DON: Today, the young people are coming out of universities and colleges... they're so much more advanced than we have ever thought of being. And they've got some great ideas.
HATTIE: Don's son, Joel, is installing plenty of new technology.
JOEL DZEKCIORIUS: When I came here, the computers were antiquated. The building was wired, the network and capability were there; the problem was they hadn't capitalized on it. So the first thing I did was I went out and I got computers so that everybody had them or upgraded the ones that were in existence.
And then we needed to tie it in with Internet access.
And then the final step in that was to get the box up there (server, router and firewall). And it provided business-class e-mail, which before we did not have.
We had used a single, dial-up AOL account. That frustrated me to no end. It was not professional. You know, you're e-mailing somebody you're trying to convey an image of an established company, a company that's been around for years, which we have, and you're using an AOL address. It's just not appropriate.
Now we everybody has their own e-mail account. We have firewall security, which they did not have before. Now we have 24-hour Internet access, seven days a week. So since people can come--we can go out, people can come in. We allow manufacturers' reps to do the same thing. It eliminates some of the time we spend nurturing them because they can do things themselves now... where before they didn't, they had to call us on the phone.
HATTIE: So it's really paying off. You're getting more sales because of the connectivity.
JOEL: We're hitting more contacts, which turns into sales. We have better customer service, which turns into more sales.