[Groovy Chick]

March 2010

To Our Customers – Past, Present, and Future,

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.

For those of you who don’t know, PHP is run by the husband and wife team of Bill and Corey Cohron. Bill has been in the automotive field for more than twenty years and specifically in the performance industry for the past dozen years. He started off at Superchips in the late nineties – back in the early days of custom tuning. Along with Steve Cole, he was one of the first 7.3L tuners and wrote many of the calibrations still in use today.

Bill left Superchips and opened Diesel Power. Have you read or heard about “Bill’s Chips?” Well, those are chips that were sold between 2000 and 2004. During this time, we also sold tuning software under the name DPTuner (Diesel Power Tuner) to many performance shops.

In 2003, Edge Products was a young company looking for a Ford tuner. They called Bill and offered him a job after his name kept coming up during various inquiries within the performance community. Bill worked for Edge from February 2004 through May 2007. Along with an amazing team, Bill was responsible for much of the development of Edge’s Evolution Programmer, from initial concept and design to firmware and calibrations.

We relocated back to the east coast in June 2007 to start a new company with another tuner; that didn’t go as planned, and Power Hungry Performance was created! At that time, it was obvious that many diesel tuners had entered the field since Bill had gone to work for Edge, so we found our niche in the gasoline market. By mid 2008, at the request of many customers, we expanded PHP to include diesels and ironically, have been dubbed “one of the big three” in both gasoline and diesel tuning on the forums.

I had been teaching for the previous 12 years but didn’t plan on going back into the classroom when we moved to Georgia. Since I also have a degree in fine arts, Bill asked me to design the PHP logo and a logo for our first product, the Gryphon programmer. Soon, what began as taking a few phone calls and answering a couple of e-mails turned into a full-time job!

So, why did I take the time to tell you this when you can read just about the same thing on our website? I think it’s important for people to know how we got to the point where we are now because I think it answers the question Why Is PHP So Busy?

Back in 2008, we became sponsors on a couple of forums (some of which we’d sponsored previously when we owned Diesel Power), and that’s really how our business expanded. Since then, we have added a couple more (for those of you who don’t know, we can’t even answer questions about our product on a forum if we’re not a sponsor!), and our business has expanded exponentially.

Since 2007, our sales – literally – have quadrupled, and in the past year, we have added approximately ten new items to our product line. Currently, our phones ring fairly constantly during our posted phone hours; however, we take phone calls until 9PM two nights a week, and there are many nights that we’re on the phone even later than that! We also receive about 100 e-mails each day; answering all of them is just about a full-time job in itself. Yes, we’ve certainly experienced some growing pains while trying to keep up with the demand!

So, what have we done to ensure that our customer service doesn’t suffer?

• The PHP Forum went live on November 29, 2008, and we currently have about 1,450 members and over 25,000 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 four incredibly knowledgeable moderators who are more than willing to help when we’re not available. Ideally, this should reduce the number of e-mails and phone calls that we receive about basic product questions, which will allow us more time to focus on e-mails and PMs that require more detailed answers.
• We have instituted a “No Phones Week” during the third full business week of every month. During this week, business generally operates as usual – we just don’t accept phone calls. This allows us uninterrupted time to work on tuning, answering e-mails, PMs, & posts, processing & shipping orders, live tuning customers’ vehicles, and working on new product development. If customers have questions during this week, we are happy to call them if they PM or e-mail us their phone numbers.
• We have recently adjusted our phone hours to balance support of new customers as well as current customers.
• We have added two additional phone lines – one being a dedicated phone line for dealers to keep the other lines open for customers.
• We are looking to upgrade our server to include Microsoft Exchange so that our e-mail doesn’t have to go through a host server. This should alleviate most of the absentee e-mails.
• The website was recently completely redone and updated to include approximate lead times on our products; our FAQs page was updated as well. We also recently added a "Tips & Tricks" page which will, hopefully, answer potential and new customers' questions.
• Currently, we are not accepting new dealer applications. We want to be able to give our customers AND our current dealers the support they deserve, and at this point, it means stabilizing our current growth.
• Significant news (office closures, etc.) is posted on our website’s homepage and in the Notices section at the top of our forum. We also usually post events on our sponsored forums as well.

