Our little company, Quality Corners, sells product to the housing market. That market is currently going through a significant downturn. Our sales have grown very steadily over the past five years. We were worried because they started to level off toward the end of 2006. Our partner, Ron, decided to go on a sales trip to see what he could stir up. In making the phone calls to set up the trip, he ran into quite a large company on whom we had never previously called. On the sales trip, he mostly called on our current customer base in one small part of the country, but found another even larger distributor with whom we had never previously spoken. When he showed these companies our products, they were very surprised and excited because our pricing, minimum purchase quantities, quality, and lead times are all significantly better than imports from China, Canada, and Chile, our chief competitors. He also found that our current customers were going to be expanding their business with us, give us an opportunity to bid on some new products, and asked us to develop some very difficult products that they cannot find with anyone else. Those are exactly the kinds of things we like to hear. It is amazing what a little sales and marketing will do for a company and Ron is planning two or three additional trips.
The inside of our second building is just about ready now. Carol has moved into the new office and Ron is waiting for some modifications to the finishing systems to move that over to the factory floor. The new building is better heated than the old one, so the employees are looking forward to the move, too. Our goal has been to make Quality Corners a great place to work. The wages we pay are now higher than similar businesses in the area. We have added a significant bonus program and made some insurance available to our employees. We promoted one of our employees to a supervisory role so now everyone is aware that we will make every possible effort to promote people from within our current employee base. As we grow there will be more and more opportunities. In addition, we have upgraded our accounting practices this year to more realistically calculate our monthly and quarterly profit and loss. This will help us manage the business better and even out the quarterly bonuses for the employees.
Grandpa Milo and his friend Del Webber are working hard on a piece of equipment that will allow us to change over much more rapidly on small runs of rosettes and plinth blocks. The new painting system is coming along nicely. We have some new products to develop and in a few months we will have to have new and more sophisticated equipment in place to allow us to produce these much more difficult products. That is exactly how we want to grow the business.