Business View - March 2015 103
building campus – each comprising 40,000 square
feet – that uniquely positions ISG to offer pre-owned
equipment to customers for whom capital is an issue.
Additionally, Speedrack has a 150,000 square-foot
rack manufacturing plant located in Quincy, Mich.,
about 130 miles to the southeast of Sparta.
The customer footprint spreads across the entire Unit-
ed States, Bastic said, and includes projects in Can-
ada and Puerto Rico as well. And, rather than fitting
the profile of a local company that does some work
outside its home turf, ISG actually finds the majority of
its clients outside Michigan.
In fact, it has niches in varied industries like music,
publishing and hardware, which has yielded far-flung
project work from California to Indiana to New Jersey.
A recent project in a Chicago suburb, he said, saw ISG
cold-call a company that had completed an engineer-
ing study with one of its competitors for an appreciable
cost, which then suggested that $1.5 million in mate-
rial handling process improvements were necessary
and provided no Plan B approaches.
Bastic and Don Vey, the Chicago-based salesman, met
with the company’s representatives two weeks later
and ultimately presented an ISG engineering study
that was not only significantly less expensive than the
original, but illustrated the difference in the ISG ap-
proach that has kept customers loyal throughout the
years.
“A lot of business is repeat business, where we may be
working with a VP of Supply Chain or Distribution that
will move on to another company and we will main-
tain that partnership with him,” he said. “As a result,
we don’t do a lot of advertising. A lot of our work is
either word of mouth or where we have an associate
that moves on. We work hand in glove with our cus-
tomers, during our Engineering Studies, to understand
what their businesses are, and then what their chal-
lenges are as it relates to the material handling side
of their business, and where the opportunities are for
improvement. The Engineering Studies are not a profit
center but rather a means to an end. In other words,
we need to know and understand what we are going to
build before we build it.”
“I wish I had a nickel for every VP of Supply Chain that
we’ve talked with that said, ‘Are you sure you can do
this study for that price?’ Due to our lower overhead
we are more cost effective than our peers. You see the
excitement from the customer’s perspective when we
do the Engineering Studies in concert with them. They
can’t wait to implement the technology because they
know what it’s going to do for them in terms of produc-
tivity and efficiency.”
LOGISTICS
