Company News

Not only do our employees provide top-notch service to our customers - they give their very best to BMP as well. At a recent staff meeting, we recognized several of them for their excellent work during 2008.

Greg Rosner (Sales Person of the Year), Dub Ragland (Outstanding Sales Award), Nadia Tschanz (Top Sales Producer), pose with our president Jim Stewart.

Jim congratulates Donald Cervantes (above) on being named Employee of the Year, and Arnold Tran (below) on his Rookie of the Year award.

Early on the morning of September 13th, Hurricane Ike made landfall near Galveston Texas, just south of our home in Houston. As you all know by now, the damage to Houston was extensive. Power was out, basic services were either non-existent, or extremely hard to come by during the next several days following the storm.

BMP did not escape the punishment of Ike's winds and rain either. As soon as it was safe to venture outside, our VP of Operations, Ken Aldredge worked his way to our facility through roads covered with downed trees and storm debris. There were no working traffic signals, so driving was very hazardous. Ken made a walking inspection of our building and found it to be structurally sound. The following day, Sunday the 14th, Ken returned, along with our President, Jim Stewart, and our Finance Mgr. Wesley Danson to do a more thorough inspection. Our phones were out, so Ken immediately transferred our lines to our answering service who still had phone service available.

Help Arrives from up North

Our IT consultant, who lives in the Dallas area, was called on Sunday and immediately agreed to deliver much-needed supplies not available in the Houston area, so we could make repairs and get functional. Early Monday morning, he arrived with 2 large generators, gasoline (there was little or no gas available in Houston for the 48 hours immediately after Ike, primarily due to no power to run the pumps), as well as supplies to repair some minor roof damage caused by the storm.

By early that same afternoon, the phone and computer system was up and running on generator power. Ken transferred the phones back to BMP so we could begin answering calls from clients outside the Houston area who were of course not affected by the storm, and were undoubtedly not expecting anyone to answer when they called Monday afternoon. In fact, we even accepted a delivery from UPS Monday afternoon!

BMP Employees Show Dedication to our Clients

By Tuesday morning, we had 3 servers, 7 computers, and our primary phone line back in service and running on generator power. By that afternoon, our warehouse was actually pulling and shipping orders to our customers around the world who were counting on us to deliver. Because power was not yet restored to the entire building, our main conference room was turned into a kind of multi-purpose work room. Several of our customer service people made their way into work Tuesday and Wednesday even though many sustained damage or didn't have power at their own homes. Salespeople began coming in on Wednesday to tend to important orders. We all worked by lamplight in this one room, but the important thing was that BMP was up and functioning as a company again within 48 hours of Ike's hitting the Houston-Galveston area.

Back to Normal at Last!

On Wednesday afternoon at 2:30 pm, a roar of applause went up in our conference room as the fluorescent lights above flickered and then came on, meaning full power had been restored to our building. On Thursday it was back to normal, business wise, as our full staff returned to work. Our clients in the Houston area may not have noticed, because many of them were out that entire week and longer. We do know that our clients around the country and indeed around the world noticed though, because virtually every call to and from suppliers or clients included a surprise that we were even open, let alone ready to go to work. Kudos to all BMP'ers who rose to the occasion and kept BMP running during the worst storm to hit the Houston area in memory.