Lee LaFleur
I’m Lee LaFleur, co–owner of Mike’s Hardware and Supply right here in New Orleans on the Legion Field. Been here for going on 44 years and it’s our family business. My dad and mom started, my brother and I took over in 2012. We’ve got a great crew. There’s about 12 of us that work here. A small place, but we like to think we’re robust and we sell obviously hardware. We sell a lot of plumbing and a lot of specialty things for the area. Just kind of a good neighborhood. I say neighborhood place, but we draw business from all over and we like to think we’re maybe a little more than that, but we still have that neighborhood feel so we try to get the best of both worlds here.
What makes me excited to come in every day would be just dealing with all the people, all the customers. A lot of them have been coming here since I was a kid. Just the people I would say is what really, I guess drives all of us. We like the products as well. We’re kind of hardware nerds maybe, and plumbing. We get into the intricacies of a lot of what we sell so it’s always good to be able to pass that on to the customers and learn something from them oftentimes. But we learn something new every day here, so that’s always enjoyable.
Our whole front counter, our whole point of sale system is cloud–based and everything’s real time and it’s imperative that we have a constant and reliable fast internet. Everything that scans at our register or type in on an order quote, we need that internet to just be continuous and Uniti’s provided that. We’re going on about 18 months with the Uniti fiber, and it’s been like night and day over what we had before.
Previously we would have lags, we would have delays, we would have logjams at our register, phones would go down because they were based on that same internet connection so it’s just been great. It’s been one less worry, one less stressor for us. We recently started the process to switch our phone system to Uniti’s VoIP system. We feel confident we’ve done the demo and kind of looked at the phones and feel that that whole process and their pricing was in line with where we needed it to be and they worked with us on some options and we’re looking forward to having a better, more advanced phone system, more reliable phone system. Yeah, really looking forward to that.
There’s been no hiccups. Our point of sale system just runs a lot faster and everything’s working like it should and that’s been great for us because for years we would go through cycles and ups and downs with connectivity and I’m sure with most businesses now being so reliant on a constant internet connection. It’s been a great fit for us. What I would say to anyone looking for better connectivity in their business would be to definitely give Uniti Fiber a call. Let them come give you a proposal. It was very easy, very seamless. It’s been a great fit for us. I would just would not hesitate to give him a ring and go from there.
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