It should come as no surprise that the folks at FSI are a bit competitive.  We sneer at the notion that anyone could top our 99.9% pick/pack/ship accuracy rate, and point to our steadily growing collection of achievements ranging from the Inc. 5000 List to the Top 25 Businesses as proof of how hard we like to work. But with the cool weather sending us an official memo that summer is gone, it seemed like a great idea to share a terrific fall meal together. And what better way to start off a great meal than to announce the winners from the 2011 FSI Chili Cook-Off?  So that’s exactly what we did today.

No beans about it, these guys can cook!  We had 9 entries, and each one was really good.  Ranging from a little on the sweet side to a bit on the fiery side, it was all good.  Forrest Marbutt, Carleen Blakes, Charlie Hayes, and Daryl Gramling were selected to judge the event, and the hardest part was figuring out who should claim the first prize.

But someone had to win, and as it turns out, Karen Cross walked away with the blue ribbon.  Not bad for someone who doesn’t even eat chili!  Second prize went to Drew Yarborough, with Bobby Stephenson right on his heels in third place.  There was tons of food, and the only thing missing was live music by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.  (Sadly, they’re on tour in Ireland.)

We have always enjoyed our company gatherings.  Thanks to everyone who participated and congrats to the winners!

Karen Cross shows off her prize-winning entry.


Drew Yarborough just narrowly missed the top award, garnering Second Place.


Bobby Stephenson proves he can cook up a mean bowl of chili. Great job!

“Is there anything you guys just won’t do?”

I think we answered that question pretty well on May 15^th when Forrest and I arrived in Mountain City, Georgia for the 2011 Warrior Dash.  The Warrior Dash (www.warriordash.com) is a peaceful, relaxing event combining 3.2 miles of running in the mountains with 11 obstacle courses.  The obstacles ranged from scaling a 20-foot high wall to crawling through massive mud pits to jumping through fire to get to the finish line.  And if that weren’t enough, I had a chest-wracking respiratory infection that week and had been advised to take it easy.  But I was afraid Forrest would give me a wedgie if I chickened out on him, so I stuck to the plan.  We certainly had a blast though, and my doctor has assured me I will make a full recovery.

But when it comes to your packages, this is the kind of attitude you want your fulfillment partner to have. You want a partner with a vested interest in seeing every package shipped correctly, on time, and without hassle. Do we have to stay late? No problem.  Do we have to re-pack the entire job to fix the mistakes the previous fulfillment company made? Been there, done that. Do we have to design a custom database around an insane set of business rules? As we speak, we’re in fact working on the second such project in a month.

Every department at FSI knows we have to jump through the fire from time to time; it’s just what we do.  So how about you? What can FSI do for your next project?

FSI VP & General Manager Forrest Marbutt leads the way by
jumping over the last obstacles to cross the finish line.



I.T. Guy Daryl Gramling follows. He's a mess, isn't he?

Ten provinces, three territories, and over 34 million inhabitants.  It is the world’s second largest country by total area, and the shared border between our two nations is the longest in the world. It sure sounds like a great business opportunity to market to these guys.  But professionals in the fulfillment industry could add a note of caution. The customers are there and their dollars can provide a much-needed boost in this economy. Problems can arise however when your product is ready for shipment, and since the root of the problem lies in a complex array of government regulations, asking if it’s worth it is good business sense.

Zappos, the shoe and accessory giant, should know.  This month it will close its online doors to Canadian customers due in part to the logistical challenges of getting products into Canadian hands. (See http://www.internetretailer.com/2011/03/25/zappos-closes-its-canadian-storefront for the full article).

What makes it so hard? You pack a box, slap a shipping label on it, and everyone’s happy.  Right?  But first the package must make it through Canadian Customs, who can slap the same package with hefty duties and taxes.  If that package is among the many that are opened for close inspection, your package can be seriously delayed and the result is an unsatisfied customer through no fault of your own. Customs also routinely disputes the reported value of the products, presumably to increase the amount of taxes that can be assessed. And if that isn’t enough, a mountain of complexity and cost can be incurred in the form of finding which of tens of thousands of harmonized trading codes (HTS) apply to your products. Telling Customs there’s a t-shirt in the box isn’t enough; they also want to know what it’s made out of, what kind of style it is, the country of manufacturer, the size, and more. Each of these pieces of data helps determine the amount of taxes that must be paid before the product can legally enter the country.  Invest in discovering the right codes and your product may slip through Customs smoothly; but pick the wrong one and the package is stopped in its tracks. Don’t want the hassle of finding out the HTS code? Customs is usually happy with that too, they’ll be glad to assess the product at a higher tax rate.

