A Chat With Dennis Garvey, chief operating officer, U.S. Cavalry
We’ve made a lot of converts out of our suppliers as well. That was a lot harder in some ways. A lot of our employees saw it as an opportunity to capture something early on. We weren’t a startup, we were a restartup. A lot of folks saw that potential, and the dedication of the management team. The supplier base had been through some tough times with the old ownership and management, and we had to work harder to regain that trust. As much as you try to explain it to them, it was hard for some to recognize that this was not the same company in many ways. From the standpoint of ownership and management, we inherited a lot of sins of the past and we had to prove to our suppliers that things were going to be different.
CS: How did you repair those relationships?
DG: You can talk the talk, but at the end of the day, if you don’t produce results, you’ll go nowhere. If you don’t follow up your statements with actions, it’s meaningless. You have to grow sales, pay your bills on time, and be the company that suppliers will seek out because they know you’ll grow their businesses. It’s performance. And we had some suppliers who took longer than others to come around. And my statement to them was “If you’re not with us now, you’ll definitely be knocking on our door in a year, because you’ll the see the business we’re giving your competitors.” As a broad line distributor, our goal is to grow the lines of our suppliers. We don’t do any private labeling, we don’t knock off our suppliers stuff. We have an approach where we grow their brand recognition and distribution. It’s been about delivering results. Those that came back on board later certainly lost out on a lot of sales.
