[Groovy Chick]

May 2012

To Our Customers – Potential, Current, and Future,

If you are looking for a company who will enter your order, ship your product tomorrow, and never think twice about you again, then we are not the company for you. Why can't we ship all of our orders next day like some other companies? That's easy. We have LOTS of customers and LOTS of orders, and we have made the conscious choice to limit our staff so that we don't lose personal contact with our customers. If you are looking for a company who will go out of their way to provide you with the best customer service they’re able and treat you as a person – not just another order – then we invite you to read on…

For those of you who don’t know, Power Hungry Performance is owned and run by the husband and wife team of Bill and Corey Cohron. (If you’re not sure who Bill is and about his extensive experience in the automotive performance field, we encourage you to take a minute and read the “About Us” page on our website.) Cody (cleatus12r on our forum and PHPDiesel on the diesel forums) began working with us in April 2010. He is also an ASE certified mechanic with more than a decade of automotive experience. Though his specialty is the 7.3L PSD, he also tunes 1997-2011 gassers.

Throughout most of her adult life, Corey has experienced occasional migraine headaches. In early 2010, however, she began having daily migraines and cluster headaches (if you haven’t heard of cluster headaches before, they’re also referred to as “suicide headaches” because the pain is far worse than the worst migraine). She has seen a variety of specialists, but unfortunately, nobody has been able to pinpoint the exact cause. Recently, she was also diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, and an MRI showed that several vertebrae in her neck/back are fused and several discs are bulging and/or herniated. In addition, due to Degenerative Joint Disease (she has had arthritis for more than 20 years), the cartilage in many joints throughout her body has been worn away. She is working with a rheumatologist, pain specialist, and neuromuscular masseuse to find relief. Now, why would we share all of this personal information?

We think it’s important for potential and current customers to have a good picture of our company so that they can decide whether or not they wish to do business with us. Among others things, Corey is responsible for processing orders and accounts receivable. This means that when she is unable to work, orders may be delayed. Also, when Corey is out of the office, Bill is the only person answering phones (except 9-3 Tuesdays and Thursdays & 11-2 Wednesdays when Angela helps answer phones and Fridays when Cody answers phones), which sometimes makes it difficult to get in touch with us.

We stop answering the phone at 3PM; this allows us time to prepare orders for UPS pickup at 5PM. Though we stop taking phone calls, our work day certainly doesn’t end at 3PM; in fact, most days we work well into the night, stopping only to have a family dinner with our sons. Bill is also at our shop most Saturdays with customers or dyno tuning and testing.

Regarding our growth, we invoiced our 500th customer in January 2009 – about 11 months after beginning retail sales. Over the next 24 months, our popularity grew, and in January 2011, we invoiced our 3,000th customer. We are proud to announce that in March 2012, we will provide service to our 5,000th customer! As you can imagine, such incredible growth has been accompanied by some growing pains, but we’ve taken steps to address them.

• The PHP Forum went live on November 29, 2008, and we currently have about 3,750 members and over 54,000 posts! Current and potential customers are encouraged to check out the forum to find answers to questions they might have about our products. We have six incredibly knowledgeable moderators who are more than willing to help when we’re not available.
• We have recently adjusted our phone hours to balance support of new customers as well as current customers. We are closed to phone calls on Mondays to allow us time to address e-mails, forum posts, and projects.
• The website is updated regularly; significant news (unexpected office closures, etc.) is posted on our website’s homepage and in the Notices section at the top of our forum. Scheduled office closures can be found on the Contact Us page. Approximate lead times can be found on the Ordering page; our FAQs page has been updated as well, and we also recently added a "Tips & Tricks" page which will, hopefully, answer potential and new customers' questions.
• We created a PHP page on Facebook to provide a more informal setting for our customers to chat and ask questions. Unexpected closures can be found here!
• We offer Live Online Help on Fridays, so customers have another way of contacting us.
• We dropped sponsorship on many automotive forums so that we can focus on our own forum.
• We hired someone to help with answering phones and entering orders.

Even after doing all of these things, we admit that there are still times when some phones calls may go unanswered or posts or e-mails may not receive an immediate reply. Being a small company certainly has its benefits, but the downfall is that if we are short-staffed for any reason, customers experience delays. Each of us has our own responsibilities, and aside from phones and e-mails, they really don’t overlap.

So, knowing all this, should you buy from us? It’s definitely a valid question. Is experience and longevity in the automotive performance industry important to you? Do you want to give your business to a company who is willing to spend 10 hours -- on a Sunday! -- writing new software to recover your PCM because you killed your truck or to call a customer who posted in the Emergency section of our forum while we were at Disney World on vacation? Would you prefer to work with a company who is happy to talk you OUT of purchasing something you don’t need instead of talking you INTO something you don’t need? Then yes, I think you'd be very happy with PHP. Will there be time when you may have a longer wait with us than another company? Probably so. Why? Because we have lots and lots of customers and are very, very busy.

In 2007, during the early months of Power Hungry Performance, there was no way we could have predicted how quickly our company would grow! We are very blessed to have a thriving business, and we owe so much of our success to our incredible customers who promote PHP on the forums and to their friends and families.

We hope this information helps you make a more educated choice regarding your purchase. Please feel free to contact us with any questions you might have. We look forward to being able to help you with your automotive needs!

Have a blessed day,
Bill and Corey Cohron