Then there’s the question of who pays duties and taxes – is it you or your customer?  Will they really pay $15 in duties and $20 on shipping for a $30 product? You could of course use a cheaper shipping option, but here at FSI we field constant complaints from customers whose USPS package was lost and there’s no tracking available. But the USPS provides guaranteed international tracking, right? Surprisingly the answer is no. A tracking number may be created, but once it leaves the United States, the visibility of that package often disappears. Using a major private carrier such as UPS all but eliminates that problem, but the full tracking capabilities can come at a steep shipping cost.

A great fulfillment provider is an essential component of your international sales strategies, and indeed FSI has invested in the systems to make international shipping (especially to Canada), as easy as possible. From supporting the HTS codes to using technologies that often reduce the amount of paperwork required for international shipments, we can be an even greater asset to your business. Even so, shipping-related labor costs to handle Customs requirements can have a detrimental impact on bottom lines.

Ultimately, each business must weigh the costs and benefits of offering products to our northerly neighbors. Just be sure to set realistic expectations when determining your strategy.

 

FSI is an Atlanta, Georgia based provider of quality fulfillment services. Founded in 1996, it has shipped millions of packages to nearly 160 countries worldwide.

Move over, Superman.  Pictured left to right: Daryl Gramling (Director of IT); Ken Marbutt (President); Forrest Marbutt (Vice President and General Manager); and Bobby Bounds (Director of Operations)

 

FSI has done some mighty crazy things since arriving on Atlanta’s fulfillment scene.  Starting with just two employees, a temp, and some serious caffeine we knocked out our first job of 200,000 kits in about 6 days.  We’ve run multiple shifts, worked into the ungodly hours of the morning; and packed just about every type of kit known to man.  So on April 1, 2011, it seemed perfectly natural to don some wetsuits, adjust our capes, and fly gallantly into FSI’s main warehouse to celebrate our most recent milestone.

Okay we actually walked into the warehouse (mainly to avoid flying into power lines, which isn't covered by insurance), but celebrate we did. Today is the fifteenth anniversary of Fulfillment Strategies International, certainly a perfect excuse to pull out all the stops.  Corporate Events catered the meal and provided outdoor games, including a dunking booth which would explain the wetsuits.  Wetsuits or not, the water was icy cold but it gave our tremendous team of employees the chance to dunk the manager of their choice for all the times they’ve been called upon to pull off some truly heroic feats.  (Attention employees: retribution will surely follow – you know who you are).

But as we dried off the water on this 51-degree April day, we warmed up to the incredible memories that are still being made.  FSI serves an amazing variety of clients, from small startups to globally-recognized leaders, and just about everything in between.  Some are getting started with just a few orders per day and others send us thousands of orders per day.  But there is one thing our clients have in common: they know FSI will do everything humanly possible to complete every job with a level of excellence befitting our favorite superheroes. They tell us all the time, “we couldn’t have done it without you.”

So on our 15-year anniversary, we’d like to say, “right back at ya.” We couldn’t be here without a dedicated staff and the clients that make it all possible.

There are some pictures below, and be sure to check out the video as well!

FSI Anniversary Video: Part 1
FSI Anniversary Video: Part 2
FSI Anniversary Video: Part 3



Fittingly, Ken takes the first dunking. We're pretty sure he was trying to use his superhero powers to fly out of the water and onto the relative safety of FSI's roof.




Cool sunglasses, $42. Wetsuit rentals, $95. The look on Forrest's face as he is
unceremonially introduced to the freezing water: priceless.




Forget those superpowers, Bobby took .000003 seconds to cry out to God for help.
(I think God was laughing too hard to do him much good.)




Daryl managed to be last in line, but his time has come.

Well, it certainly looks like FSI will be closed due to inclement weather today, January 10th, 2011. When we talk about P/P/S we normally refer to our award-winning Pick Pack Ship capabilities. Today however the acronym refers to Pretty Piles of Snow. For our Clients outside the Atlanta, Georgia area who aren't stuck at home with us, here's a view from a few of FSI's security cameras to see what it's like out there.

Everyone be safe, we'll be back in action as soon as the weather permits.

Volunteers serve Thanksgiving dinner to community visitors
and package "to go" plates to be delivered to shut-ins.

On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving Day, FSI’s Business Development Manager, Linda Williamson, led a team of volunteers on to serve Thanksgiving meals to over 1,000 members of the community. For the ninth year, Dallas First United Methodist Church has hosted this community event offering free meals to anyone in need. Many visitors come and eat at the facility while other meals are packed and delivered to shut-ins at their homes. It takes many volunteers coming together to purchase, prepare, serve and deliver the food to make this annual event a success.

