cracky, even at that late stage of manufacturing they were still inspecting the quality of the baits. if the product wasn’t perfect, it got tossed into a tub for an overhaul. How cool is that? Visiting with the assembly personnel, it was obvious they liked their jobs and took pride in doing the best possible job. At GYCB, each person practices quality customer service with one another. Quality should be an integral part of the process in everything we do.
The quality of a person’s actions speaks for itself. Killer and I have a pretty booming (if I do say so myself) tackle repair business. If we do a poor job on even one reel, the phone would be ringing off the wall, our ears would be burning, e-mails would be locking our computer and we’d be thrown under the bus. And that’s just for starters! We make each day a quality day for everybody in our business. Those of ya’ll out there with your own guide and fishing businesses should remember to give it a try!