BusyBeeNews - May 2021

may 2021

Wellness Tip Submitted by: Lori Zimmer

Drink Your Water!!!

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock for the last ten years

or if you haven’t been told enough already - DRINK WATER - it’s good for you!

Most of our body weight is made up of water and is involved in many important bodily functions, including, but not limited to: • helping your brain function (if you have a slight headache or are in a foul mood, you may just be slightly dehydrated - try drinking some water).

• regulate body temperature (sweating keeps you cool, but you need to replenish the water you’ve lost).

• helps keep your skin bright (keeps it hydrated and may promote collagen production).

• helps flush out waste from your body (do I REALLY need to elaborate here???).

How much should you drink?

Men should consume about 100 oz. of water daily from beverages and women about 73 oz. from beverages.

Tips for drinking enough water: carry a refillable water bottle with you wherever you go. keep track of your intake. try to be halfway through your daily intake by midday.

Water is important to nearly every part of your body - so drink up!

HMC Trivia

Question Submitted by: Lori Zimmer

What country contributes the most players to MLB next to the United States?

Trivia Answer: The Dominican Republic

MEMORIAL DAY 2021 MONDAY, MAY 31 ,2021 ST

Each year, on the final Monday in May, the United States celebrates the federal holiday Memorial Day. Originally, Memorial Day was known as Decoration Day, meant to honor the Union and the Confederate soldiers who died during the American Civil War. By the 1900s, it had become a day to celebrate all American soldiers who died while serving in the military.

It wasn’t until 1967 that it was legally named Memorial Day. It became a federal holiday in 1971.

Tales from the

Outdoors

by Pat Armstrong

Drive It Like You

Stole It Springtime, every year, reminds me of one trip to Arkansas where we timed the sand bass spawn perfectly to spring break. Must have been a warm winter because they ‘ran’ early.

When they ‘run’, I mean the fish run up the creeks to spawn and are very concentrated and pretty darn easy to catch.

This story introduces another family friend named Jack. Jack worked with Dad for many years, so Jack, Dad, Ben, and I fished together often.

This particular day, Jack, Ben, and I took Dad’s ’72 Chevy Suburban (the green machine) up to the Little Missouri River, at Star of the West Camp ground to fish for ‘sandies’. Dad must have wanted to rest because he wasn’t with us.

So, Jack, Ben, and I were just hammering the fish and we ran out of bait. We were using minnows at the time and we were really doing well. Most were smaller, but we did catch some keepers, in fact we caught too many small fish. We had a choice to make…Pack up and leave this epic fish catching event or send someone to go get bait.

Well, the choice was pretty obvious, we had to get more bait. Like gambling where you never walk away from a hot streak, you gotta catch fish while they’re biting

I’m about 14 at the time, which would have put Ben at 11, so he was out. Jack wasn’t going to leave me and Ben there on the riverbank by ourselves (in hindsight, might have been a safer option). So, I volunteered!

“Of course, I can drive, I back the truck out of the driveway all the time,” I asserted. Jack looked at me suspiciously, but I was indeed a responsible teenager (most of the time) so he agreed.

Now a little about the truck, it was 5,000 pounds of hell on wheels. Dad and I rebuilt the motor on this truck and used it to haul all sorts of building materials…and when I say it had power…IT HAD POWER. This thing would flat haul the mail, especially when it wasn’t loaded down!

I wasn’t a particularly tall kid at 14, but I did indeed back the truck up and down the driveway easy enough, however I could just barley see over the steering wheel because the seat was sunk in a little. Now, as I remember the story, I distinctly remember Jack saying, “be careful and hurry back!” which to me meant – Haul A$$. So, I did.

I’m 14 years old, can barley see over the wheel, driving east on Hwy 70 in Arkansas (two lane blacktop road) doing 80 miles an hour to go get minnows. The feeling of being a ‘grown up’ and having this responsibility bestowed upon me was an awesome feeling.