This year, the Community Thanksgiving Dinner volunteers also prepared 10,000 meal packets for the Stop Hunger Now organization. The meal packets will be delivered to several overseas destinations including an orphanage located in the slum area of Kibera, Kenya.

FSI encourages our associates to give back in ways that are meaningful to them and important to their communities. At this special time of year, our wish is that all our associates, clients and partners will experience the gift of giving!



Additional volunteers prepare 10,000 food packets to be
distributed to areas in Kenya and other destinations.

FSI, along with the rest of the world, stood transfixed as the story unfolded of the 33 Chilean miners trapped nearly half a mile underground for 68 days. OnlineSocialMedia.net reported that during the rescue period, worldwide social media traffic surpassed 4 million page viewers per minute, and multiple television networks saw their viewers doubled during that period. So we join you in celebrating the rescue of those 33 men, who finally are restored to their families and friends.

FSI was especially proud of one of our own clients, Campus Crusade for Christ, who became involved in the rescue efforts and provided t-shirts to the trapped miners, who voted to wear them as they were rescued (see photo above). Included on the shirt was the apt passage from Psalm 95:4 – “In His hand are the depths of the earth”.

FSI has handled Campus Crusade’s “Freshman Survival Kits” project since 2002, which is a massive annual distribution of books, CDs, bibles, and other items to colleges and universities around the country. At times, this project has required over 1,000,000 pieces and up to 15 tractor-trailer loads worth of small package shipments to be shipped out in various order sizes. All of it must leave FSI’s facility within a 2 day period. We have witnessed Campus Crusade’s generosity and excellence in all they do, and are proud to call them our friends.

ATLANTA (June 25, 2010) – FSI recently displayed at the 2010 Cobb Chamber of Commerce B2B Expo. We met a lot of great local businesses and saw a lot of friends and clients who stopped by our booth. Topics and demonstrations included FSI's custom kit assembly, product, literature and promotional order fulfillment, and we also had the opportunity to show off the latest in our online capabilities with our online reporting and catalogs. Check out FSI's VP / GM being interviewed at the show.

Click here to access the podcast on iTunes, or click here to view the file in your media player.

If you’re going to do something nice for others, maybe something that might hurt “just a little”, then why not do it together amongst friends, right? FSI recently made another group visit to donate blood at the local Red Cross donation center. It’s becoming quite a routine for FSI employees to do their part of giving back to the community by donating together. Your body can donate every 56 days, so we make it a point to schedule our next appointment as close to that 56 days as possible. Did you know that (from www.redcrossblood.org):

• Every two seconds someone in the U.S. needs blood.
• More than 38,000 blood donations are needed every day.
• A total of 30 million blood components are transfused each year in the U.S. (2006).
• The average red blood cell transfusion is approximately 3 pints.
• The blood type most often requested by hospitals is Type O.
• The blood used in an emergency is already on the shelves before the event occurs.
• Sickle cell disease affects more than 80,000 people in the U.S., 98 percent of whom are African American.
Sickle cell patients can require frequent blood transfusions throughout their lives.
• More than 1 million new people are diagnosed with cancer each year. Many of them will need blood, sometimes daily, during their chemotherapy treatment.
• A single car accident victim can require as many as 100 pints of blood.

Pictured above are FSI’s Betty Stringer, Beth Williams, Forrest Marbutt and Graylin Crawford. Also, pictured is Forrest’s 4 gallon pin he recently earned. That’s a minimum of 32 donations, or at least 5 years worth of routine donating every 56 days! Come join us for our next donation, or make an appointment for yourself today at www.redcrossblood.org.

FSI is honored to be named as one of the Top 25 small businesses by the Cobb Chamber of Commerce. Since 2008, FSI has been chosen in the top 25 based on a wide range of factors including financial strength, an ongoing and tangible commitment to community involvement, and numerous criteria published by the U.S. Small Business Administration.

With an almost unheard-of order accuracy rate of 99.9% and a sales growth of 13.9% during one of the roughest economies ever to hit the fulfillment world, FSI certainly is proud of some key accomplishments. Like everyone else, we have had to find creative ways to streamline our operations and have found a number of ways of doing so without negatively impacting service, but we strongly feel that these investments in a down economy will continue to pay dividends, especially as the economy begins the inevitable rebound.

FSI expresses deep gratitude to the stellar Clients and employees who continue to make FSI the fulfillment provider of choice for a growing number of America’s best companies.

FSI wishes to bid a fond farewell to a truly great Client, Guitar Hero, with whom we have enjoyed a great relationship. Guitar Hero has decided to shut down their eCommerce store, which means that they will no longer need FSI to fulfill their orders for them. Guitar Hero (formerly RedOctane), initially awarded FSI with the fulfillment of all merchandise sold through their popular eCommerce site. Once they got a good feel for our responsiveness and ability to streamline key portions of the customer experience, they extended our relationship to include the handling of sizable warranty programs.



