Technology is changing communication in 2025

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with MCS Influencer Randy Chaffee. You can read the interview below or watch the recording.

Intro: Hello, I'm Alex Tolle here with MetalCoffeeShop.com and I am here with Randy Chaffee once again for our Metal Influencer. How are you?

Randy Chaffee: I'm well, how are you, my friend?

Alex Tolle: I am so good. Happy to see you.

Randy Chaffee: It's always good. It's always good to see you. It's always good to have some chat. I like it.

Alex Tolle: Yes, of course. So our December question is, how are you communicating with the people within your company to make sure that the work they're doing is aligned with your company goals for 2025?

Randy Chaffee: Well, I like that question because we've talked sometimes before and communication with customers and the like is pretty important and we've focused on that a lot. And I think we spend a lot of time focusing on that, which we should. But I think it's easy to forget to focus on the communication within our own teams.

And so I would come at it from two places, since I'm a rep agency, I have to communicate with my manufacturers on a regular basis. And I have several because I'm an independent rep. So I think it's important for us. And technologically based. We use a lot of text, of course, emails, phone calls, but we really find using the Teams or any kind of virtual Teams, Zoom, Google Meet and whatever, to be very beneficial.

And I like the fact that we can do a quick meet up too, as you said, to be aligned because we're all trying to go in the same direction. And you get marketing and sales and procurement and production and ops and all these people, and it's easy to forget the direction we're trying to go. And it is important, I think, that we're all pulling the boat or rowing the boat in the same direction or pulling the rope in the same direction, whatever we want to say.

So that's what I do a lot of and I'll do a lot and then I try within my own little small group and my rep agency to do the same thing. And actually, I have daily meetings and it can be very short. They may literally be, I mean, a minute, two minutes. Just where we're at, "And are we on task on what we're going to try to accomplish today? I'm going to be on the road all day, I'm going to be with customers, but I may not be that available, are we good to go?

Do we know what we're doing? And then will we decide to catch up later in the day to see if we met the goal or the task, the things we're trying to do? Or if we didn't, where we are to get back on task?"

And I find that I've not always been good at tasks, so I try real hard myself because I expect other people to do that stuff. And then I'm not always that good at it myself because I get to run and then gun and run the roads and airplanes and all the stuff that I do. And then I wonder why stuff isn't happening. And it's probably not happening because I'm the one that got in the way by not communicating.

So I think that's a key if you're in a leadership position at all in your company, you probably got to think a lot and you've got to take most of that responsibility yourself. Almost all of it. I mean it ultimately stems back to you. If your people aren't responding or they're not knowing where they're going, what they're supposed to be doing, generally that's back on you.

Just because you're not setting the right path or you're not setting an accountability track to be able to make sure that everybody knows what they're doing. Because I've always found, Alex, that most people do want to do what you want as a leader, it's just that sometimes we don't tell them very well because it gets in our beady little mind what we want. And then, "Well, just do what I want." "Well, but what do you want, Randy? I don't really know. You never completely tell me what you want." And so I've learned to get better at that.

And then I think there's a third arm to that, especially as with what I do as a rep agency. I look at my people as my customers too. They're friends, they're buddies, they're pals, they're part of it. It's not like I'm the seller and they're the buyer and there's this distinct break. I look at it as we're a team, they need a place to buy product and services and I need somebody to sell that to, right?

So I try to manage expectations with my customers as much as possible, "I know you're looking at an order, we're getting close to Christmas, did you get the order in? Because we got this winter booking that's going to end next week and I know you have Christmas, so you might want to get it into me now so you don't forget it." Those kind of things. "We're not shipping next week because it's Christmas, so you better get it out today." All those kinds of things I attempt to use.

I consider my customer base, my customer friends as almost a third arm of what I'm doing. And I try to be proactive in using the same technology, using the text, the phone calls, the Zoom, Teams, Google Meets, whatever the case may be. So I think it's a matter of my case, I like to use all three, the triad of that group of people and there's never too much information.

