Thanks for the inside scoop on the Savinelli ownership situation. I thought (not sure why) that their handing off operations was a transfer of ownership. Learning that's
NOT the case makes the tradition-lover part of my brain very happy.
10-4 also on GdO's being back to the standard of earlier days following their rough patch. When that happened I figured it was for keeps (market entropy rarely goes the other way), so paid far less attention to the line. Once again, learning that makes me smile.
Funny story about you, Sykes:
This past St. Louis show I was sitting around a table upstairs with a group of guys and the subject turned to Laudisi. Everyone agreed you had brought the PipeWorld into the 21st century in terms of business style and organization, and it was going smashingly well.
One of them wondered out loud how much money might be involved and etc., and when that mini-subject had run its course (it sounded like several of the guys knew business pretty well), I said into the silence:
"Sykes doesn't care about money."
All the faces turned my way, of course. They countered with stuff like,
"He's never taken a step backward!", and
"Huh? You're crazy, George. He's killing it!"
Into the next silence, I said,
"What Sykes cares about is creating happy customers... ...
because when you do, the money takes care of itself. In a business like his, money is just a metric of customer satisfaction."
They all did that quick little head-snap-followed-by-a-stare thing, then broke into smiles when they realized that sure enough, they'd only rarely heard of someone having a problem with SmokingPipes on any level, and when they had, it had quickly been set right.
One of them even came up to me after the group dissolved and said the simplest things are sometimes the hardest to see, and he couldn't wait to tell "Sykes' Secret" to his son who was in the process of launching his first business.