As the owner of a business that provides a service to other business owners, I am aware of how important quality and customer service are in maintaining those relationships. What surprises me is the apparent lack of that understanding in other services based organizations, at least some of the ones that we have tried to give our hard earned money to over the past few months. As a small business owner we always have a budget in mind as we evaluate who to give our business to, so price is always a consideration. In that effort, location of the vendor really didn’t matter to us, so we were shopping with companies in North Carolina, Minnesota, Illinois, California, etc… Guess what, we got burned! So we made a concience effort to partner with vendors right here in Virginia, and in some cases right here in our building. Guess what, we’ve received great service, and the quality has been outstanding. The pricing has been competitive, not the cheapest, but well worth the extra few bucks to be able to walk down the hall when a problem arises. The term “throat to choke” has been used quite a bit lately, because we wanted to do just that with a vendor we chose, but flying to California to do it just wasn’t worth it.