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Partner Profiles

I love my job. People who know me well, know I love my job. I tell people that I’m in charge of special projects. As I’m almost 60, this gets a laugh or two but in a way it’s true. Special projects to me are all those things you wish you could do but can never find the time to do them. You know that your business could use them but they just never get out of the incubator or if they do, they fail because you don’t have the time to implement them properly and they never catch on. We don’t want that to happen at IR.

One of the hardest things to do with a business of any size is to influence a culture or part of a culture–the way people think about certain things. Our world today is all about instant results and we all have high expectations about this. It is also about easy. The goal is to find the fastest and surest way from Point A to Point B.  It is often thought that the best way to be efficient in business is to treat everyone alike by lumping them into the same mixing bowl. One solution for all. And that’s where it ends.

I like to think that at IR we are different than that. I do know that here in special projects, we have gone to great lengths to build a corporate culture that looks at every client as being distinct, with their own set of problems.  And that we have the solutions to help solve those problems. I believe this sets us apart from other businesses in our field. I also like to think that IR has vendors—partners–who are also different in that respect.  It is with these differences in mind that I thought I would start a series of articles that describes our major vendors and why we at IR think you should look closely at what they have to offer.

There are very good reasons why we have chosen the vendors we have.  Though nobody is perfect, we do vet our vendors and have high expectations of them, as they do of us. I think that over the last 15 years or so we have learned a lot about our long-term suppliers and I’d like to share some of that knowledge with you. I will try to be brief, but there is some history behind our relationship with each of our vendors.  This history takes you back from the type of business they are today, to what they were when we started together.  I believe it is not only interesting, but vital, to understanding how we all got to where we are today. By no means are these articles exhaustive. They are simply my own abbreviated observations of what has evolved over time and why I believe the products and services from these companies should be on your short list of options.

So watch for the first of the series in the coming weeks.  First off: QSA Global.

In the meantime remember…for the unknown there’s NDT, for NDT there’s IR.

Brian Sargent
IR Supplies and Services