I drove from Star of the West to Self Creek Marina, which was about ten miles away, in about four minutes…or at least it seemed at the time.

Like most parking lots in rural America, the parking lot at Self Creek Marina was gravel and I was going a little too fast when I pulled in. I hit the breaks and started sliding. Luckily, I got the green machine stopped in time before sliding off the cliff down to the water. That would have been bad! But I hopped out, ran down the ramp, slammed ten bucks on the counter like I owned the place and said, “I need ten bucks worth of minnows!”

Minnows in hand, stowed securely in the passenger seat, I take off back to the river…at 80 miles an hour! Fortunately, nothing bad happened, and we got back to catching fish, but the experience of really driving for the first time on the road, without an adult, was more fun than catching fish.

We all have those moments in life where we must do something different…a new job, a new spouse (it happens), a new ERP system…whatever the case may be. You just have to have confidence in yourself, in your abilities, and ‘drive it like you stole it’.

Cheers! - Pat

CURRENT JOB OPENINGS: Warehouse Associates – Carrollton Inside Sales Associates – Plumbing & Pump Teams – Carrollton Accountant – Carrollton HR Generalist – Carrollton Factory Service Team – Central Texas (Austin or San Antonio) Account Manager – Corpus Christi, Victoria, and The Valley Account Manager – Little Rock

WHAT THE HIVE CAN TEACH BUSINESSES ABOUT

LEADERSHIP, EFFICIENCY,

& GROWTH LESSON #15 Develop Your Team THE WISDOM OF BEES by: Michael O’Malley, Ph.D. Bees are a disciplined lot. Bees’ development can be accelerated, slowed, or even reversed based on the external conditions and needs of the colony.

Honeybee development follows the adage, “When children are young, give them roots; when they grow, give them wings.” Their work life begins with the safest, easiest jobs within the hive and advances to the most difficult, hazardous jobs outside the hive.

What does the developmental progression of bees tell us about how employees might be trained with given opportunities through corporate career programs? What works? Taking the lead from bees, stellar development programs have the following components:

Connect to staffing plans Set behavioral criteria for advancement/job performances Allow for multiple pathways Actively promote growth experiences Provide broad exposure to varied tasks More Pollen: One of the most important things you can do to enhance organizational performance is to implement intelligent career development programs.

A little self-study saves time and increases performance. It is nice to have well-designed instructional programs in companies, but they cannot totally replace all forms of learning, especially the will to learn and grow on one’s own. An employee who is curious enough to explore what might be amiss on his or her own is worth gold. On the other hand, organizations where the employees wait to be told will have a hard time surviving.

Manager’s Update Michelle Mitchell Marketing Manager

There is No “I” in Team Recently, I was asked to become a founding member of the Watts Rep Marketing Council. My first reaction was pure excitement and I felt honored to be asked. I quickly and gratefully accepted the invitation, and then with anticipation for the first meeting, started to write down ideas of what makes HMC’s Marketing Department so unique and special. And for the sake of this article, I have found a couple of acronyms to summarize the thoughts that I wrote down.

TEAM – Together Everyone Accomplishes More We make a great TEAM!

If we didn’t inherently know this, the Predictive Index proves it. We often joke when tours come through that Jonathan and I are polar opposites and Cynthia is the glue that holds it all together. It’s an amazing thing to see three distinct and different work styles come together, with some very common core values, to create a solid foundation on which we can all be creative in our own different ways.

PUSH – Push Until Something Happens

We will try anything (at least once) and we never give up!

One thing that we are never satisfied with back in the Creative Lab is the status quo. We continually look for new ideas, try different ways of doing things, and we continually grow both individually and as a team (even during the really busy times).

A few of the new things that we are focusing on: Quarterly meetings with each of the group managers. We find it very beneficial to listen to each GM’s needs and gain insights into what each market is currently focusing on.

