Interviewer:  Hi, I’m Val DiGiancinto, Vice President of Sales and Partner of the Ace Group, Inc. in New York City. 

Today, I’m here to discuss some of the things that we’ve done to change our company.  Let me tell you about change in our company.  We’ve really had to learn how to be very agile.  I’m sure everybody has seen this situation with the economy and has had an affect in one way or another. 

I speak to business owners around New York City on an every day basis.  Everybody I come in touch with and everybody has had something that has affected their business in a very big way, and it goes from the person who cuts my hair in the subway, to the hot dog vendor down the street that we do some signage for, to every other company that we’ve spoken to.  And understanding that and being a very closely held company that can make changes, and that’s an opportunity that we have that maybe some larger organization don’t have, we can make pretty quick changes.  And we’ve started to do that pretty aggressively over the last couple of years. 

Some of the changes have been very positive, it’s not just a matter of looking around and seeing where you can make additional cuts in your organization, but it is also an opportunity to move into new areas that you haven’t looked at before that provide opportunity to meet and greet and sell to people who you haven’t had the opportunity to speak to before. 

Some of the products we were providing in the past don’t seem to have the same value propositions that they had, so by having some of these new capabilities, it’s really given us an opportunity to get our foot in the door and speak to people.  And some of them have liked personalized URL’s. We’ve added the capability by hiring the right people, creating the backend technology that provides the marketing statistics to our potential customers, and we’ve actually combined those now with quick response codes to even give them an added benefit of some of the value of Endura technology that’s out there. 

So, I guess what we’ve found is agility is the word of the year and I think being able to adapt to an ever changing technology as quickly as we can and help keep up as a stable company and help us to actually grow. 

So, hopefully everybody has a positive experience this year, and let’s get out there and figure a way to make the change.