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Garrido Printing Equipment - An Interview with Executives

Take a virtual plant tour of this Miami-based maker of shrink wrap and bagging equipment to learn how the family-owned business started from scratch and evolved from an import/export company to a trusted manufacturer of the Advantage Machinery brand.


Transcript

On a small side street off the highway in the heart of Miami, sits an industrial building that is the headquarters of Garrido Printing Equipment, a former import and export company that opened its doors in 1986 and has evolved over the years into a manufacturer of paper converting, shrink wrap, and bagging machinery.

At first glance, the building is rather unremarkable, but one step inside and a very interesting story unfolds. The leadership team here includes founder Diego Garrido and his two sons, Nicholas and Juan. Originally from Colombia. Diego brought his family to Miami in 1986 with just four suitcases and $300 in his pocket.

He quickly found work in this warehouse, which he eventually purchased and took over as his own company. Here he raised Juan and Nicholas in the family business, teaching them the value of hard work. For us, it's very important the family and the company, eh, have together the family all the time. After graduating college, Juan and Nick came back to Garrido printing equipment to continue to build upon their father's success story.

Well, it is, you know, such an honor for my brother and I to be able to go and continue the work that my father started, you know, particularly that we started with nothing. Um, we are able to continue what his vision was in providing. You know, quality products and quality prices to our customers. We get to honor his legacy by maintaining our name.

We do what's right by the company. Everybody that comes and works for us, becomes part of the family and they become part of the legacy as well. So we're just trying to create an overall culture for everybody that comes in, not just, you know, my brother and, and my, and myself, that are leading the company, but all of our employees, all of our distribution partners, all of our clients, everybody becomes part of our extended family and we want to do that while maintaining our name and maintaining my father's legacy.

Recognizing the need to diversify its equipment portfolio. In 2007, Garrido Printing Equipment created the Advantage Machinery Division that makes packaging machinery used in a variety of industry applications, including food printing, electronics, and most recently e-commerce. In 2022, the company opened a new factory training center to provide customers with a first class experience for factory acceptance testing.

Including a Sky Box room that overlooks the training center, providing a comfortable space for meetings. Well, we do a lot of FATs with the companies are in distribution that buys our equipment. We wanted to create a first class experience for them when they came to our facilities. We wanted them to have a private area.

Where they can go and not only inspect the machines, uh, that they have buy from us, but they can also go and receive adequate amount of training. And that's what the FAT room is for. But then we also build a sky box overlooking our FAT room. So when there are breaks or if there's upper management that comes along, they have a place that they could go set up shop.

They could still oversee everything we're doing with the training and FAT process, but they can feel at home and they can feel comfortable with it. We want them to have like an overall first-class experience when they come here. The training center was made possible when the company purchased two additional warehouse units in the building.

One to store machinery and parts and the other for training and testing. The machinery has been built to adapt to different materials and applications, and the goal of the company is to take the burden off the end user. Well. We want to offer solutions to their problems. We want to take difficult products and difficult applications and make it easy for the customer.

So whether it'll be an odd shaped product or if it's something that it just hard to transport or whatever, we want to find a solution for them to be able to make that difficult application real easy for them to use. As the technical director, Juan Garrido makes sure that he or his technicians are always available to answer customer questions.

The company provides end users and distributors with a free encrypted chat app as a way to reach his team anytime. Well, one of the first things that we're trying to create with our equipment is when you know we wanna make them operator friendly. Right, the easier you make it for the operator, the longer lasting the equipment's gonna be, the more uptime the actual manufacturers are, are gonna have as well.

So we're trying to make things that are user friendly. We're trying to shorten the actual changeover times in the machines. We're creating a lot of automation when it has to do with changeover, where. Once a company is done running one production, they could just scan the next product, the machine, completely automatic changeovers to go onto the next one.

Also, another goal for us is to be able to create sustainable solutions. We're working a lot on developing equipment to be able to seal paper, horizontal flow wrap style machines that can run at very high speeds are gonna be able to work for both industrial packaging and e-commerce packaging.

So all of that is tying into what our future goals of the company are and where we want to take the market. Ultimately, it's about the customer experience. From the moment that they request a quotation from the whole RFQ process, the invoicing, quoting, purchasing process, then to the FAT and delivery, making sure we meet our timelines.

And being able to get everything to the customer quickly and efficiently. Installing the machine, proper training, and then afterward, all the after sale support, the technical support, the parts service, everything that they're gonna receive for many, many years to come. We want that overall experience to be the best.

We don't need to be the biggest company. We don't need to be the fastest, but we do want to provide the best overall experience to our customers. The strategy Nick says is to treat people the way you want to be treated. It's been how the company has operated since the beginning, and it will continue to be the mantra moving forward.

We hope to be in the business for long time, and we want to give to the customers the best service possible.

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