Monday, August 15, 2011

Focusing on Our Core Competency

At a meeting last week I was amazed to learn that Florida's biggest trading partner is Brazil. A staggering $16 billion passed between Florida and Brazil in 2010. This is twice the next partner, Columbia. What was the next surprise is that Brazil is now the world's number 5 economy and is predicted that their GDP will pass Germany in a dozen years. What a success story.

Henry Ford once said, "Coming together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success." In the light of today's global economy and our own problems at home with both parties in congress undecided in what to do, one thing for sure is the outcome will not be successful. It seems we have taken success out of our business vocabulary hoping just to get by and stay afloat.

On our side ignoring the turmoil around us as much as we can, our three companies are looking at ways to find strong long term partnerships and investing in the future so we can bring meaningful solutions to them. Companies are reinventing themselves and thus partnerships are going to be needed to ensure growth and success.

We believe we have to stick within the core competency of the three businesses to ensure that it's hard for competitors to imitate what we offer. We offer our partners a market advantage and finally our products must satisfy the purchaser.

For example, at PPi Global Sales, our core competency is StandUp pouch machinery. We offer all speeds and all types of pouches and today we offer intelligent machinery with our SmartSource™ electronic systems that tell the customer if the machine is running out of specification and if necessary will shut the machine down. We still sell machinery, but we present the sale in a different way. We patented many of these systems to give our customer an edge and the technology ensures the consumers buy a pouch with no defects. This makes for a successful partnership.

Our Beverage Pouch Group competency is to provide beverages always in a sustainable low carbon dioxide footprint pouch. You can buy our water pouches with spill proof spouts, small juice pouches from South Africa and France, wine from countries where we support local co-operatives [who buy from small farmers] and bring container loads of wine back and then fill and pack into USA patented BarrelPaQ® pouches in Florida. This means we support friendly countries, small farmers and also have American labor to pack a resource we don't have in Florida. This competency is very hard for a competitor to follow. The consumer gets a new taste in wine with pricing that reflects small company purchases.

Finally ShotPaQ™ and its ready-to-drink ShotPak® cocktails and the premium global STR8UP® spirits continue to grow and can be found at many liquor stores, bars and over the internet. It's the same product delivered in a variety of ways and the consumer can drink it in the pouch or as part of a mixed cocktail.

So you can see we consider partnering with our end user as the reason for our success.