We have been active on social media for some time, but we are really making a push to grow our LinkedIn audience right now. We are seeing great traction with our posts and this is turning out to be a great way to get our name and brands out in front of a lot of people. We look forward to creating some “Social Media 101” short trainings, to share with all of the associates in the near future, to help grow all of HMC’s social media channels.

Converting our email blasts from Constant Contact to MailChimp with our new SAP software.

So, after preparing for and attending the inaugural Watts Rep Marketing meeting, I was struck with the realization of just how lucky I am and how special our group is. I look forward to our future meetings where I can share some of our experiences with them. But even more so, I look forward to learning from their successes and challenges and sharing these new insights with the TEAM.

by adam merritt The FactorySupportTeam exists to solve field issues, so that account managers and inside sales teams can keep selling without being distracted. Helping to solve these field issues is itself an act of salesmanship. “If you keep buying our product, we’ll be there to help you when issues come up.”

While supply chains are disrupted everywhere, and prices are going up on everything, we want our customers to be confident in doing business with us because of that priceless ingredient.

The stress that our customers and our customers’ customers are under translates directly to us through the phones. We all feel it. In FST, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in frustrated wholesalers and contractors who are demanding immediate solutions to problems…that in most cases aren’t actually problems at all. FST has been to many jobsites lately where there was nothing wrong with products from the manufacturers that we represent.

Stress levels are through the roof and people are making easy mistakes.

Let’s take a deep breath, slow down to ask basic questions, thank them for their business, and for giving us the opportunity to help them trouble shoot these issues.

We all have the opportunity to work with a frustrated customer and turn them into a customer for life.

Academic All American Taylor Moon Royce City High School Daughter of Donald Moon VP of FireWaterGroup

Conner Wilkinson Texas Tech University Son of Curtis Wilkinson PMG AccountManager

Misti Streeter Liberty University Wife of David Streeter CommercialQuotations

Alison Kirkpatrick James Martin High School Daughter of Nikki Kirkpatrick Purchasing Manager

Blane Low Martin High School 2nd Shift Associate DistributionGroup

Emma Grace Oetken Daughter of Jim Oetken HVACGroup AM

Jac Cunningham Southlake Carroll High School Son of David A. Cunningham Executive Chairman

Nicole Kelly Florida State University Niece of Mark Kois General Manager

Preston May Wakeland High School Son of Aaron May VP of PMG & SandiaGroup

Flower Mound Marcus High School

FEATURED GRADUATE Jaxson Reeves Preschool of Hard Knocks Major - Bugs!

Minor - Soccer Son of Aaron Reeves VP of FlowControlGroup

click to check out hmc’s social media channels!

BRITTANY LUTTRELL I know you have been dealing with a lot of angry frustrated customers lately. Just wanted to pass on that several customers and outside Account Managers have made comments to me on how you have accepted and embraced the challenge head on and have become a go to person on Charlotte for several customers and AM’s.

Thanks for all you hard work and efforts.

Jim Ambery

RICHARD ROJO Hi Austin, I do not know if you know this person, RICHARD ROJO, but he was VERY helpful in tracking down this spreadsheet for me. It is FOUR sheets back from the current Charlotte sheet. I tried Charlotte customer service and they said I had to go through Cunningham. I did not want to bother you, so I just went through Cunningham customer service. Richard Rojo was not very confident he would find this spreadsheet, but low and behold, two days later, he called me to tell me he found it. Kudos to him. We load our pricing into our system with this spreadsheet so it will save us lots of time.

Thank you for your great service.

Shellie Male Christianson Co.

ALMENDRA PEREZ Almendra always helps me with a smile on her face. I have reached out to her on multiple occasions over the past few weeks needing freight charges for our customers that hadn’t been billed yet. She always stops what she’s doing and gets the freight charges – never does it appear that she is being bothered. She is a real team player and understands the importance of taking care of our customers.

Thank you Almendra!

