My parents celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary earlier this week!
Celebrated may not be exactly the right word. They were quarantined in their apartment together at the time! In a post-covid world, all there was to mark the occasion was a day (and night!) on the couch watching CSI.
Hardly a celebration worthy of the accomplishment!
If you ever spent any time together with my parents you would gain tremendous respect for my mother! My parent’s 60-years of marriage is a testament to my father’s good taste; and my mother’s patience.
For some reasons known only to time, after 60-years they remain an outstanding couple. If they had lived in Shakespeare’s time, then the greatest romance ever written may have been called "Bobbie and Billy" instead of "Romeo and Juliet!"
I continue spend my days speaking to dealers all over the United States and Canada, about the effects of the coronavirus outbreak on their stores. In the coming weeks, I am going to share the results of a survey I did in this segment.
That data is very alarming.
But right now, I want to continue to focus on getting you information that helps you in your stores TODAY, as you try to re-set your businesses to survive or excel in the post-covid world. A number of the dealers I've spoken to recently have mentioned that they don't know what to do about their tinting equipment if they are forced to close for an extended period of time?
That’s a good question! Tinting machines are designed to keep moving! If you are forced to close your stores due to this outbreak, it could be many weeks before you are able to reopen them again. In New York I know dealers who have been closed for three weeks already and are looking at another month at least until they can reopen. That is bad enough! But it would be even worse if when you reopen you are looking at a $5K repair because you did not prepare your tint machines for a long period of inactivity.
With this blog this morning, I also added a new episode of the Mark, My Words podcast with my guest, Chris Kosmala. Chris is with HERO Industries and he knows a thing or two about tinting equipment. We spent our time speaking about what specific steps you need to take to ensure that if you close your stores and can’t purge, agitate and dispense for a number of weeks (or longer) that the colorant doesn’t dry in the lines, tips and pumps and cause significant damage.
You’ll notice that these podcast episodes I'm putting up now are a little “rough” in terms of their production quality. Sorry about that! I am working to get that fixed as quickly as possible. My new podcasting equipment came today which will be my first step back into the Big Leagues. But for the time being I am going to focus on getting out content that you need to hear and I’ll worry about the production quality later.
So, give Chris a listen here if you own a tint-machine and don’t want to see it turned into the biggest item in the recycling bin!
In the coming weeks, I will have more episodes as I ramp up more production. If you want to subscribe and get a notification and automatic download whenever I put up a new episode you can subscribe here on: Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or on Blubrry. I'll be ramping up production as the response to this outbreak continues to unfold.