• Hi, I’m Brad Abare

  I'm a make-it-happen guy working with big idea people. I design teams and orchestrate strategy so that great ideas I believe in get done.
  
  I am Jamaica's husband, Foursquare's comm director, Personality's founder, and a catalyst for CFCC.
  
  
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It was about a month ago that Cheryl Johnson (one of the Foursquare admin gurus on my team) began working on the logistics for shipping a pallet of stuff from Los Angeles to Jerusalem for our convention here this coming week. We had done everything we could to avoid shipping and customs hassles. I had already been to Israel several times to setup local contacts–including printers–for this very reason. Unfortunately, there were a handful of print jobs that were going to be cheaper to print in the U.S., and then ship to Jerusalem. No problem, we printed them with plenty of time to ship and arrive safely. A nice little savings of $10,000.

At the last minute before the shipment was set to go, one of the IT guys saw the pallet and asked if he could throw a small box of electronic things on so he could avoid carrying them with him on his flight. No big deal, throw it on.

Wait. Very big deal.

It turns out that small box from the IT guy was big enough to hold up the entire shipment in customs.

The good news is that when the convention team arrived to Jerusalem earlier this week, the pallet had already beat us here. The bad news is that it had not passed through customs yet. Cheryl spent every other hour this week on the phone with the local shipping company in Israel who was working with customs. I was also in conversation with our local Israeli contacts working every angle possible.

Tonight (Friday) is when Shabbat begins in Israel. This means the majority of the country (Jewish sector) shuts down from sun down tonight until sun down tomorrow. The convention starts Sunday night.

We still don’t have the pallet and we’ve been working on it this whole week.

I spent the last two hours negotiating with local printers–including the Arab ones because they don’t observe Shabbat–to print everything locally and have ready by Sunday night. We’re talking a pallet worth of printing to be done in 48 hours. Yikes.

After tracking down a couple different sources, everything is in motion. There was one part of the job we couldn’t print here in Israel because it was too complex, but we had extra copies back in Los Angeles. We were able to track down a bunch of staff who were boarding planes in LA on there way to Israel who are leaving in a few hours. We had the boxes rushed to meet up with the staff at the airport.

Whew.

We still need the missing pallet as it has other stuff we’re waiting on too, so we’ll keep working on that too. All this and the convention hasn’t even started!

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