Business World |
May 2015
70
kind of communication in business; as I
would travel, I made prospective contacts
and appointments as I drove from town to
town, fromone payphone to the next,” Rains
continued. “Look where we are as a country
today – everything is instant, we have cell
phones, computers the size of a watch, faxes
and the internet – everything has become
more instantaneous than it used to be. It
puts a lot of stress on us as human beings to
keep up. Business moves so quickly, and op-
portunities must be acted upon while they
are staring you in the face. The owner of any
successful company can tell you, our jobs
don’t end at 5pm on workdays.”
PULLING TOGETHER
Astute and loyal, Rains’ sales experience has
made her a savvy savant when forging rela-
tionships with the supply chain.
“We have built and nurtured these relation-
ships with the people that we work with –
the railroads, the Port of Houston Author-
ity, and we have a number of other vendors
that are a valuable part of our business – like
our supplier of strapping in the rail service
side,” she said.
“Reliable and service-oriented vendors are
very important to our supply chain because
when we need something, sometimes we
need it immediately, so we want to build the
kind of relationships where that’s possible.
Sometimes if you just jump from one place
to another because it’s absolutely the cheap-
est price, you’re not going to get the best ser-
vice.”
