HARDI Mexico has already made official the start of its operations in Mexico with the purpose of supporting and improving the HVAC industry in that country.
by Guitze Messina*
Last December, amid more than 1,600 participants from the world's leading HVACR industry companies, all HARDI members; including more than 60 participants from the Mexican market. Guitze Messina, CEO of HARDI Mexico, officially launched the new division offering an emotional speech and took the opportunity to invite all Mexican distributors and manufacturers to join HARDI to improve the HVACR industry in Mexico.
The main message of the speech is that HARDI comes to build bridges between the USA, Canada and Mexico. Bridges based on the four pillars of the organization and that require the participation of all members in each country to help the industry in general.
The event, which lasted 2 days, and reaffirmed each pillar of HARDI, had several professional talks by renowned authors and specific events, here we summarize some of them:
Tim Pollard: Author of the bestseller, "The Compelling Communicator" dazzled the audience with his findings of presentations that kill the message and destroy the sale. We have all attended excessively long presentations, with too much information about the company that presents and too little about the problem we want to solve. Tim showed the audience to carry a few great ideas and not use PowerPoint. "The key to a great presentation is the ability to be repeated by the audience," Pollard argues that if it's not easy for the audience to repeat the message later, the chances of closing our sale are drastically reduced. All HARDI members had the opportunity to send Tim's talk to their offices through live transmission, this is a new modality of the organization to share knowledge more openly to all employees of its members.
Shama Hyder: Author of the bestseller, "The Zen of Social Marketing," one of the most influential consultancies in the world of Digital Marketing, explained why distribution companies in our industry also have to use digital marketing to compete today. It is not only to have an adequate presence on our website, but to understand how many effective visits we have and look for how many people stay to see our offer versus how many decide to leave again. "If you don't use video in your digital marketing, you're dead," how many of our companies have pages with written "books" of content and not a single video? Did we even know that videos open 12 times more than written content?
The most accurate economic forecast in the last 10 years with more than 94% effectiveness, was delivered by Alan Beaulieu, Associate Economist at HARDI and who spoke about the economies of Mexico, Canada and the United States. In his entertaining talk Alan explained that the HVACR industry within the Mexican economy would grow in 2018 in the commercial area and decrease in the residential area. Once the issue of the renegotiation of NAFTA, which he hopes will be maintained with minor changes, is resolved and the political election cycle ends, Mexico will continue its current economic growth.
Of the most popular events were the NAFTA report for Mexico and "real cases in the U.S. of generational transition."
For the NAFTA report, HARDI's lawyers in Washington, Palmer Schoening and Alex Ayers described that HVACR products are outside the nafta renegotiation and therefore will not be affected in any treaty changes. They also explained that it is unlikely that the US will completely leave the treaty and even if it decides to do so it would have to be approved by Congress which is unlikely.
Even if President Trump wanted to unilaterally exit the treaty, it is very likely that the decision will be taken to court by the companies and associations that are affected. HARDI already has the precedent of taking the government to court for misuse of regulations for regional efficiencies of HVACR products and won the case, therefore, we must remain attentive to the process.
Generational change of the family business: Undoubtedly the greatest acceptance and vibration was caused by the presentation of more than five distributors in the U.S. who shared how they changed from parents to children and from uncles to nephews successfully. Cases of distributors that have mixed models of administration and shareholding were also presented.
HARDI's vision is to present different models that work in other countries so that distributors and manufacturers in Mexico take diverse ideas and ensure that their companies last in the long term. The spirit of openness and exchange of ideas was amazing and participants are invited to visit various distributors and learn from their best practices.
One of the members of the board of directors of HARDI invited all Mexican partners to its facilities in Orlando to know all the parameters, computer systems, internet purchases and deliveries in less than 24 hours throughout the state of Florida. Chris Ware, CEO of the Ware Group/Johnston Group, with more than 26 stores in Florida and sales of more than 200 Million dollars, will be receiving the participants of HARDI Mexico in April and that also his magazine ACR will be taking them the details of this visit. Like this there will be many events and activities exclusive to the members of HARDI Mexico.
We have no doubt that HARDI Mexico has planted a great flag with this event and we can only wish you many successes and we will be by your side to share them with our readers. Adelante HARDI and Adelante México!
* Guitze Messina. Executive Director, Mexico. Heating, Air-conditioning & Refrigeration Distributors International (HARDI). www.hardinet.org - [email protected]