Dianna Bryant

DAVID STREETER You ROCK!!!!! Thank you so so much!

Once again sending quotes in record time!!!!!!!

Kristan Neil - Ferguson

CRAIG STICKLES & PETER EDDINGER I want to give a big shoutout to Craig Stickles and Peter Eddinger. We had a pump order that was setup for next day air for Saturday delivery shipping to Austin. Ryan reached out to me because the customer was asking for tracking on Saturday. I was already talking to Peter that morning and he got Craig involved. Craig went the extra mile and reached out to Brian Schober and they were able to hunt down the tracking number even though it wasn’t available in our system. Craig had to make multiple calls and went completely out of his way to help even though he’s not even on the pump team. On a Saturday nonetheless! I definitely owe him lunch but also wanted him to be recognized for his effort.

Aaron Vlasak

DAVID STREETER I received a call yesterday from Leonard Garron with Chicago Faucet and I wanted to pass along his “Attaboy” to the team. Leonard was speaking with Kathy Amadee with Southern Pipe to check on how things were going and how HMC was doing for her. She specifically mentioned the great job David Streeter was doing with providing timely quotes and his overall responsiveness. I know our quotes team does not hear enough what an important and impactful role they have with our customers and certainly don’t hear enough how appreciated they are from the sales team.

Thank you David for your work with Kathy whom Leonard mentioned at times can be very demanding. Hearing this praise from her was very well received.

ATTABOY!!! - Aaron May

MIGUEL TOVAR • BRIAN SCHOBER • JUAN ORTIZ RIGO GONZALEZ • LUIS MONDRAGON• JORGE MARTINEZ Through all of the fog, long hours, new processes….not to mention COVID, a cyber-attack, a freeze and a new computer operating system……

I find myself writing this email very proudly for a few DG associates that came in on a Sunday to help pull, arrange, and stage a series of PVC orders for two very key & loyal Charlotte accounts.

I simply cannot THANK them enough, but I did want to recognize them for the efforts on April 18th.

Great job gentleman!! - Mark Kois

by: Pat Armstrong

Guess Who…It’s basically like “20 Questions” and you, the reader, have to guess who the subject is.

Here’s how the process worked. I listed all of the associates on an Excel spreadsheet and then had Excel assign each one a random five-digit number. I excluded myself obviously. Then I asked a volunteer to select a totally random five-digit number and the person whose number matched closest was chosen as the subject. I reached out “said person" and under “the cloak of secrecy” asked him or her 20 questions.

Can you guess who it is? Their identity will be revealed in next month’s Guess Who article. So here we go!

1. Who was the president the year you were born? Ronald Reagan 2. Are you married? Yes 3. How many teams or departments have you worked in for HMC? Seven 4. What was your first ‘real job’? Landscaping 5. Favorite food to eat? Seafood 6. Do you prefer a sports car or a pick-up? Pick-Up 7. Favorite ‘adult beverage’? Corona Light 8. What size shoe do you wear? Nine 9. Did you have a favorite pet growing up? Yes, a dog 10. Are you an ‘indoor’ person or an ‘outdoor’ person? Outdoor 11. What’s a family nickname they have for you? Manchas 12. Favorite cartoon growing up? Bugs Bunny 13. If you could meet one historical figure, who would it be? Martin Luther King 14. Favorite type of dessert? Shot of tequila lol 15. What will you NOT eat if it’s on a pizza? Barbecue sauce 16. Who was the biggest professional influence on you career? Cristiano Ronaldo 17. Do you have kids? One 18. Favorite hobby or pastime? Family time 19. What’s the best vacation you’ve been on? Visiting my hometown in Mexico 20. Mountains or beach? Mountains… I don’t know how to swim

last month’s “guess who” was cassie murray!

IT Helpful Hint by sabrina sankadota INSIDE SALES TIPS are saved on the m:drive in the SAP B1 folder!