Hi, my name is Sydney Kossowski, and I am co-owner of Veterans Metal here in Largo, Florida. I just wanted to put my role out there as office manager, and I deal a lot with Steelhead in the quoting process and pretty much all of the administrative work that we do here in the office for the shop. What I do in the shop is handle all the invoicing, the quoting, and the Steelhead software that we use, which is wonderful, and handle everything that we pretty much do here on the administrative side of Veterans Metal.
The deployment process and my experience have been actually surprisingly quite good. I expected it to be a lot more... not thought-provoking, but more just harder to grasp. I've dealt with different software and different industries over the years, and this one was quite easy. So even with the training that I've had to go through, again, it's been wonderful, and the staff has been very, very accommodating for our shop.
I love the fact that it works well and it's able to help us go from the Stone Age to the digital age, so it's been very, very good. The best thing I like about Steelhead software is the quoting process. It has been amazing. Before, we had this Excel spreadsheet that was, you know, equations that were put in there to help us figure out the dimensions of parts. With this, Steelhead has been wonderful. It's just the process itself. You put in your numbers, it pulls everything out for you and pops you up with a quote, and it's amazing. The way it feeds back to you and how it reaches over to the customer, you're able to look at the PDF before you send it. It's very professional. It's where I wanted us to be as far as where we're going with this plant, and it's amazing. The feedback from the customers has been great. They love it. They love that it's so easy to read, and it breaks everything down: parts per process, how many you can put in the tank at the same time. It's just amazing.
So, I would recommend this to anyone who is looking for a quoting-style software. It just takes all the guesswork out of everything. It's wonderful. When we originally started this business back in 2020, we didn't have a quoting system. It was all about looking at the part and guess how much it would cost to run the part. You can lose money that way, because without knowing proper dimensions, weights, mass, all of those things, you could be running your tanks a lot longer than what you originally thought, and it's taking longer in the process. When my husband built the Excel spreadsheet, it helped a lot and gave us a better grasp of what we were supposed to be charging. However, it wasn't as detailed as Steelhead has been, with the dimensions, the mass, and the weight of parts, especially for our passivate system for anodizing. Now that we're doing hardcoat anodizing, it helps us immensely. The time between the two — it felt like it took forever for us to get from one per se square to another. It took us a while, but once we got into it, and Chet and his team helped explain it to us, it started flowing so quickly and so well. My staff loves it. They were like, "Oh, thank God we don't have to go back to Excel." It's just been such a great experience to use this software and be able to just pop in your dimensions, and it spits it out for you. And of course, even if we do have a question, it's the 80/20 rule, but even if we do have a question, we still can look at it and go, "Yeah, that sounds good, and we're going to stick with that."
Again, the feedback from the clientele has been amazing. It's very easy to read. It puts it in a very professional format, and no more of the Excel spreadsheet. So, we love that. It's been great working with the Steelhead team. It's been great for my office and for the girls. We've been able to call Chet and his team for anything, any questions we've had, or if there were discrepancies, and we're like, "Chet, we don't understand why it's doing this," and he would jump right on it. He would look at the coding and say, "Oh, I know what it is," and he would fix it. He was always very attentive to us, attentive to my staff, and anytime we ever had a question, he'd say, "You know what, that's just a tweak. I can take care of it." The experience has been very good. They're very detail-oriented, especially Chad, which I love. We love that, and it has made the process for us very smooth. I couldn't have asked for a better team to help us get into the 21st century, because everything was so paper-generated before, and now it's all digital.
At first, I was a little scared, thinking, "Oh gosh, it's a new software I have to learn, because I'm not young anymore; I'm old," but, you know, it's been a pleasant experience. It's been very good, and anytime we've ever needed anything, even with the handoff to Mike Johnson, it's been amazing. He's been very good. He came to our shop to do hands-on training. Who does that? It's an amazing experience. I would definitely recommend it to anybody who is looking for this type of software. They're the company to go to. They do everything for you. No questions asked. They just say, "What do you need? We'll take care of it." That's what I love about it. It's awesome.