Interview Paper

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DM: That’s really interesting. You don’t typically…. Do you tailor products to different markets? Do you do a local strategy?

NS: Yes. We do analyses on what platforms each country has, and when we go to different trade shows, and different marketing events, or when we meet with the attachés of the embassies (which are located in [Washington] D.C.), that is where we go in with our lists of capabilities for each platform. If somebody has an F5 and somebody does not, I’m not going to take them up with what my F5 capabilities are. So it’s tailored but to a broader range, because an aircraft can have billions of parts. It’s my job to see which ones can I get you.

DM: It seems that you have to have a geocentric view. You can’t be ethnocentric in this job.

NS: Correct.

DM: You have to be able to have a corporate culture mindset that’s geocentric to be able to work with different cultures.

NS: Correct. Being in the industry that we’re in, our main goal I to abide by our governmental rules. That’s our number one [priority]. Also, because we’re a U.S. government contractors, it’s very important for us to abide by the rules and regulations of the United States, and then we will go out and market to make sure that we abide by those rules.

DM: Do you also have to be concerned with the rules of the other country’s government?

NS: Correct. That’s definitely a challenge. There’s something called trace certification. It’s a certification created by a company in Washing D.C. that says, “I abide by all anti bribery laws.” And it’s an annual certification. I go in and I have to submit all of the paperwork and state who deals with each governmental agency, and they do a background check on each on of those people, too. That has created a bit of great defined roles for everyone, but as you know in different cultures there are still those cultures that say, “Hey, how much am I getting for this?” We want to make sure that nobody does anything like that [i.e. bribery]. They abide by the trace regulations. That does keep us in a bit of a stronghold sometimes.

DM: Do you use a vendor to ship your parts, or do you actually ship it yourselves?

NS: We ship it ourselves. There are freight forwarders that are used, but we still have to apply for everything; we still have to get all of the paperwork, and the freight forwarder has to get approved by the United States government to be used to ship to that entity.

DM: When you’re doing your shipments, has technology progressed your company to the point where natural barriers to get the shipment to where it’s at is no longer an issue, or have you ever ran into an scenario where a natural barrier (whether it be a mountain, a desert) in a different region, presents a challenge for you to get product from point A to point B?

NS: Natural barrier in the sense of deserts and things like that have not been too much of a challenge, but there are other barriers like HAZMAT and things like that. When we want to ship batteries, we have a hard time getting them on the planes, and things like that. We do have barriers like that. Us as a company…we’re choosing to reduce our promotion of those types of items to our customers. That’s the barrier that we faced in those situations.

DM: That’s really interesting. I didn’t even think about the whole issue with plane technology on a shipment platform to get out the door.

NS: Oxygen tanks and oxygen-ranking leaders come into play for that too, which is interesting, because they are needed on planes, but you have to watch how you ship it on a plane.

DM: Right. I’m sure you have different scenarios where you have a product that has to have certain standards in the U.S. versus different standards elsewhere.

NS: Yes! Very, very correct. There are different certifications that are even required within each country that any of these parts can land on. If I’m trying to get something to Taiwan, and that HAZMAT is OK’d in the U.S., and OK’d in Taiwan, but it is not OK’d in Europe, I have to find a different way to get that item to get to its facilities.

DM: That’s really interesting!

NS: Yes. It takes a lot of knowledge and energy.

DM: Do you try to tailor the product to meet a wide range of standards? Or is it pretty much, “Where going to ship this product and continue to do business with Taiwan (for example); where not shipping it elsewhere so we only have to meet U.S. and Taiwan standards”?

NS: Yes. That’s something that the United States government has done, by creating the Department of Commerce export compliance. They’ve given us all of the regulations and all of the guidelines, and there is something called ECCN numbers, and they correlate to what country and what rules and regulations you have to abide by. That’s has helped out a lot.

DM: A few more questions and we’ll wrap up.

NS: Sure.

DM: With regards to your competition, who are your biggest competitors? [That is], [i]f you’re allowed to say.

NS: I will be more general with our competition. Even though you would think it’s a huge market…it’s an aviation market… it’s really not. We have the OEMs (the original equipment manufacturers). We have the consumer…the customers, and then we have everyone in between. The job of the in between (which is companies like mine) is to take that strain off of the OEMs to focus on manufacturing the parts, and to take on the strain on the customers, because they are having a hard time dealing with the OEMs. Our job as the middle person is to streamline the process. You would think that someone like Lockheed or Boeing would have a process like that, but they don’t, because their focus is so much larger and because their overhead is so large. A goal for a company like mine is to go to these huge OEMs and say, “Hi. I can do what you are not able to do and what you’re not good at.” After going back and forth and knowing what regions you’re strong in, these large companies will give you the contract to do [business] within those regions. It’s not my job just to sell to the customer. It’s also my job to sell to the vendor and say, “Dimo is who you want to go with for Saudi Arabia because we’ve been strong there for twenty