Glad to Have a Job Bermuda dealer shares his pandemic story by: Ian Nash, A.F. Smith
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t has been more than six months since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The market is slowly revealing where it may be going or how long this might last — we think. Those of us in the office technology industry are trying to be optimistic, as the future of our companies is under attack, right? Not only are we under attack from the competition, but from a force we still do not understand. The pandemic has thrown the world and the economies of all countries into chaos. As the vice president of technology for A.F. Smith, located in Hamilton, Bermuda, in this article I will outline some of the things that my company has done to reduce some of the risks, as well as to capture as much revenue as possible. Perhaps you will find my comments and advice to be of interest and useful. January to March I noticed stories coming out of China in January that a new strain of the flu was possibly spreading in the central part of the country. Of course, like everyone else, I paid no mind to the news at first. But when a few more channels and the WHO started getting more involved, it really made my ears perk up a little. I certainly did not have the forwardthinking knowledge at that time to buy and sell stock, but thought about smaller things — like what products we could sell at A.F. Smith that might be hot for our market. Luckily, we did jump on the face mask and hand sanitizer bandwagon early, but still had large back orders due to other like-minded people considering their future needs, too. My company has been very distinct over the past 47 years. Taking care of an entire country has demanded that we expand our product portfolio. One year ago, we had $0 in infrared thermometers; this year we sold hundreds of units as a brand-new category. That brings me to one of my first points for this article: Diversify, if you can. We have a large product offering that is sold through our technology, supplies, retail and furniture departments. Even under each of these departments, it seems the product offering is expansive. Our technology department alone
A.F. Smith’s headquarters in Hamilton, Bermuda. has us selling Ricoh, Xerox, HP, Frama, RPost, Seclore, PaperCut, Equitrac and DocuShare — and the list goes on. Of course, each one of these companies or solutions produces multiple other products that we sell as well. I have always tried to pick the best products for the changing times, get the team involved and push forward with them for a period to see if they fit the local market or help support some of the international business here in Bermuda. It helps that I have a great team of technicians, account managers and an owner who is open to change. In the early stages of the pandemic, the owner and the managers started to discuss possible issues that our company could face. Two questions — “What products are we selling now?” and “What should we consider selling?” — were the main topics at each of our weekly meetings. Our communication with each other was a key factor in being slightly prepared. I say “slightly” because we had no idea things would be as bad as they are now around the world. April to June As the country slid into a full lockdown by the end of March, we had our thinking caps on 24/7 in terms of how we were going to manage the company, continue bringing in revenue, pay companies that we buy from and see which employees in the business were most versatile. Personally, I think this time period had extra stressors considering what
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