John Joyce of Brennan Industries returns to share how remote work and logistics pileups have led to both issues as well as improvements.
Danny:
- Well hello and welcome to today's Executive Series on IndustrialSage. I am joined by John Joyce who is the global marketing director at Brennan Industries. John, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series.
John:
- Glad to be here, Danny. Thanks for having me.
Danny:
- Well John, I'm excited to have you again for the second time because we spoke—gosh, I can't remember when now. It's been a minute. It was a while ago. It was before this crazy thing called Covid happened, so I imagine things have changed. We talked a lot about marketing last time, some tactics and different things that you guys were doing, and that was pretty cool. Today, before we get into today's topic and discussion, for those who aren't familiar with Brennan, if you could just give me a high-level on who you guys are and what you do.
John:
- Sure. Brennan Industries is a manufacturer of hydraulic components, specifically hydraulic fittings and adapters but also some accessory components. And we are a multi-national company, so we manufacture those things in the US, in Canada, in the UK, and in Asia and have a worldwide distribution network as well.
Danny:
- Okay, that's great. Since we last spoke, and again, it's been a minute, how have things changed over there for you guys?
John:
- Yeah, so I think the same way things have changed for a lot of businesses is an increasing reliance on remote, technologies that enable remote, remote management and leadership, and also other technologies that enable remote sales and a shift away from a traditional sales model which is still super popular in the world of manufacturing. It's kind of like an old-school industrial world, shifting away from that model towards a more social selling and marketing-heavy. Marketing's doing more lifting, I think, than it used to do in the past because of the inability of people to meet as easily and freely as they used to in the past.
Danny:
- Yeah, so it's definitely made things quite a bit of a challenge. Obviously there's been a lot of changes. You mentioned trying to reach customer, obviously, is kind of a big one. How has it really altered your future? Some of these things are, maybe you can say a blip on the radar, temporary. But what do you think those things are that will remain permanent?
John:
- Well I think actually a lot of the changes that have happened aren't going to roll back. I don't think things are going to roll back to the way they were before on most of the levels. We talked about increasing reliance on marketing. That was one of the changes and moving away from the face-to-face sales. That's going to continue. I also think the importance of data and the immediate access to data through systems, kind of like ecommerce but streamlining that whole concept of direct-connect, direct-sharing of data has just gotten more and more important because it's eliminating the human element which, we've been on a trajectory for that for forever, from really switching from face-to-face business to the telephone to the fax to the email to ecommerce. But Covid just pushed it all the way to the edge of almost touchless as much as possible. And I don't think that's going to go back, I think because we were going that way already. And not only in commerce, but then you also have that in leadership and management. Building and training and managing your team has also been shoved entirely over into the virtual space.