From Sea Ships to Waffle Irons – The Electrician from Iceland

My name is Hans Beck born and raised on a farm in East Iceland. I came to Akureyri in 2003 to study. Started working for a company in 2005 where I got laid off quickly after the “big bang recession” in 2008. In March of 2009 I started working at Rafröst Ehf. Since then, I’ve never looked back as this job offers a wide variety of knowledge and gadgets to work with.

Iceland is one of the most interesting and beautiful places in the world. Contrary to its name, temperatures are relatively cool but moderate all year round with winter month temperatures averaging around -3°C or 26.6° F.

The company itself was founded in the year 2000 when Guðmundur (The Owner/Founder) quit working for a big seafood company in Akureyri. He worked there for more then 2 decades.

Rafröst Ehf. is the “go-to” business in Akureyri, Iceland for anything electrical needed for a fishing boat. We have everything from small starter switches to GPS devices. We store the basic parts in our inventory, but most special items are serviced within the day or so.

What produces or services does your business offer?

We sell and service everything electrical for small and medium sized fishing boats. We do installations, repairs and everything that has to do with electricity aboard boats.

We also service bigger ships, but not as often. One of our bigger customers are Dynamic Positioning (DP) ships that are based here as well.

What are some day to day challenges you face?

Well… tough question. Take this week for example:

Monday I was working on one of the DP ships that we have been servicing. I needed to remove and repair motors from radars which were on-board and fix NMEA Data problems for the ships’ autopilot. Then I repaired a waffle iron for a friend.

Thursday I went out of town to a smaller fishing boat to repair problems with an autopilot not getting a correct heading signal from the GPS Compass. I finished the day by taking apart an alternator, which had an insulation problem to see whether or not it could be fixed.

On Wednesday, I went out of town again to overhaul a boat’s electrical system on board, which was starting to look quite dangerous. The process included removing broken switches and circuit breakers, fixing cables and much more.

As you see it’s quite a lot that we deal with. It gets too time consuming finding prices for every item when we are dealing with hundreds of products that we use in our business. That’s where inFlow came in and has made our lives much easier when it comes to billing customers.

From your experience, what advice could you give to other small businesses?

It’s worth it spending a little cash on an inventory application such as inFlow. Spending hours each week, that you can’t bill, on shuffling papers isn’t.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

The time that I’ve have spent using inFlow has shown me a couple of things. It is a great product as soon as you learn to use it and the customer service is fantastic.

You can follow me on Twitter @hansgbeck or visit the Rafrost Website.

If you are an inFlow customer and want to be featured on the inFlow Inventory blog, please see our customer spotlight page. If you are not yet a customer, get the free edition of inFlow at the download page and see how inFlow inventory can help your small business.