This article is an excerpt from Episode 12 of Alchemy-Spetec's podcast The Injection Connection, featuring Outside Sales Representative at All-Tex Supply, Inc. Josh Van Hook. Josh has over 18 years of experience as a distributor in Austin, TX and one of his passions has been chemical grouts. (If you'd rather view or listen, an audio/visual version of this excerpt is posted at the bottom of the article.)

Charlie Lerman: One of the things I’d like to say - and I hope you can add on to this because it's right there in the Austin area - is there's a standard kind of tick you'll find from distribution that people just come in, pick up a couple of pails a month or something like that. But then, we have these what I like to call “grout nirvana” jobs that just all sudden pop up. They're typically no bid. I think within the last couple of years, we had (without really going to the contractor's name or the job specifically) a close to $50, 000 just on the grout material side job that came up within a few days there, right?

Josh Van Hook: Yeah, obviously the grouting world is very up and down due to the weather pattern, too. And so, we'll go for a stretch without selling anything really big. Then all of a sudden, you'll have something break loose and you'll have a bunch of rain or you'll have the weather change. And all of a sudden, it’s nothing to sell 25, 50, $75 000 worth of grout on any given job just because they've got to have it.

Charlie: Those things get kind of hard to forecast both on the manufacturer side and on the distributor side because you look at, you’re like, well, how much we're going to do with Alchemy-Spetec this year? And you're like, well, last year, we did this but it's up and down because you hit those job specifics.

Josh: Correct. And with the grouts, you just don't know what you're going to get. We go into corporate meetings and talk about forecasting and whatnot. Over the years, I’ve learned that you really can't forecast your chemical grout sales for the year just because no one knows how far a bucket of grout's going to go. One bucket could do a whole job or one bucket could turn into 100 buckets. You have no idea until you get in there.

View the video version of this excerpt...

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