Submitted by ops on
The benefit of an experienced, full service installation company is that they know how to stay focused on one goal: getting the job done. Here at Bay Area Installations, we pride ourselves in staying focused on the end result, and not letting ourselves get distracted by all the red herrings along the way.
As is often recounted in this blog, one of the big differences between BAI and other "brand X" companies is our experience and professionalism. Having done this for over thirty years, we are truly office furniture experts. But business is business and sometimes, for whatever reason, another company gets a project that should have been ours. Maybe a new project manager has taken over an account and hasn't used us before. Maybe a managerial decision from higher-ups demands putting the account out to bid and someone manages to scrape in under us. Whatever the reason, we believe that it is always a mistake to go with brand X, when you could work with the professionals at BAI.
Here's an example of this phenomenon: for many years BAI has serviced an unamed state agency based out of Oakland. We were very happy with the relationship and we were informed that our customers were as well. But somewhere in the bureaucracy, a specific project was forced to go out to rounds of bidding, with no option to choose a reliable, proven company should their price not be the lowest. As we have written in other blogs, "you get what you pay for". To make this case more extreme, BAI had already knocked down and was storing forty offices worth of cubicles at our warehouse! So in addition to the bid, the other company was going to have to re-inventory and will call the product from us; talk about a waste of resources! But the payoff came when they showed up to do the job. With all due respect, they didn't have a clue what they were doing. From knowledge of the furniture system to simple tasks such as palletizing pieces and operating in a warehouse environment, it was very clear that several of their crew had never done this type of work before.
And circling back around to the theme of this post - staying focused - these guys just couldn't do it. They repeatedly lost counts of pieces, would stare blankly at the mass of product that needed to be loaded onto a truck...they couldn't stay focused! One of our managerial staff was overseeing the load-out and struck up a conversation with their lead man. He confirmed - in so many words - that their company only has a handful of dedicated installers, and the pick up day-laborers from Home Depot to fill out a crew if they need more manpower! Of course fast forward a few weeks when the job was done, and the state agency called BAI and apologized - they said they would never use that company again - and that they needed BAI to come out and fix several problems the other company left in their wake.
We're not afraid of competition...mostly because we know that we usually win. When it comes to professionalism and experience, Bay Area Installations is the local industry leader. And we stay focused on getting the job done until it is.