When gossips age, they become myths

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Despite the fact that the business of RusHOLTS exists over the last fifteen years, a wider audience know about it very little. As often happens in such situations, myths have spread much wider than objective information. For a time I enjoyed such a situation, it is always interesting to watch how you are perceived from the outside, you learn a lot :). But lately, myth-making began to acquire a pronounced "goal-oriented" and manageable character. And that’s pretty sad, because the free and quite safe flight of individuals’ fantasy are replaced by methods of disinformation, clearly proven in the politics, and now being carried on the business field. Why prove or something, why go any deeper into thinking about the problem if you can just come up with "another great myth" and create the right mood in the business environment? Minimum cost and the effect can be quite significant. Therefore, I think it's time to take a particularly active debunking myth attitude regarding my company. I propose to consider five main myths about business RusHOLTS:

1. RusHOLTS is very expensive

Here everything is just simple and clear. The myth is invented by competitors, who can not count neither the money of their own nor someone else's money. Or rather, by those of them who just do not know how to count, or by those aptly pretending to be that way... In nine cases out of ten this myth is refuted as soon as they cease to compare liters to square meters, or in place of adjectives just begin to use numerals. When people start to take into account all process-logistic components of a quotation, for some reason, it appears that competitors have nothing special to oppose. No, in fact the product or service you can be offer at a cheaper fare. But to bring it all in proper quality to the final consumer, provide the timing and amount of supply, security of supply, storage and return, etc. etc ... . Here comes all the complexity. But is there a place in the myths for such "details"?

 

2. You are not coffee-expert - how can you compete with companies with coffee as their core business?

Indeed, when the topic of "Cafe at the gas station" started gaining momentum we began to engage in this direction because we are an integrated supplier for gas stations and must provide our pertners with all the necessary. If today it is coffee machines and coffee blends, we are, for a start, to thoroughly examine the issue and get acquainted with the international experience in this field, we will begin to work with the world's leading experts, and then apply all the knowledge gained to their effective implementation at gas station networks.

 

It is very good that we are not "coffee company” - so we do not tell you tales of the wonderful properties of the coffee we sell - we take coffee beans from one of the world leaders, from the other one we acquire coffee machines, add remote monitoring to it, set up in close cooperation with one of the world leaders in the IT-industry and offer M2M solutions allowing to quickly earn a lot at a constant level of service quality.

We're talking about the gas station, with all the specifics of cafes in this segment, where it is impossible to put by every coffee machine a trained barista, where the stability of the quality of grain and produced  beverages can be guaranteed only by the maximum reduction in the influence of the human factor, and therefore should be equipped with high-tech automated solutions. And we successfully cope with this task by building the entire chain "Coffee-delivery-coffee machine-coffee-drink", creating service solutions that prevent downtime of coffee machines or the very possibility of intentionally or inadvertently reduce the quality of the final beverage.

Is it possible to compete with us in this direction? Of course it is! And that’s even necessary, because it is such competition that will eventually lead to a qualitative leap in the field of maintenance. But competition must be fair and based on one simple postulate - the ability to ensure uninterrupted operation of the equipment and the same high-quality coffee taste at hundreds of distant objects at low qualification of "coffee" staff.

 

3. You do not have production facilities of your own - how you can participate in tenders among real manufacturers?

Indeed, if we consider the company RusHOLTS as an individual entity then its structure doesn’t have production units per se, and company's balance sheet dosen’t have any registered bottling lines or product packaging units. And in general having read the product line supplied by RusHOLTS it’s hard to imagine the scale of such production enterprise. In all fairness, I should note that our company had at the distant period of time its production capacity, but over time the asset has shown a lack of efficiency and was got rid of.

We focused on the core - product development and management of the production process. Since then, the structure of RusHOLTS includes only management unit of contract manufacturing. However, year after year, we offer products on the market with the best price / quality ratio, which is achieved just by the fact that we specialize in the organization of production by the optimized requirements.

As for the optimization and placement of production facilities as well as quality ingredients, we are able to respond flexibly to changes in the requirements, ensure security of supply due to the thoughtful  alternative schemes of production. Thus, not only do we get the output of the finished product with given parameters, but also insure our customers from the problems with the specific production lines - we always have an alternative for the production of each element of the final product, we just quickly change the scheme of commodity circulation, changing its "not working" elements.

In this sense - we DO have our own production, just its workshops, equipment and employees are distributed over large areas, which in the era of advanced network technology should not be surprising. It is particularly necessary to allocate targeted RusHOLTS focus on Russian production capacity, attracting foreign companies only in the event of absence from the territory of Russia of the necessary production. Recently trendy "import substitution" ideology has been RusHOLTS’ priority over the years, thus providing jobs for Russian workers, insuring our clients from possible risks associated with the use of imported components.

 

4. You are not an IT company - you can not offer a high-tech IT solutions to your customers!

But we can. Because we ARE an IT-company, focused on creating solutions that minimize the negative impact of human factors on our business partners. We tried a lot of options for working with the IT-developers and are faced with the fact that outsourcing companies are not able to respond to our requests with the required speed and to give us products of the desired quality. The problem, again is in failing to understand the specifics of the gas stations market.

And then a unit was set up involving high-end IT specialists, honed in the direction of software solutions for gas stations. And this move is paying off: it is in RusHOLTS was developed an ADR system which is  integrable almost anywhere in the accounting system of customers. It is also able, based on sales analytics, stock balance and seasonality of making a forecast for the next cycle of the order from the gas stations. These day is being developed and implemented a unique system of bilateral monitoring equipment for cafes at gas stations that monitors the state of the equipment, reduces maintenance time, prevents theft and change settings, etc. So we can call RusHOLTS an “IT-company" which in its spare time engages into logistics)))

A clear illustration of RusHOLTS as an IT-company was the successful work of our stand at CeBIT 2015, where our specialists presented new IT-solutions in the field of remote monitoring and automation of cafés equipment.

 

5. RusHOLTS is strictly a St. Petersburg based, local company.

This is a fallacy invented by our competitors from Moscow. For them, everything that is not in Moscow - is “on the local market”. Let's take a look at the geography of RusHOLTS’ shipping destinations. In addition to gas stations of Northwestern Federal District, the Company carries out direct deliveries to the stations located in Moscow, the Moscow Region, the Murmansk Region, Yaroslavl, Ivanovo, Tyumen’, Chelyabinsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Sverdlovsk and Kemerovo regions, the Krasnodar region, as well as in neighboring countries .

Faced with the lack of quality services for café equipment at the gas station, we have created an extensive customer service so at this given moment in all these regions our masters certified by WMF experts are operating. In the most critical regions regional managers are present overseeing the work of local logistics services.

These are the main myths that I know. Do you have a myth about business of RusHOLTS? Add commentary – I am happy to discuss it with you :)