Sometimes we have “mini fires”—a piece is off by 3/8” inch, we can’t find the screws, the crate falls apart. THINGS HAPPEN! I call them mini fires because they dominate my attention in the moment and I cannot relax until I have them fixed or extinguished. Mistakes happen to all of us, and as a business owner I am still learning and accepting that they are not avoidable, but what’s most important is how I react to them. As we are a small company, and I am integrally involved in every step, each piece of metal feels like my baby. I inspect them carefully and if there’s an error or an imperfection, after freaking out, I take a deep breath and try to figure out how to deal. I care so much about my customers and want you to be happy. I am also a perfectionist. Just yesterday, I received a shipment of gorgeous custom grilles. I was thrilled looking at them, perfect clean cuts, correct sizing and pattern placement until I realized they were coated in the wrong black! They were supposed to be glossy not flat!! Yikes. Our fabricator immediately apologized. It was indeed an oversight and is going to be remedied, and re-coated asap. The customer knows this will be a week late as it didn’t pass our quality control. It wasn’t fun to see the fire, put out the fire, and mostly to tell our customer of a delay, but we survived! There will be more fires in our future I’m sure, but extra nice to be dealing with understanding customers and exceptional fabricators.
