Bulletin Board Magazine 2021 Volume 1

Master Sponsor Spotlight

PROVIDENT BANK Demonstrates its Commitment to Customers During the Pandemic

These instruments help analyze water and steam for companies and businesses that rely on ultra-pure water, such as power generation, industrial processes, and semi-conductors.To put it into perspective,Waltron’s sodium analyzer can measure a grain of salt in an Olympic sized pool. In 2014, I assumed ownership of the business, took back the original name, and the newWaltron Bull & Roberts was born.

Shortly after, we received a letter from the NAVY that stated we must operate and remain open, that under no circumstances should we close.We never skipped a beat. Our employees kept working andWaltron kept supporting all of its critical infrastructure customers throughout the pandemic.

Jon Guy is President and CEO of Waltron Bull & Roberts, a company that specializes in steam and water chemistry management. Keith Buscio, Vice President, Director of Public Relations, Provident Bank, spoke with Jon to learn more about the company’s success and to discuss how Provident helped Waltron during one of the toughest years the company has ever faced.

What are some of the changes you’ve had to make to your business that you never would have anticipated this time last year?

KB:

Tell us about your business

KB:

How has your business been affected by the pandemic?

KB:

JG: Founded in 1903 by chemists Irving Bull and Alfred Roberts,Waltron has a long history of expertise in water chemistry management. The company started as an analytical and consulting laboratory in lower Manhattan in NewYork City – a perfect location to sample, analyze, and make recommendations for the boiler water of the many steamships that called in to the major seaport there. In fact, our company pioneered the first modern boiler water treatment program, including the first nuclear water chemistry program on a commercial ship, and at one point had nearly half of the US merchant fleet under contract. When the core maritime business (and Bull & Roberts name) was sold in 1984, the company refocused on manufacturing analytical instruments and rebranded itself asWaltron.

JG: We have been monitoring the pandemic since the very early stages. In 2016, we opened a sales office in China. Our Chinese sales director went on lockdown for seven weeks starting with the Chinese NewYear in mid- January 2020.We anticipated our sales in China would take a hit, and they did. Sales set to ship in the months of February and March pushed into April and May. Just as China began to climb out of the worst part of their pandemic, our key European suppliers began to be impacted. We now had pent-up demand for instruments and spare parts coming from customers and no way to get enough products fast enough to meet demand. At the same time, we grew anxious about whether or not our Flemington headquarters would be put into the same restrictions as our foreign business partners.

JG: The sales that we coordinate typically require meetings at customer facilities, whether by our own employees or our many distributors around the world.While services dried up for a short period of time during all of this, we learned that we needed to become more creative when it came to keeping our customers engaged. Our customers are mostly essential businesses, for example, power plants that need to remain open but that rarely ever allowed anything but on-site sales calls.They were mostly closed to sales visits, so we started using video conferencing for our sales rep training, changed over to conduct virtual sales calls, and live-streamed specialized training sessions for customers. None of that existed before 2020.

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