PERSPECTIVE: 2005 Quips of the Year

John Wolz

Do you give tickets for major sporting events to your best customers? One Denver distributor participating in a Western Association of Fastener Distributors executive roundtable session recalled having four tickets to a hockey playoff and selecting two seemingly compatible customers. After the game one salesperson asked his customer how they liked the game and the people who sat next to them. “It was just someone who said they bought the tickets in the parking lot,” replied the first customer about the ticket holders for the distributor”s other seats.
The fastener customer who sold his tickets in the parking lot has been removed from the sports gift list.

“My wife said I could retire but I couldn”t come home,” Ed McIlhon explained his new role as a business management consultant in a new company with his son, Casey McIlhon.
Ed McIlhon acknowledged Casey will be doing most of the work in McIlhon & Associates. “He”s got one thing I don”t youth,” Ed sighed.

Make a suggestion and get a job: Bob Coursey of Big D Bolt & Screw Co. Inc. was introducing a program on technology at the Southwestern Fastener Association spring meeting. He acknowledged he had merely suggested the topic to a board member and ended up moderating the session. A board member pointed out that someone making a suggestion is “how we get program chairmen.”

“We open in two weeks,” Don Haggerty of Porteous Fastener Co. declared of the new New Jersey branch. “But if you call me in a week it may still be “We open in two weeks,”” he hedged.

Biting off more than one can chew? Intelligent fastener maker TZ Limited may try to buy Textron Fastening Systems, the Australian newspaper The Age reported. TZ has annual sales of $18.2 million, while TFS reports revenue of $1.8 billion. “TZ is not even the size of a flea compared to the TFS elephant,” an observer familiar with the Australian and American companies reacted.

If you want to make firing someone fun “offer to take them to lunch and order theirs “to go”” consultant Richard Flint advised the National Fastener Distributors Association.
But another fastener entrepreneur who took two people to lunch to tell them they were laid off soon found nobody wanted to go to lunch with him.

After registration slipped, a spokesperson for a fastener-related trade show responded to a question about attendance numbers and auditing: “Basically, we track our own numbers. I believe they are accurate if for no other reason than if they weren”t, they would be much higher!”

“Sounds like a tax dodge for a vacation home in Colorado,” one Southwestern fastener insider concluded after Texas businessman Greig Placette who operated a fastener distributorship out of Colorado was sentenced to 23 months in federal prison for cheating the Department of Defense out of $160,307 in dozens of orders for nuts and bolts through a program designed for small businesses.
Boomerang of the Year
“The information found on this website may not be used in any manner prohibited by law or disallowed by licenses, contracts, copyrights, or FCC policies or regulations. If you encounter any violation of the above restrictions, please let us know by emailing American Fastener Journal.”
Mike McGuire”s disclaimer boomeranged when he started posting articles from other publications word-for-word without attribution on his website and with no indication he had obtained permission. Among the publications not even given credit were a Michigan newspaper, Petoskey News Review; a Massachusetts newspaper, The Republican; trade magazine Auto Body Repair News; and even the Associated Press.
Numerous other stories used verbatim were attributed to copyrighted publications with no indication he had permission to use them.
“Would Mike visit a fastener plant, leave with a pallet of bolts and sell them as his own?”
“A few crooks selling counterfeit bolts are how we got the FQA. Is he asking for more government regulation with counterfeit stories?”
Using Internet searches for any story with the word “fastener” and copying whatever is found boomeranged in a second way: The headline “Technical Handbook on Fasteners Released” sounds relevant until industrial fastener readers discovered McGuire”s 10/07/05 posting was from the Association of Suppliers to the British Clothing Industry. One industrial fastener executive who took the time to read it described the story as about “bra hooks and zippers.”

How did he get into fastener software sales? “My wife wasn”t going to marry a bartender,” Jon Doffing of Profit 21 told the Southwestern Fastener Association.
Doffing”s advice on solving computer problems: “Go to the youngest person in your company.”

Each year one pundit sends his commentary on the FIN Calendar and for 2006 he felt most comfortable with November: “I hope to wrangle an invite to Rotorclip”s Thanksgiving meal. A fine looking family, by the way, and far friendlier than the July crew and more animated than their February counterparts.” \ �2006 FastenerNews.com