Pitching safety
Bruce Kingman battles the 'price guy' with value-added services and the stance that investments in safety save money
By Susan L. P. Srikonda -- Industrial Distribution, 5/1/1999
THE OFFICE BRUCE KINGMAN MOVED INTO a few months ago is still a bit disorganized, but you can hardly hold that against him -- on most days, Kingman works out of his sports utility vehicle, transporting sample safety equipment in the back and using his car phone to make the most of travel time.The day I spent on the road with Kingman began shortly after 8 a.m. with Kingman loading equipment, including safety glasses, a spare gas detection monitor and airline respiratory protection equipment, into his SUV.
Upon reaching Boston's Logan International Airport complex, Kingman heads straight for his first stop: the office of Ray Stafford, safety manager for the R. Zoppo Corp. of Stoughton, Mass. Zoppo is a contractor working demolition and refurbishing projects related to an on-going $1 billion airport improvement project.
It's obvious that Kingman is a familiar, and welcome, face here.
"Not everyone will do this for you," Stafford said as he watched Kingman adjust a malfunctioning gas monitor. "A lot of times you buy a product and you get the kiss of death -- it's like buying a car."
Like many safety equipment distributors, Safety Source is a family business, owned by Kingman's father, Robert. Kingman and the rest of the family, including his mother and three brothers, focus on providing customers like Stafford with individual attention and service.
"I do so much running around," Kingman says. "It's a mix of troubleshooting and service calls, mixing in the sales calls with new products. And then there are times I've got to do emergency product deliveries. It's a catchall. Maybe because I'm in a small family business I do more of that."
After 14 years of serving customers in the greater Boston area, Kingman is entrenched in the family business and can't quite imagine a career outside safety equipment sales.
"It's definitely an enjoyable business. I know the players in the market, the end users, and I know the products," Kingman says. "At least for now, it's a great industry for me. As far as the future, unless something drastic changes, my brothers and I have an understanding and we'll do well to stick it out. We're not the little guy in our market anymore. We may not be the biggest distributor in Boston, Providence, Hartford or Worcester, but we're a major player in all of those markets."
Shortly after 10 a.m. Kingman arrives at his second destination, the Refuse Energy Systems Co., a trash-to-energy plant in Saugus, Mass. Inside, Kingman shows two styles of airline respiratory protection equipment to a plant manager and four men who will use the equipment to complete maintenance tasks inside the plant. Kingman says the workers will likely make the buying decision.
"The hard thing is typically getting by the front door or the point man," Kingman says. "Once you can get the products in some of the [employees'] hands, they love new, better ways of doing things."
The four men try the headpieces on, ask questions, and seem pleased about the equipment's air cooling capabilities because they work in high temperatures. Kingman's sales pitch is soft because he believes the equipment, which he leaves with them to test, will sell itself.
"In this case, the equipment is going to help them stay in there longer and work more comfortably," Kingman says. "That's expensive to do and a lot of companies may not offer that, but they're going to make up the money in the long run. It may take them a day now to do the work, whereas before it may have taken them two or three days because of the heat. They couldn't stay in there long enough."
Fighting the battle
The constant battle in safety equipment, Kingman says, is convincing companies that providing appropriate safety equipment is both the right thing to do and a sound financial investment.
"Safety equipment will pay for itself by reducing lost time injuries and perhaps insurance premiums," Kingman says. "If a company doesn't have gas monitors and they send a guy down into a confined space area and he dies, what does that cost when they could have bought state-of-the-art equipment for two grand? All a company has to do is buy the equipment and we'll show the employees how to use it and save the company potentially several thousand dollars."
For companies like Modern Continental Construction Co. in Cambridge, Mass., safety equipment is critical to the work it does on the Boston Central Artery highway construction project. For Katrina Willis, safety representative for Modern Continental, Kingman is a good resource for product information and training. Willis buys fall protection equipment from Kingman which workers use, for example, while doing slurry wall excavation, working out of manlifts, or working to form the column piers that will support highway ramps.
The battle is more difficult at companies that, unlike Modern Continental Construction, do not have dedicated safety professionals on staff, Kingman says.
"If you're selling to a human resources guy or somebody that may not be as well versed in safety, he may see his job as 'let's provide something decent and let's hope we don't have any problems,' " Kingman says. "But medium to larger companies with a dedicated safety specialist on site, they're the ones who can usually put together better safety programs and probably have better lost-time injury rates."
At West Lynn Creamery, Inc., in Lynn, Mass., Kingman is greeted by two dedicated safety professionals. He asks about the success of a previous glove order and then slides into a pitch about Safety Source's repair and rental service, leaving the customers with literature and a sample pair of safety glasses.