One enabling feature was FSI’s ability to bring together key pieces of data at different stages of the warranty/replacement process and make it available to their Customer Service teams in a way that previously was not possible. This enabled their CSRs to be able to resolve a far greater percentage of support requests while the customer was on the phone – all by logging into the FSI Enterprise reporting portal. (By the way, can your fulfillment provider do that?)

Guitar Hero was an account we were particularly proud of due to the multiple levels of integration that showed off FSI’s technical capabilities particularly well. But even more importantly it highlighted the terrific job our Customer Service and Warehouse teams did in handling rapidly changing volumes, with volume spikes during the holidays and throughout the year during new product launches. It wasn’t unheard of for the Warehouse to be greeted on Monday morning with a stack of packing slips 4,000 sheets high, all of which had to be accurately picked, packed, and shipped same-day. At least there were only about 400 different products to deal with.

But I digress. Guitar Hero was recently acquired by Activision, and the decision was made to eliminate the eCommerce site and focus strictly on building the business in retail channels. So the next time you purchase a cool Guitar Hero product, it’ll have to come from a reseller rather than be shipped from FSI. They will be missed!

More details of the plans are freely available on the web such as http://www.edge-online.com/news/activision-closes-red-octane

Team in Training (TNT) is an organization that trains participants for endurance events, such as, marathons, triathlons, adventure races, century rides, etc., and the participants in turn raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society in exchange for this training. FSI’s Vice President & General Manager, Forrest Marbutt, has participated in several of these events in the past raising thousands of dollars for the cause and has been supported by FSI in his efforts. Even when Forrest is not actively participating in an event, FSI continues to support the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society by continuously sponsoring a current TNT racer.

FSI’s current sponsored TNT racer is Joanna Berentsen. Joanna and Forrest got to know each other through a previous TNT event when they were teamed up together in an adventure race (each team of 3 must complete the entire race together). Joanna’s current race is the St. Anthony’s Triathlon. Want to make a real difference? Join the fight to find a cure by donating directly to Joanna’s fundraising page at http://pages.teamintraining.org/ga/Augusta10/jberentsen. Or even better, sign up for an event today at www.teamintraining.org!

See below where Joanna (wearing a hat) is helping Forrest scale the 14’ wall in their previous adventure race just before their team finish in close to 5 hours.

Pictured left to right: Jay Gustafson, Lance Smith, Ken Donnelly, and FSI's Ken Marbutt

FSI has been an active member in the Printing & Imaging Association of Georgia for years, so we figured we might as well have the decency to win the 2009 golf outing. So just to show our support for this fine organization, FSI Founder and President Ken Marbutt and his team took first place in the Low Net division.

Now wait a minute. The number of golfing events Ken has won sure is growing lately. How can he have time for this and make sure FSI keeps Clients happy at the same time? We must be doing something right while he's out on the links...

One of the great things about working at FSI is the chance to be involved with some really cool promotional campaigns for startups and Fortune 100 companies alike. Take our very first kit-packing job when the doors opened in 1996 for example. The job entailed 200,000 fun packs of various Spider-Man comics and a dozen related items for a national hotel chain. Or more recently assembling what appear to be giant Chinese-style takeout boxes filled with fortune cookies for a global news organization (no added MSG!). Or even a customized box sent to over 25,000 employees of the IRS that, when opened, an animated hand playfully pokes the recipient in the eye.

Now maybe I made up that last one, although of course we all agree it is a terrific idea. Please contact the FSI sales team if you’d like to partner with us on that one. But the point is we enjoy working with Clients who make an impact with novel and imaginative products and promotions.

And in this economy, innovation is key. Certain types of cutbacks are unavoidable, but bland marketing campaigns are almost worse than doing nothing at all. Check out the article Humor Me, written by Phaedra Hise and published in Deliver Magazine. It caught our attention because FSI is so good at handling these types of custom kit-packing jobs, which, as the article points out, can be enormously effective marketing tools.

Maybe your customers don’t need an enormous box of fortune cookies, but give them something to remember you by with the confidence that FSI delivers on each and every job.

A total of 27 FSI employees and friends joined in on October 17, 2009 for a 5K run sponsored by the Make-A-Wish foundation. Taking us through the historic Marietta Square district, the event was just one of many that occurred all over the country to raise money for children with terminal illnesses. The event organizer noted that FSI had one of the largest number of participants in the event that drew an estimated 1,015 runners. Wish.org reports that as of the time of the event, over 184,000 wishes have been granted. FSI is proud to have had a small part in the next one.