His son stepped up into the business and has taken it over, and he's about the same age as me, and also has two young children so we relate well to each other. We're the next generation running these businesses.
What does your ongoing relationship with this supplier involve these days?
All of the equipment is made to order to meet individual customer's requirements. That means we naturally have a close relationship with our supplier because I need to be in contact with them from the initial stages of quoting on a customer requirement, right through to the delivering and servicing the equipment.
In the past year I've had their senior technicians over here from France about three times, and I've developed personal relationships with them too. They're of a similar age to me, and they've become like family. For example, one of the technicians just flew out yesterday after being here for a week - primarily to do an installation in Hawke's Bay, but while he was here we also visited other customers to drum up a bit of business. And from a customer's point of view it shows them the manufacturer gives us great support and they're interested in seeing how the market here is progressing.
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I also go over to France about once a year - usually in November for a couple of weeks - and I always stay with the family and eat with them. It's more than just your normal business relationship.
As well as that direct contact, what other elements do think have contributed to the success of the relationship?
I've been fortunate to have had a slow introduction to the relationship and a long process of learning about how it all works. That meant I could hit the ground running with it when we took over the business. The relationship is very personal, driven by a mutual respect and shared business culture; we have common ideas and goals about how a business should be run and how customers should be treated. For example, you could think the time difference between our two countries would be a challenge, but because I have those personal relationships I have the mobile phone numbers of a lot of the senior technicians and management. When required either of us can be up at 1am working through an issue, because if there's a problem we understand we need to react.
Another factor is we solely rely on selling their equipment for our income, whereas almost all of their other distributors around the world sell their equipment as an add-on to another business they have.
And then there are the cultural similarities; in particular, they love their rugby and we do here, so whenever I'm in France we're always going to rugby matches and vice versa.