The repair and rental service is a new value-added service for Safety Source that the company hopes will help distinguish it from integrated supply competitors. The company also has a first aid and medical supply van service, provides extensive on-site training to customers, offers instrument repair services and looks for a competitive edge from its membership in the marketing group Affiliated Distributors -- Northeast.
"Obviously we'd rather sell [than rent] a unit, but it may not be in the best interest of the end user to want to spend two or three thousand dollars for a piece of equipment if they only need it for two or three weeks," Kingman says. "It's better to sell at least a value-added service for them and not go after the hard sell. A lot of manufacturers or contractors may not want to spend the money."
Competition subtly confronts Kingman on almost every call he makes. He may see a competitor's name before his on a company sign-in sheet or an integrator's catalog on his customer's desk. Even Kingman's office is a stone's throw away from a W.W. Grainger branch. But Kingman never acknowledges the competition to a customer -- his focus is always on solving the needs of the customer before him.
"We've got every kind of competitor, from your Graingers, your industrial salespeople, your tool guys," Kingman says. "We see a lot of tool guys running around selling safety. Are they specialists? I wouldn't call them specialists. Are they competitors? Yeah."
Service makes the difference
As the traditional lines drawn between regions and product categories are rapidly being erased, Kingman defends his belief that safety equipment is sold best through specialty distribution and that Safety Source will continue to grow laterally.
"There's a lot of things we do that are absolutely, totally separate from what your John Doe distributor commodity broker will do. He'll sell at 10 percent, 12 or 15 percent, whatever he can get ... but if that's all he does, do we even want that end user?" Kingman asks.
"Once you grab an end user and he buys your services, your training programs, the value-added parts of your business, you're not going to lose him as long as you keep up your service end of it. And then price is taken out of the equation and you get a decent margin on those accounts," Kingman says. "It's an on-going battle between the price guy and trying to get your message out as a service company."
Bill Judd, the environmental health and safety manager at Madico, Inc., a custom laminations manufacturer in Woburn, Mass., is the type of customer Kingman values. During Kingman's call on Judd, they discuss OSHA regulations for respirator products and compare product lines.
Kingman first solidified his relationship with Madico by providing respirator fit testing for three different shifts at the plant. He was willing to step into the role of the "bad guy" and stress the importance of some unpopular rules of the company's newly-instituted respirator program -- namely the respirator wearers' restriction to one day's growth of facial hair.
"When you have a technical representative like Bruce come in as a third party, you're removed from the controversy," Judd says. "It's not just the safety guy telling them the news, it's a technical professional."
"It's hard to get the kind of support I get from Bruce from other salespeople," Judd says. "I depend on Safety Source to be a quick, technical source. If I call up with a question about a technical application, most guys don't have a clue how to answer it. If Bruce doesn't know the answer right away, he knows where to find the answer. When it comes to people's safety and you're talking about exposure, you need a quick answer."
At Kingman's final appointment of the day -- at after 2 p.m. when he's running on breakfast and cold coffee -- he sat down with the environmental health and safety manager and the occupational health nurse at Alpha Industries, a manufacturer of semiconductor devices in Woburn, Mass. They discussed parameters for a plant-wide prescription safety glasses program at the end of which Safety Source will have fitted approximately 500 employees for prescription safety glasses and provided additional non-prescription safety glasses for visitors.
Kingman left them with a promise of a letter summarizing their meeting and a sample tray of polycarbonate non-prescription safety glasses to review. The time and detailed information that Kingman provided to those customers is critical in forming a positive relationship between the customer, the distributor and manufacturers like Uvex Safety.
"With safety glasses, we really do feel the need for those products to be sold and shown and [demonstrated] to the customers so that the end users know exactly about our line," says Jane Viscolosi, Uvex's Northeast territory manager. "We have a variety of lenses and sizes, and we also have welding and laser eye protection which gets very technical. Without sales reps we wouldn't always capture the sale of those products -- salespeople like Bruce are really good at digging for additional applications."
Back on the road at 3:30 p.m., Kingman checks in with his inside sales staff at the company headquarters in Sturbridge, Mass., winds his way back through traffic to his Watertown office and begins to think about lunch.
SELLER SNAPSHOT
Name: Bruce Kingman
Years in distribution: 14
Sales territory: Greater Boston
Core products: Safety equipment
and supplies
Company: Safety Source Northeast
Headquarters: Sturbridge, Mass.
1998 company sales: $6.5 million
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