Gordy Holmes: A New Strategy For Success

Gordy Holmes,the SVP Marketing & Sales at Connelly/CWB Board Co., has been around the industry for a long time—long enough to be able tell it straight without a lot of floss. No surprise, this past year has been a tough one, full of difficult daily business decisions. But according to Holmes, Connelly/CWB Board Co. is using the same sensible, go-slow approach it’s used in the past—and he says the most successful retailers are quickly following suit.

 

What has the past year taught you about your business?

First off, I’ve never experienced anything like this before—and I’ve been in this business for a long time. I’ve never seen quite the impact, economically, and how widespread it’s impacted our business and the business of our dealers—both here in the states and around the world.

Typically, when our economy here in the States falters, the U.S. dollar weakens. As a result, the cost of our product overseas drops. This time the foreign currencies went down in value instead of going up. That raised the cost of our products overseas. Typically we’d be able to sell more of our product overseas to make up for a domestic shortfall, but that hasn’t happened. It’s been a double hit on us and for other businesses in our industry as well.

Because of that, we’ve really had to focus on our inventories. The same thing is happening with our dealers. They are focusing on what they have in stock and they’re not as interested in having the depth of inventory they’ve had in prior years. They are watching their inventory, ordering less, and they are expecting us to have it in stock for the reorder period. That means we’ve got to watch our inventories as well. The emphasis on us importing product from China or other countries, and the fact these supply channels take time, makes that a challenge. When we’re out, it takes us longer to respond.

But in terms of running our business, most of the things we’re doing today we’ve done in the past. We’re placing a greater emphasis on some of the things we do to be smart businesswise, but I don’t think we’ve changed the way we’re doing business.

When you take a look at your business as a whole, what are your key strategic advantages?

The fact that, historically, we haven’t had excessive inventories left over has been one of our advantages. Everyone has carryover product, but I think when you look at our industry we’ve done a better job controlling our inventory so we didn’t have a mountain load of stock remaining. That’s been important to our success.
 

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