I've heard horror stories from talking to people at trade shows about the problems and foreseeable issues that could go wrong with shipments, imports and exports of goods, orders, samples, and other logistics related categories. With that said, I've made mental notes of things I should be more careful of, what to follow up on, and luckily, since starting with FouFou Dog, have only experienced a few mishaps of my own. The most memorable being the first time Cheryl and I travelled to Germany for the hugest, bi-annual, worldwide trade show which costed thousands of Euro to attend and another few hundred Euro for accommodations, food and flight, only to find that the delivery of all of our samples to be displayed in our booth had not arrived to the show. Boy was that a scary time of my life.
But as Cheryl always says, 'Mistakes are allowed to be made, just make sure to learn from them, and never make the same mistake twice'.
To date, I have not allowed that to happen again, however, Evelyn and I have experienced a similar incident last year when the freight forwarding company we used to deliver our crate of samples to our trade show in Quebec ended up misplacing the crate and we had to make do with what we had while we were there.
I've been fortunate enough to say that I haven't encountered any huge, deal breaking nightmares as of yet, but I'm starting to see that it's true what everyone has been telling me; which is the fact that the people dealing with the logistics side of any business have it the worst. When things go smoothly and everything is delivered on schedule, a year will go by and no one will pay any attention to all the work that you've done to ensure things work out accordingly. It's when one little thing goes wrong that sh!t hits the fan, suddenly your head is on the chopping block with all fingers pointed in your direction, and everyone hates you. Go figure.
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