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COMPANY NEWS

Link to August 2008.pdf

Newsletter / August 2008

Baby’s Got a Brand New Crib “Paragon Steel is Moving”

By Jim Stavis

A few months ago we celebrated our 20 year anniversary. In our newsletter, we showed a picture of our first office located over an Irish pub in the Belmont Shores section of Long Beach. Like the college student who was so proud of their first apartment, it is fun for us to look at our humble roots. But unlike many of our steel distribution competitors we made a conscious choice not to go the route of the traditional steel company. We believed we could provide better levels of service to our customers if we had separate locations for our inventory, processing and fabrication facilities. All we required in our initial start-up was a sales office, good personnel and supportive vendors. Previously, it was critical for steel operations to be on site with their steel and their processing equipment. Paperwork had to pass from one department to another and it literally took days to process an order. If you are old enough to remember, there used to be intricate vacuum systems in facilities so that paperwork could be moved quickly throughout the building. It looks ridiculous in today’s digital environment. When we were established 20 years ago, there was new technology that allows us to operate seamlessly from an office remotely from our steel and our delivery trucks. We could fax, and later e-mail, sales quotations, orders, packing slips, test reports to and from each facility and even directly to the trucks. Orders could be processed in hours or minutes, rather than days. Customers now exist in an on-demand world. Waiting is something that they simply do not have time for. Paragon Steel has built our operation to exist within this new business order.

So back to moving...on August 1st Paragon Steel moved its corporate headquarters into a new space atop the Kilroy Airport Plaza Tower (8th floor). We have a superb view of the Long Beach airport and the 405 freeway. We’ve acquired brand new furnishings, state-of–the-art telecom and IT systems, all in an effort to better serve our loyal customers. Our new address is: 3780 Kilroy Airport Way, Suite 850, Long Beach, CA 90806. Our new phone number is 562/216-4000 and fax is 562/216-4001. We welcome you to come visit us.

THE TECHNOLOGIST AND THE TECHNOPHOBE

So, it’s easy for me to get excited about all this new technology. Truth is if it were up to me, we would still be using the abacus and a telephone with a dial on it. It is hard to imagine a world without cell phones, GPS systems, fax machines, the Internet or iPods. But it wasn’t all that long ago that the world in which we lived had none of that. Our kids feel the same way about FaceBook and MySpace. The world adapts to these changes at a record pace. It is truly hard for us baby boomers to keep up. I still prefer my simple flip phone to the Black er, Crack Berry. I’m stubbornly fighting against getting Bluetooth, still using my speakerphone in the car. At least I’m ahead of John McCain who recently made news with his admission that he needs help to get online. I’ve gotten quite adept at using Google, ordering books via Amazon, frequently using my car’s GPS system and can now send a text on my cell phone. But that is about as far as I get. Thank goodness I have a partner who is a gadget freak. He is my first call when the printer won’t print or when my computer freezes up. That is what makes a good partnership, I say as he reminds me of every meeting and lunch on his PDA (Palm Pilot). I still have to do it the old fashion way, with my memory. Thank God I still have one.

The other day I witnessed a seminal event at Paragon Steel. One of our employees was vacationing in Las Vegas. One of his customers called and he retrieved their message on his BlackBerry while playing poker in the casino. He retreated upstairs and accessed our computer system on his laptop. There he was able to enter a sales quote, price it out while accessing our inventory and e-mail the quote to his customer. The customer placed the order.

The salesman scanned the customer’s P.O. and had it printed back in our office for credit approval, to the warehouse for processing and to dispatch to get it into the shipping schedule. He then went back downstairs to the casino a la James Bond where he met up with his wife. I thought about that story for awhile. How could that have happened five years ago?

But I often ask myself if keeping up with all this technology is really worth it. Because I find that it can be really annoying and even intimidating with the proliferation of all this technology. Each new “must have” device creates more anxiety for me and more levels of incompetence. I used to always be self-conscious about the fact that I was not handy, couldn’t fix things. I used to say that I was more handicapped, than handy. Now with all this technology I’m handicapped and techno-capped. Thank goodness I can still write a newsletter.