Store Front

With another new year, I thought it unforgivable that our store front hasn't changed much over the years.  Our original store name from 1997 had been effectively erased by a bus accident.  Now, it's even covered by the guard house.  Some effort had been put in 1999, although virtually only "Water Systems" is visible from the street.

Last year, I put a Sta-Rite tarp on the left of the store.  I was elated to get an inquiry on pool products a few weeks after.  (These things have effects after all.)  Towards October I also added an Aermotor poster.  And then we temporarily moved office as we started renovations.  Unfortunately, after the renovations finished, I couldn't find the Sta-Rite tarp anymore. 

2010 ended and a new year began.  We stopped a bit to focus on our primary work.  And pretty much no effort was being made any more on our store front.

While a good store front might be a secondary priority for a company like us, since we are primarily a wholesaler, not taking advantage of our front might be remiss of marketing savvy.

We are located at Mayon St. (or Avenue, according to PLDT), and it's not a small street at all.  It's a commercial street, though new developments have only started the past few years.  We are two blocks away from Suki Market, we're near the local church and baranggay hall, and SM's Sun Residences is rising at the South end of Mayon.

So, to me, that we would not do even simple steps to increase our marketing presence is a loss of opportunity.  So what did I do?  I brought an unused plastic holder back to life and filled it with excess fliers and brochures.  I hung a big A.O. Smith tarp by our window -- it still needs ironing though.  I rummaged a "farmland" beside our store, and found a ready-to-be-thrown Atmor sign from our retail days.  I taped it at the window in a not-so-nice way.  I saw the Aermotor banner hanging by the guard house, but it looked too drab now so I decided against it.  Instead, I'd been eyeing two more tarps from our exhibits.  They looked nice and green and could work effectively to accentuate our sky blue office.  All these hacks weren't so hard.

Next one should be a nicer store sign.  Hmmm, we could even use our underwater lights to put on a colorful show.  Not.  Well, at least a store sign with big nice letters.  And then, afterwards?  Perhaps our service vans and motor bikes...

Moved In!

Finally, for what felt like a long time, we've moved in to our new office!  It's still the same location, right by the precarious intersection of Mayon and M. Cuenco, where a Florida bus once hit the corner of our humble store, by the border between Quezon City and Manila.  But with a new paint, wiring and cables, new tables and chairs and partitions, and a much more sensible arrangement for employees, our office felt imbued with a breath of new life. 

Right now, it's not yet a 100% done, mission accomplish project.  There are still the oddities from our office's previous iterations like the uncovered section of the aircon's vent as well as the out-of-place legacy PBX hopelessly visible and the unchanged long haul cabling up and about the office and nearby departments.  There are still undefined or temporary locations for telecom and printing equipments.  And people places will still be changing with time.  We still have lots of ideas to improve.  This may be a relatively short term fix for capacity stress.  But fixing we will do.  For us right now, we can accept and embrace the changes moving forward.  And we like it like that.

Office Renovation

For a lot of people who've seen our Metro Manila office, one thing obvious was that it was very crowded.  That impression is amplified on those mid-morning hours when everyone was there -- on those times, it was a market place. (Not on those times, it was just an internet cafe.)


Over the past week, however, it's been desert empty, save for the workers and the dust.  We're finally on our scheduled major office renovation!  We're expecting the project to finish in a couple of weeks or so.  In the mean time, we've moved half of us to the obliging service department next door, and the other half to the training room of our sister company Thermovar Pipes.

Moving and subdividing our office to nearby locations is not without challenges.  We had to minimize phone, fax, computer and network downtime as we reshaped our infrastructure for our ad hoc relocation.  Fortunately, with just a little shuffling, network cabling wasn't too hard; we were able to reuse most of our network cables.  Sales executive Alexis Garcia, our resident telecom expert by night, managed the rewiring of our phone and fax system to working order.

This project is a major makeover that's long overdue.  There's been so many changes over the years that has stretched our office capacity to its limits.  With this over, we expect to maximize space in our humble office and to increase overall efficiency in our operations.