We Moved Our Inspection Bay Next to the Dock

This year we did something expensive: we moved the inspection bay from the factory site to the edge of the Nansha dock.

Rent is 460,000 yuan a year; with renovation and equipment, we put in 780,000 in total.

People ask me whether it's worth it. I say, do the math and you'll see.

How customers used to inspect

Our old warehouse was in Panyu, forty-seven kilometers from Nansha Port.

A customer would fly in, see the machines at the warehouse, then go back and wait while we hauled them to the dock for loading. If he wanted one more look on loading day, that was another trip.

A customer flying in from out of town would land in Guangzhou, take a car to Panyu, spend three hours with the machines, and go back. The next day was loading — either he stayed in Guangzhou to wait, or he flew home.

Stay a day: 600 yuan for room and board, plus a day of his time. Fly home: he's not on site when the machines are loaded.

His not being on site at loading is the real problem.

Why loading needs the customer there

Eighty percent of damage to used machines happens during loading.

Not collisions — details. A track scraping the container wall on the way in, a bucket not secured swinging at sea, a cab door left ajar letting in seawater.

With the customer present, we deal with these on the spot. With the customer absent, they surface at the destination port, and then it's a claim.

How long does a claim take? The shortest one we ever handled was forty-one days.

Forty-one days, with the customer watching his machine sit in port, paying storage every day.

After the move to the dock

Now a customer comes out of the airport and reaches the dockside in forty minutes by car.

The inspection bay sits right by the berth, across one road. He inspects the machines, walks two hundred meters to watch the loading, signs the paperwork, and catches an afternoon flight out.

Half a day.

I've done the math: on average each customer saves a day and a half. For an African customer making one trip to China, that's over two thousand yuan in rebooking fees and two days of business.

Where the 780,000 went

I'll write out the breakdown, because it's not a small number.

Rent: 460,000 a year for a 1,200-square-meter covered yard.

Ground hardening: 110,000. The ground was gravel; you can't spot an oil leak on gravel, so it had to be concrete.

Drainage and lighting: 80,000. It rains a lot in Nansha; without drainage the yard floods in a day.

Lift and inspection pit: 90,000. You can't check an undercarriage without a pit. Non-negotiable.

The remaining 40,000 went to the office and the rest area — somewhere for customers to sit.

The first machine inspected at the dock

On March 12, the first customer to inspect at the new site was Mohammed from Kenya.

He bought three twenty-ton excavators. On inspection day he brought a local operator, who squatted in the pit looking at the undercarriage for forty minutes.

When he came up, he said something to Mohammed, and Mohammed translated for me: this machine's belly guard has been welded.

I said yes, it has. The previous owner worked a quarry; a rock deformed the guard and it was welded back. It's in our inspection report, page seven.

He flipped to page seven. It was there, with photos.

Mohammed said, you wrote it down.

I said, you'd see it even if I didn't. Better that I say it myself.

Afterward, he added one more machine to the order.

The downsides

Honestly, dockside is not as comfortable as Panyu.

It's noisy. Ship cranes run around the clock; you have to raise your voice.

It's dusty. Container trucks roll past all day; by evening the desks are gray.

Eating is inconvenient. There's no decent restaurant around, so we set up a small kitchen ourselves.

And one more thing: the site is leased, three years. Nobody knows how much the rent rises after that. If it rises too much, we may have to move again.

I know this risk. I keep it in mind.

Does the math work

780,000 over three years is 260,000 a year.

We sold more than 190 machines last year, saving each customer a day and a half on average. Even if only half of them actually saved that trip, that's over 300,000 yuan a year in customer costs avoided.

Those 300,000 are not our earnings — they're the customer's savings. But a customer who saves comes back.

In the first eight months of this year, the share of repeat customers in our deals rose from 31 percent to 44 percent.

That number, I think, pays for the move.

If you're coming

Tell us three days ahead and we'll send a car to the airport.

Bring your operator. Operators see more accurately than bosses.

Bring your inspection checklist. If you don't have one, we'll send you ours and you can adapt it.

After the inspection you can come watch the loading, or not. If you come, lunch is on us.