Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1228683
18 SMT007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2020 Johnson: One of the things you shared as we were preparing for this conversation is that there is a company culture of being nimble and responsive, as well as automated. Kadah: It's the only way we survive, you know. For example, our competitors are Honeywell, Emerson, and United Technologies. They are very big, and we are very small. We have to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. We must move around quickly, or we'll get squished. We had a competitor who designed a surge protector built in a plastic box. Surge protectors die for a living, and when the com- petitor's surge protector units started to die, they tended to catch houses on fire because they were plastic. We were asked to enter the market about a year before their product recall. When the MOV goes short, it gets very hot and glows red. I put our surge protector in a metal box. I also did something a little different; I found a source of MOVs that had built-in intrinsic fus- es. Right around the time we entered the mar- ket with our metal box solution and intrinsical- ly fused thermal MOVs, their recall happened, and we had a field day capturing the market share because their recall corresponded with our release. Kevin Jobsky: The speed in which we got to mar- ket with that product was phenomenal. Outside of UL, we had that design in a week or so, with prototypes and everything else. It was fast. Kadah: We have to be fast and nimble to sur- vive. It's one of our greatest attributes, in addi- tion to our engineering talent. Johnson: You mentioned that you have 271 em- ployees on staff. That's a nice size for being nimble, especially with all of the various man- ufacturing you do. And as we're talking right now, there are a lot of changes going on. We're all in the middle of a bunch of shifts regarding the supply chain and other government-man- dated changes intended to respond to the CO- VID-19 outbreak. How has that affected you in the past few days? Kadah: We are now rearranging all of our pro- duction shifts to maintain compliance with the executive order of Governor Cuomo, which— as of 24 hours ago—was to cut the number of people in your building at any given time in half. As of six hours ago, we got notice that he wants it down to a quarter. We already have a fairly wide open facility. When we're done rearranging the staff, we're going to have 83,000 square feet, and proba- bly less than 80 people in it at any given time. They said, "Try to maintain a distance of six feet between people." We're going to have 1,000 square feet per person shortly, so we're going to have a very low-density population. This was to responsibly comply with the social distancing requirement and be able to support other essential businesses with the product they need to support the infrastructure during this challenging time. We'll take every measure that we can, but eventually, they might come back and say, "You have to shut your facility down." Until that point, we're going to comply with every rule they throw at us to keep our facility open. If we go down, then some of our supply chain part- ners—our customers—go down, and that rip- ples through this economy. The more compa- nies that go down, the more difficult it will be to recover long-term. We're fighting hard to stay open. Johnson: You have this ability to adjust your staffing and your operations. It sounds to me like you might be adding additional shifts to Even though labor costs are less outside of the United States, we have been able to survive because we simply outdesign our competitors.