Case Study: Work Sharp

Whether you’re a seasoned outdoor enthusiast with a passion for nice tools or are just introducing the family to the outdoors as a hobby, there’s a pretty good chance Work Sharp’s products have made their way onto your workbench. We sat down with 20-year vet and Chief Operating Officer, Grant Loberg recently and spent some time on where Kelley Create helps him do business every day, where things can get better, and what’s next.

“We make sharpeners,” Loberg said, “Soon we’ll make knives as well. Primarily consumer products, where prices start at $4.00 and go up to about $300.00. We span a whole range of products, and we’re bringing in parts both overseas globally and from some domestic sources.”

Everything gets assembled in the Work Sharp facility in Ashland, OR. It’s there that Kelley Create spends time focusing on helping find efficiencies in workflow.

“We’re constantly working across time zones, sharing files, in different scenarios having video calls; early in the morning or late at night, depending on whether it’s supply chain or if it’s customer facing,” he said.

Although moving sharp and sharpening things around the globe sounds like dangerous business to us, what Loberg found more frustrating to him, and his team was inconsistent service.

“We were with another IT company out of the Bay Area, and they were fine, but they didn’t end up providing us great service,” Loberg continued. “We’re global. We didn’t have to be local, but that definitely helped. We weren’t like, ‘oh, we need to have someone in our own backyard.’ Who did we feel would be able to deliver a high level of service at the price point they wanted to charge, with the right level of backup and redundancy for us.”

With that as a deciding factor, Loberg described the working relationship with Kelley Create.

“We still have our own internal IT manager, and he’s kind of a jack-of-all-trades,” Loberg said. “He’s not deep in any one area. He’s not the help desk. He doesn’t want to be the help desk 24/7.”

As Work Sharp builds much of their own hardware and systems, they sought other ways to work with Kelley Create’s expertise. And as is sometimes the case, Work Sharp brought a potential solution to the team at Kelley Create, vs. the other way around.

“We have been focusing on, and Kelley has been helping us with, our AI training,” he continued. “Nobody really knows right now what to expect and how it will go. Kelley’s been instrumental in helping consult on that and has been on the forefront of using it.”

That’s not to say Kelley Create led from the beginning. In fact, Kelley joined Work Sharp in the exploration, ultimately landing on a recent Microsoft Copilot launch.

“They weren’t really doing that exploration before,” he said. “I don’t think most clients were asking for it. We wanted to look out into the future, but in reality, most companies are just attacking the next quarter. They don’t know where they want to be in a year, so what’s cool is that we’ve pushed ourselves to look further. Kelley Create matched that.”

Microsoft Copilot offers some incredibly promising efficiency opportunities. The implementation at Work Sharp, which began just recently, is aimed at automating and streamlining various tasks. Saving time by automatically creating PowerPoint presentations and managing Outlook emails, Microsoft’s Copilot is primed to reduce the time spent on mundane tasks. The expectation is Work Sharp employees will focus on more critical thinking and strategic activities. The ultimate goal is to boost overall productivity and potentially grow the business by 20% without adding any new staff.

We’re feeling pretty good about it and we’ll check back soon with Work Sharp to see what we’ve all learned. One thing we know for sure is things are constantly changing. Is there a place Kelley Create can help streamline your business and get it teed up for growth? Let’s see what we can do together.