We’re passing on our costs, for sure. We’re using this as an opportunity to increase prices where we can and where we feel like there wouldn’t be too much pushback from customers. Taking into consideration the competitive landscape of each situation, we are making the strategic decision to raise prices to compensate for the increase in our costs.
The supply chain has been really difficult and inflation is driving up costs. I’m in the electronics manufacturing industry, so we have the global component shortage to contend with. I’ve been expanding our suppliers and changing the electronic designs to increase our part options and avoid the worst of the price increases. It’s been a challenging year, but we’re able to adapt.
It’s a competitive market right now for talent, and that is everything from a laborer through leadership. We’ve had to increase wages to remain competitive in the marketplace, and we’ll likely need to continue to do so.
We’ve seen opportunities mostly in office space. We took advantage of having a lease that ended and — with skyrocketing real estate prices in Nashville — went 100% remote. So our challenge now is to maintain corporate culture and collaboration while we’re working on a flatscreen more often than not.
The supply chain has dried up and we’re absorbing as much as we can, but we’re making investments in the business. We had a new website developed that has cost us quite a bit but that has been bringing a great ROI. We’re branching out into some new manufacturing brands of equipment to give them a try because the equipment is more readily available than some of our older go-to manufacturers.
There’s the old phrase: “What do you do with lemons? You make lemonade.” We had our banker proactively approach us to actually reduce our rates on our loans before the next guy down the road came knocking on our door. We were able to take advantage of that, and that helps now and really into the future.
