Whyning Our Way to Success

At Frain we love whyners and have accumulated a crack group of them in our engineering, sales, shop and support departments. Many of our customers are whyners as well. For those that are not, we encourage them to become whyners.

That’s whyners, not whiners. Nobody likes a whiner.

One of the primary words in a whyner’s vocabulary is “why?” This is what drives progress. We all need to examine whether we ask why as often as we should.

Back in the day we got our first inquiry to rent a machine. My first reaction was that we were in the machine sales business. We still are. Fortunately I suppressed that reaction and asked “Why?” instead. The customer explained that they were going to try a new product and were not sure it would succeed. Rental vs purchase kept it off their balance sheet until success. Sounded like good reasons to me. I asked my team why we could not rent machinery and a unique machinery rental business was born.

We get customers calling asking for specific machines. It might be something that they saw on our YouTube channel or elsewhere. It may or may not be the right machine for what they want to do. They may want a machine that runs 200ppm but what they really need is one that puts 20 pallets a shift on a truck. These two things are not always tied as closely as some might think. Our sales team asks the customer “Why?”. Drilling down this way lets them recommend truly effective solutions. Sometimes it is the machine they saw. Sometimes it is something different that they didn’t think of. Out on the shop floor our builders and engineers asked why we were spending so much time refurbishing older electro-mechanical control systems. It turned out that refurbishing older controls cost more and was less reliable than routinely replacing them with modern electronics and PLCs.

We’re proud to be whyners here. Whyning leads to learning. Whying leads to progress. Whyning has helped make us the world’s largest dealer of Quality Pre-Owned Machinery.

Give us a call at 630-629-9900 and let us show you why we should supply your next production line.