What is the biggest challenge facing Toms of Maine right now?
Managing growth. We’re growing very quickly and that is, in and of itself, a challenge. It seems every six to eight months the business has grown itself out of our previous infrastructure, organizational structure, and we have to redesign to keep up with the business. Q. When you say you’re growing continually, you mean you’re growing both with sales and in terms of employees? A: Yes. But not just sales and employees — it’s sales, profit, employees, and infrastructure changes — and as we grow, there’s a higher and higher demand on technology. Keeping up our technological platform as it relates to partnering with other customers is a key part of our growth challenge. We have an extensive EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) process that is staffed internally by a full-time IT person. Primarily we’ve been in reaction mode with EDI and so we react to customer requests downstream in the supply chain. But in the last few months we’ve moved to a more proactive position, controlling the linkag
