FROM THE INDUSTRY
Tell me how you ended up in Hawaii.
how did the move affect Rincon?
We had been in lockdown for a couple months; I was reading about the 1919 pandemic and thinking, I’m not sure that the kids are going to be able to go back to school in the fall. San Diego has got a big biotech community, so I talked to a couple of experts in that field. One of them was politically pretty red, one was pretty liberal; the one thing they could agree on was that they thought that there was probably low probability that the schools would open. My daughter was 16 at the time and is pretty cerebral and possesses an outgoing personality; she wasn’t enjoying remote education; it didn’t fit her learning style. I wondered what we could do to keep her engaged and growing, intellectually, personally. It’s such an important age. Consequently, I thought to myself “With our infrastructure and culture I can work from almost anywhere, especially right now. I said to my daughter let’s see if there’s a place we can find where, instead of having COVID be something that we have to struggle through, let’s see if there’s an opportunity to use this as a period of growth for you and for the family.” I told her to go do some research. She came back to me the next day and had found a school on the big island of Hawaii that was offering in-person instruction. It was a big move, you’re crossing time zones, a massive ocean. You’re away from the mainland. It’s like another country. It was crazy. It happened so fast. We rented out our home in San Diego to a family in Chicago that had young kids, preschool age. They were looking at San Diego for a house to rent. We did the whole deal in a few hours. We literally made the whole pivot, change of schools, housing, in a few days. In terms of it being like another country, that’s perceptive of you. Although it’s part of America, Hawaii has a long-established culture, language, institutions and rightfully so, take tremendous pride in its heritage. We learned so much from the culture and practices of the place.
It was actually great timing because there were no trade shows to attend, no customers to visit, no remote offices to connect with. We weren’t allowing people to visit our distribution centre, that’s in Las Vegas, because we didn’t want to expose those guys to any chance of infection and in fact had split the staff there into two shifts to minimise any cross infection. I just thought, if I’m stuck, then, let’s go have an adventure out of this. It was an incredible experience, life changing in many ways. Now, because we loved it so much, we come out for about one to two months every year. And my daughter who attended her last two years of high school on the island is going to be working for RINCON this summer as an intern updating our sustainability action plan. We have come full circle. RINCON has quite a remote working culture so this move must have seemed feasible. That’s right. We had become a primarily remote company back in 2012, at that time we reached the point where more employees worked remote than in offices. By 2020, 80% of our staff were working remotely anyway. How did Rincon get started? Mike Bartling and I started RINCON back in 2003. We had worked together at a traditional hardware broker. The model was buy something for a dollar, sell it for two, a nice little business. Mike and I had begun experimenting with different variations of the traditional brokerage model, which proved successful. The two of us had great chemistry and we liked working together. We had confidence in the model. We shared the same values but possessed different and complementary skill sets. Mike’s the traditional great salesperson, he’s charming, he knows the technical aspects of the hardware, whereas I brought the marketing, the finance, the operational element.
Our whole approach from the very beginning was about creating a business model that saves your customers money and helps the environment, making things better for the next generation.
SEPTEMBER 2024 Volume 46 No.3
37
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