Secrets To Success: How Supply Chain Services Tripled Its Business

Five years ago, Chip Emery, a retired big-business CEO, bought a small-time, 8-year-old reseller startup, Supply Chain Services.

At the time, the bar-coding VAR was profitable, with $9 million a year in revenue, but Emery, the owner and CEO of the company, simplified the business. Five years later, the company has just come off its most profitable year in its history, pulling in $25 million in revenue, and is set to make an additional $30 million this year.

So what radical changes did he make to drastically grow the company? Well, as Emery said, it was really quite simple. He just had the company focus on what it did well.

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"One thing that we did when I bought it was to focus on where our expertise is," Emery said.

"I learned very quickly that our expertise was in warehouse, distribution and manufacturing, so I made the leap of faith and decided, 'Why don't we focus on what we know and stop talking about selling to hospitals and municipal government, and point-of-sale equipment in the retail world, and health care? Let’s just stop all that stuff."

Emery had the Minneapolis-based company focus its energy on just three major markets, as he said you can only do two or three things really well at the same time. If you try to take on more than that, you're taking on too much, he said.

Initially, Emery's sales team said he was limiting their horizons, but he convinced them that by going after warehouse, distribution and manufacturing, they were spending more energy on a billion-dollar market from which about 98 percent of their business was coming. He emphasized that with more focus in those areas they could have a larger presence there.

"We've been running at roughly a 20 percent compound annual growth rate for the last five years and expect to keep right on doing that," Emery said. "We haven't done that through acquisition. It’s all by building, by employing people, by training them, educating them and then implementing a very disciplined sales and technical support process. And what amazes me is, it works. It amazes me in the sense of this market has not been growing 20 percent a year ... but we've been growing 15 to 20 percent."

Emery said his company believes in working closely with customers, and has instituted a policy of when a sales rep visits a customer, they never go alone. Sales reps are always accompanied by a technician during on-site visits for the client's benefit.

"It sounds trivial, but the magic is that the IT competence is usually what closes the deal," Emery said. "Yes, the salesmen are important because they find the opportunity and have to go through the contractual terminology and negotiations and all that, but, ultimately, it's the experienced IT professional that walks into your warehouse and talks to you in your language and addresses your problems."

As one final note, Emery highlights that employee morale and company culture are very important parts of his business' makeup. "It's huge. We spend a lot of time talking about our culture," he said. "One of my personal objectives is that Supply Chain Services should be a great place to work. You should come in every day thinking, 'I can’t wait to get to the office because it’s so much fun. It's so exciting.' We empower people to set their own goals with a broader perspective, and then we make a lot of noise when people are successful. What keeps you working for somebody is when you get a lot of recognition for doing well ... and when you get a sense that your company cares about you, not just in terms of your profession, but also as a person."

When Emery bought Supply Chain Services, the company had a total of 14 employees, and he said that not one of them has left. At the same time, the VAR has more than tripled its staff population since then with more than 45 employees today.

PUBLISHED APRIL 3, 2015