Even after doing all of these things, we have to admit that there are still times when some few phones calls may go unanswered or posts or e-mails may not receive an immediate reply, and we apologize for this in advance. Please know that it’s not because we’re ignoring our customers. I work about 60-70 hours a week and Bill works at least 80 hours each week (many times throughout the night and on weekends) to do everything we can to keep our customers happy because we genuinely love what we do!

Now, some of you might not know a lot about Bill, and I will do my best to keep my observations objective. Bill is the type of person that gives every project 100%, whether it’s live tuning a truck or writing software for a new product. He is also very adamant about what is acceptable for our customers and what isn’t. For example, someone recently asked him, “If two [Gryphon] customers have the same HEX code and modifications, isn’t there a way to reuse the tunes.” He abruptly replied, “If a customer pays for custom tunes, he’s going to get custom tunes.” We know that some other companies reuse calibrations for several customers, but to us, that sounds like canned tuning. Sure, if we simply reused tunes, we could get products out the door by the dozen! In our opinion, however, custom tunes are called “custom tunes” because they’re written specifically for each customer. Does it slow things down? Sure does, but we are always willing to refer potential customers to other vendors if the wait is an issue.

Something else about Bill – he works far more efficiently when working on one project start to finish than when he is pulled in many directions at once – which happens all the time! (Hence, the “No Phones Week” and the reason he works through the night quite often…) However, if a customer has a disabled vehicle requiring his immediate attention, he puts everything down and concentrates fully on the problem at hand until the issue is resolved.

The last thing I want to point out is that most other tuners simply program chips or programmers all day and that’s it. As one customer observed today, Bill really is a jack of all trades. So what is it exactly that he does for PHP? I’ll try to make a list:

• Custom gasoline tuning for customers
• Custom diesel tuning for customers and dealers
• Customer tech support
• Hardware Engineering and New Product Development including electronic circuitry
• Software for current and new products
• Firmware for new products
• Sales Phone Calls
• Dealer Phone Calls
• Forum Management
• Live Tuning
• 6.0L FICM Tuning
• PCM Reprogramming
• E-mails, PMs, and Posts
• and to top it off, he is still subcontracted by Edge!

When it’s written out like that, it’s easy to see why a custom tuned chip might take a couple of weeks and a customer’s gasoline custom tunes might take much longer. It’s also evident why we can’t just hire someone to do what he does.

In case you're wondering... yes, we see the posts where people claim to have sent us dozens of e-mails and called hundreds of times to avail. I even read one that suggests that we stop growing so quickly! (How we would accomplish that, I’m not so sure.) We’ve also read the ones praising us for our customer service and thanking us for helping after hours. Eventually, we see them all.

We certainly realize that there are definitely going to be some changes that need to be made within the next 1-2 years if we continue growing at this rate, and yes, we talk about the expansion of Power Hungry Performance just about every day. At this juncture, however, there are just two of us, and we are willing to give everything we have to making PHP a huge success.

So, knowing all this, should you buy from us? It’s definitely a valid question. We are asked often, “Why is your product better than Product X?” or “Why is your tuning better than Tuner X?” We never compare ourselves to anyone else, and we only compare products feature to feature. Without equivocation, I can say that Bill is one of the best Ford tuners in this field – and I can provide a list of other tuners who would back me up. I think that says a lot.

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? (Bill finally got it to work about 2AM on Monday morning, if you’re wondering…) 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 our products. Will you have to wait at least a week for a chip and longer than that for gasoline custom tunes? Probably. Why? Because we have lots and lots of customers and are very, very busy. That says it best, and we couldn’t pay for that kind of advertising.

I 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!