But I try to keep it quick, succinct and to the point and not talk forever about the same subjects. Because I feel like everybody, whether it's manufacturers that I deal with, customers that I work with or people on my own team, everybody really knows what we want to do and everybody wants to do it. It's just a matter of taking that two, three, four minutes or 10 minutes or half hour, whatever it takes to make sure everybody's in the clear.

And I think it's a great subject and I'm glad you brought it up because it helps me remember that I don't always. I would say, I'm going to say this last thing, probably nobody that's in any sort of a leadership position does it anywhere near as well as they think they do and nowhere near as well as they should do. And I think that's an area we all need to work on, to be better at that. Because anybody that we're working with, the whole team, if you will use the word team, will just prosper and do better if we just communicate with each other. So that's the key.

Alex Tolle: Yeah, with how many channels and ways of communication that we have now? Especially a lot of us being working virtually, there's no reason not to be able to send a quick message. Whether it's a question or it's a little bit more information on something, there's so many ways to communicate now. It's so easy. We just have to take advantage of it. And it helps get your point across, get that message out to your team.

Randy Chaffee: Exactly. And you're so right, Alex, there is no excuse today. "Well, I tried and I left a message," "Let's send them a text, send them an email, shoot them a video." I use video a lot. I'm big into video for marketing. I'm into video for a lot of things. I just like video. And if I want to tell you something or I want to show you something rather than call and leave a message that you may or may not totally understand because I'm not communicating it well.

I like to just set my phone in a little holder or hit the iPad and show you what it is I want to do. Show you something that I'm talking about. Or with a customer, for example, if I'm sending them a quote in an email I like to, I use BombBomb but there's different platforms, actually send them a video holding the quote and saying, "Line eight, seven and 14 are the three things that you're the most interested in right now. I went ahead and quoted you a bunch of other stuff too, that I think may be of value."

And I point to them, I show, that way they actually see on the page when they get it exactly where I want them to look. And that saves them time when they get it, going, "I don't know their terminology. I don't know. There's 19 different fasteners on here. I don't know which one it is." "Well, I'm going to tell you which one it is. The one you want is line seven."

And what that does is it saves them a lot of frustration and time. It saves them having to call me and try to find me and then I'm just on a flight or I'm with another customer and I don't call them back. It just saves a lot of back and forth between the two of us and it's all accomplished in a quick 15-second video. So that's just the one other way to do it.

And that's to your point, there's no end to the amount of things we can do to make sure we communicate and everybody communicates differently. If you can, if some people like visual and some people would rather have a text as much as we can, if it's not a joint meeting, I try to remember how people want to communicate as much as I can.

If you'd prefer a text, I'm probably going to try to remember to send you a text. If you prefer a LinkedIn message, I'll try to remember it's done that to you. I don't always remember, but I think there's so many ways that people would prefer to use that I think, to your point, there's no reason to not be communicative. And the more communicative we are, life is just easier.

Alex Tolle: Right, and like you said, it saves you time in the long run. It might take you an extra minute to send that text, but it's going to save you from maybe hours of work of backtracking and trying to fix an issue. If you just sent that text to begin with or that email or that message or you hopped on a quick call, it takes a little time up front, but overall it's going to save you a ton of time at the end.

Randy Chaffee: Exactly, exactly. And a ton of time to go do more good stuff. Right?

Alex Tolle: Exactly.

Randy Chaffee: All right, that's it. That's all I got.

Alex Tolle: All right, well thank you so much, Randy. As always, this is the last one for 2024. We'll see you in the next year, in the new year, 2025.

Randy Chaffee: I can't wait.

Alex Tolle: And we'll have some more great topics to discuss.

Randy Chaffee: Love it. Alex, have a great day. Appreciate it as always.

Alex Tolle: Thank you.

Randy Chaffee: All right.

Alex Tolle: Thank you so much, Randy. Bye.

Outro: Absolutely. Bye-bye.