growers / Medford, Oregon

(Sean, left) age / 24
crops / Pears and vineyard
education / Santa Clara University
title / Operations and production assistant

(Joe, right) age / 24
crops / Pears
education / University of Advanced Technology in Arizona
title / Information technology assistant

other info / Sean and Joe are triplets with their sister, Cynthia
business / Naumes, Inc.

Q: As you start in the family company, what is a top priority?
(Sean) I feel like Naumes’s personal role in the community is to lead by example. We are a privately run fruit distributor, and we’ve been doing it for many, many years. We feel like giving back to the community is the least we can do.

Q: What’s your biggest challenge since joining the company?
(Joe) The technical (issues)… we can’t keep up with it enough. It really tests our patience, and we see a lot of our future technical needs coming from database [management systems]. It’s a multifaceted part of our company that really likes to rear its head, so we gotta keep tabs on it.

Q: What’s your biggest challenge since joining the company?
(Sean) Tech is really important. Joe and the tech department are helping us keep up on developments making our operation more efficient.

Hopefully, we can keep expanding it and actually bring it out into the field. We’ve recently moved off of radio-based systems and into iPhones, but we also need to increase efficiencies across operations, either through tech or improvement of processes. Cost control is the name of the game.