Independent and regional dealers

What the big guys cannot copy is already on your payroll.

Commercial strategy and sales talent for independent and regional building material dealers.

A contractor does not call a company. He calls a person. He calls the one who knows his job, picks up on the first ring, knows what is actually in the yard, and gets it to him today. That relationship is the only advantage in this business that scale cannot buy and a national account team cannot reproduce.

It is also the one most dealers are quietly letting expire.

Tell me what is happening.What I actually do

The problem nobody puts on the agenda

Your best salesperson has been with you nineteen years and there is nobody behind them.

Your longest customer relationships live in one head. Your commercial and pro business is two years behind where you wanted it and you are being told to think about AI before you have a digital catalog.

None of that is a strategy problem. It is a people and sequencing problem, and it is fixable in that order.

I would not spend a dollar on AI before your customer can see your inventory and your price online. Technology is worth doing when it is finished, and most of what is being sold into this industry right now is not. What is finished, and what has always worked, is knowing the market faster than a company three states away and having someone trained to answer the phone.

What I actually do

Commercial and pro channel.

Build or fix the commercial side without breaking the retail and contractor business that pays the bills today. What to sell, to whom, at what margin, and who has to be hired or trained to hold it.

Sales organization and succession.

Who is actually producing, who is coasting on relationships that will leave with them, and what the bench looks like. This is the work most owners know they need and keep postponing, because it is uncomfortable and because there is never a good quarter to start.

A straight second opinion.

Sometimes the answer is that the model is fine and the market moved. Sometimes it is that a specialization would beat trying to match a national competitor on breadth. I will tell you which one I think it is.

Where the people work comes from

Loom Haven Advisors is our own search firm, for sales leaders and sales teams.

When the answer is that you need someone, they run the search. When it is not, they do not.

Loom Haven Advisors

Who

Director of Commercial Sales at The Home Depot, leading a $750M+ sales, operations and P&L organization for commercial sales. Before that, Regional Commercial Sales Director for a nearly $3B region, and human resources leadership across Home Depot Pro, formerly Interline Brands, the roughly $3B commercial business formed when Interline merged with Home Depot's core commercial operations.

I spent twenty years inside big-box retail and commercial distribution, and most of what I know about what makes an independent dealer hard to beat, I learned from watching companies try and fail to reproduce it at scale.

I now split my time between Spain and Florida, working with European manufacturers on their US entry and with dealers here on the commercial side. The two halves inform each other more than you would expect.

Tell me what is happening.

No deck, no discovery process. Tell me what is going on in the business and I will tell you what I think, and whether I am the right person for it.

Tell me what is happening.