Fokke Post and Dennis Slof shared the same school and education and found their - more or less - first job at Geha Laverman as sales engineers at the same time in 1994. A quarter of a century later, they are still working in the same space ánd in the same job. Despite windows literally overlooking customers, a hopeless existence you might say....
'On the contrary,' is the unanimous response of the two jubilarians. 'At Geha Laverman, no day is the same and we actually keep surprising ourselves every day...'. Their adventurous existence never even made them look around for an interesting vacancy.
Chains and armour plate
Dennis: 'What also makes working here fun is that old acquaintances of mine now regularly pass by as customers. Often they are acquaintances at companies in the Zaan region. And every now and then, even the Ministry of Defence drops by again, with an urgent order for dismountable armour plating especially for Dutch armoured vehicles in Afghanistan, for instance.
Fokke adds: 'Incidentally, I once had special chains for 'dog tags' (the typical army identity plate, ed.) made for an order from the Army, including boxes with NATO number'.
Both balance sharing the huge diversity of customers, who always - sooner or later - return.
Dennis looks back at the past: 'When I started, there was no field service like we have today, after the merger with Laverman. We only went to customers when asked. Fokke: 'If you look outside now, there are at least a thousand tonnes of HARDOX waiting to be processed, but it wasn't always like that.'
'In the old days, every order involved checking whether one new sheet of HARDOX might need to be ordered and it would be delivered by SSAB after a week. If you were lucky, there was still a remainder in stock.'
'My dad makes rollercoasters'
Fokke says: 'When Theo (van Schie, ed.) took over the helm here, the momentum really picked up and we grew from one, to two..., to three halls. Considerable investments were made in equipment and machinery. Work came in from all sorts of sectors. Even customers from the fishing and maritime sector, such as Allseas a few years ago, we had never had before.
Already during my summer holiday job, I had gained experience with chain drives and conveyors and so it happened that I once had to supply a chain to drive the 'Splash roller coaster' at Duinrell. "My father makes roller coasters," was invariably the answer then, when my children were asked about their father's profession'.
'You can also ask too many questions...'
'While we stock a lot of standard products for regular customers, almost every day a phone call comes in with a special question about a product we call a 'special' here. Questions about 'specials' reach us via the field staff, but usually these are companies that have found us via our website. You immediately want to empathise with their problem, the product, what they are looking for and what requirements it should meet,' Dennis says.
Fokke responds: 'There have been times when I have asked so many - too many - questions that people have announced, in exasperation, that I am going to end the conversation. I simply feel obliged to ask everything I need to know in order to give good advice.'
Panorama of purely enthusiastic customers
Once Fokke and Dennis have won the customer's trust with a lot of passion, the 'customer journey' - the 'customer-journey', as it is called in woolly marketing terms - can only begin at Geha Laverman.
Being a sales engineer means mapping out the entire journey including consultations, checkpoints and delivery times. The journey goal, besides a perfect product, is the customer's satisfaction or rather, how positively he experienced 'the journey'.
The sales engineering department at Geha Laverman boasts a duo of tour guides who have been looking for the perfect view for 25 years: a panorama of purely enthusiastic customers.
