Addressing the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors annual Executive Summit, George Pattee, chairman of Parksite Inc., a Batavia, Ill., distributor of building materials, focused on lessons learned as Parksite grew a small one-location operation over his 47 years with the company, to a wholesale distributor with 20 locations in the Midwest and the Eastern Seaboard.
“If you can get your company to the point where you are so far ahead of your competitors that they can’t keep up,” that’s a good position to be in.
“We focused on the customer of our customer. From its early days, instead of just focusing on builders – its customers – Parksite focused on the builders customers and firms that supported them, including architects and others. “We’d take a cooler with us,” he said. “Sometimes it would have water and sometimes it would have Old Style.” The process created demand, and, Pattee said, “Creating demand is still working today.
The company began diversifying its product line when DuPont Co. developed Corian. “We had all our employees, from truck drivers and warehouse workers to senior management talk about what was working, what wasn’t working, what we could do,” Pattee recalled.
The objective wasn’t – and still isn’t – to win by skinning a partner. “Everybody in the supply chain has to win,” he said. “Everybody has to be profitable.”
A bit later, DuPont invented Tyvek. There didn’t seem to be much of a market, except, perhaps, to make envelopes for FedEx. “This was during the energy crisis,” Pattee recalled. One of the partners asked what would happen if we wrapped houses in it, sealing drafts, prevent heat from escaping and cold air from entering. That business is a $1 billion business today, he said, adding:
“We knew collaboration with suppliers would be important.”
Parksite is an employee-owned company, he said, with 700 employee-owners. It has made six acquisitions in six years. “Diversification is good,” he concluded.
Pattee’s speech to the Executive Forum was his last as chairman.