are plenty of people that don’t know the benefits of High Volume Low Speed fans in general, as a product category. Another portion of our business, which is certainly not as well known but that we really take pride in, is our Residential business. We have about 80-90% of this business as B2C via third party channels or our direct ecommerce channel. We have 13 inside sales representatives, which allows any consumer to pick up the phone and call Big Ass Fans to order one Haiku for your home, or your interior designer to call and buy 10 Haikus for another place. It’s an important part of our business and something we have had in our portfolio since 2012 and it has continued to grow and expand with additional product lines. We are certainly under-penetrated in that market, but we also sell a residential fan that can approach $2,500 where most fans from the large home warehouse stores that most consumers have in their homes are $150 or $200. So we really created that upper market. The final segment that we have is our International business. That is a growing market for us. Certainly awareness of HVLS fans and airflow in general, really the importance of worker comfort, productivity, and safety across 7 different continents, is wildly different abroad than here in North America. However, that is a business that is a core focus for us and we have offices in Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and Canada, where they service their regions respectively.
OILGEAR HYDRAULIC PRODUCTS
AXIAL PISTON PUMPS… Oilgear open loop
axial piston pumps are offered in a variety of models and displacement sizes to match required performance. Models include both medium and high horsepower, medium and heavy duty, low viscosity pumps, plus a series of multiple fixed delivery pumps. Of the many industries Oilgear serves, a primary one is mobile and off-highway applications. Oilgear pumps are recognized for high performance in the toughest environments. Their heavy duty designs resist contamination as well as operating on low viscosity specialty fluids.
VARIABLE PUMPS…
Whatever the application, Oilgear has the ideal pump to fulfill the requirements.
MULTIPLE FIXED DELIVERY CHECK VALVE PUMPS… • High pressure to 15,000 psi • Heavy duty construction • High contamination tolerance • Operation on low viscosity fluids • Multiple deliveries up to three displacements from a single pump
7355 N. Lawndale Ave., PO Box 6, Skokie, IL 60076
PHONE: 847-676-2910 FAX: 847-676-0365 WWW.MACMHYDRAULIC.COM
18 | IMD May 2023
Problem Statement DAVID: If I remember the question, it was how do we get to an engagement point with a customer that is trying to cool a tow hook that is coming out of an oven at 700 degrees Fahrenheit? TREY: Right. DAVID: Whether it’s tow hooks, employee retention, or looking to save money on energy bills because a customer looks down and thinks “Wow, energy has gotten expensive,” or whatever it is, it always starts with a problem. Very few of our customers call and say they would like to purchase two of a very specific SKU and have them installed two months from now. It is a very different engagement than most B2B interactions are. We are really focused on the right solution. So a lot of these customer conversations start with a problem. “My facility is too hot…”, “My people are quitting in heat waves…”, “My energy bill has gone up 30% because my cooling equipment just runs all the time now…”. These large problem statements usually get passed from a sales rep to a dedicated application engineer with a specialty in the solution area. We are one of the only companies out there that have this type of specialized group and have handled these types of situations before. One differentiator is that we aren’t making super special customized products for each problem. If you were to engage a mechanical contractor, they would probably cobble together a very customized “Frankenstein”-type of machine that would be difficult to service and be lacking in reliability. We are really about engaging the problems, and presenting solutions that use the products we have developed.
Airfoils and Airflow TREY: Tell me a little bit about the design of your airfoils without giving away any IP or trade secrets. It sounds like it is a lot like designing a wing. DAVID: It is, except that the wing is going through the air with a direct angle of attack and air is flowing above and below in relatively the same direction. We have to take into account and manage a certain rotary slip condition for our airfoils. The way that we do that on our products that are focused more on raw performance is a lot of winglet optimization [Ed Note: winglets are on the edge of the wing that help to manage smooth flow of air off the edge of the wing and are usually shaped like vertical fins on the edge of the wing]. One of ours right now looks a lot like an Airbus A320 winglet. The other way that we do that is with what we call an “air fence”. It is about the size of half a winglet, and about two-thirds of the way out on the airfoil. The air fence manages the slip condition and reduces some of the turbulence induced on the inner half of the airfoil. So, instead of the air slipping off the backend of the airfoil it is actually redirected to ensure it goes down to the floor