Going the Extra Mile: One Incredible Story by Rachel Hair – In the long run, going the extra mile for customers will nearly always come back to benefit you.  Just this last month, I had a crazy but awesome experience with just that, something I don’t think I or my customer will soon forget.

The Provo City ½ marathon was scheduled for Saturday, April 4th.  A few weeks prior, I had worked closely with the race director, Jeff Gehring, to close an order for multiple banners and a total of 1800 race shirts. Under the tight timeframe, our first challenge was to find a supplier with enough inventory for that exact shirt style. With Tifany’s help, we got the shirts here in two shipments, the second of which arrived three days before the race.  By this time, I was somewhat stressed over producing the order on time, and I had actually committed to run in this race, but I didn’t feel as prepared as I would have liked to.  Well, Jose and his team at Press A quickly eased the first of my stresses, knocking out the entire order in one day’s worth of production. The shirts were picked up April 2nd, and I could finally rest easy over on the matter.  Our production team rocks!

That peace-of-mind, however, was short lived; Jeff called me at 8:30 the next morning.  Somehow the supplier had failed to ship us 90 of the shirts. Since the race was less than 24 hours away, it was determined that we would fly Tyler Kimball out to California that very night to personally pick up the remaining shirts, bring them back to our warehouse, print them on zero sleep, and then deliver them in the early morning hours (which, thankfully, all worked out smoothly).

When they fired the gun for the race to begin the next morning, I thought of all the work that went into those shirts, and how the other 1500 runners would never know the intense details.  Everyone just had a great time, and we have another satisfied and loyal customer.