Itasca, Ill.— Employees at Sanders Tools and Supplies exhaled sighs of relief April 17 when president Hunt Taylor told them that a group of other investors had bought back the company. Sanders was part of Integra Integrated Procurement Solutions, which went out of business earlier this spring. A group of some key employees, including vice president-general manager Sue Koehler, re-acquired the company for $6.3 million. Taylor, whose father, Harold Taylor, was one of five partners who opened the distributorship in 1938, will remain as president.

Integra acquired Sanders Tools and Supplies two years earlier for its specialty services in cutting tools, abrasives and precision instruments.

Koehler said that when the announcement came that the company would return to being an independent regional distributor, "there was such a huge amount of emotion in the room: relief, excitement to gratefulness. And they're the ones who did it.''

It would have been easy for Sanders' 40-plus employees to become demoralized due to Integra's bankruptcy in mid-March. Instead, they pulled together as a team in remarkable ways, Hunt Taylor and Koehler said. Sanders' suppliers also showed tremendous support, even though many took a big hit as Integra's creditors, he said.

Associates "got on the phone with customers, putting things on their own credit cards to get product to the customer," Hunt Taylor said. "They did it because they realized that ... if we were going to survive this, this is what we had to do on a go-forward basis."

"The accounting people were here until 10 o'clock at night applying invoices to open orders," Koehler added. "When we finally got product in, the shipping department worked extra, worked on weekends. When we had to close one office in Chicago because we were relocating it, one Saturday everyone came in to help out and pack up.''

A decision was made a day after Integra's bankruptcy filing to return every call and explain the situation to vendors and customers, and no one flinched, Taylor said. Most of Sanders' accounts have been retained, although he acknowledges there were some losses in the Chicago market.

"Since then our focus has been communicating with the customer and to the vendors, how exactly the process works,'' he said.

There are immediate concerns like getting away from cash advance and COD terms to paying in discounted terms whenever possible, as Sanders did in the past. The company did $38 million in sales last year, recently added a new office in St. Charles, Ill., as a sales hub for the Aurora market.

Looking ahead, Taylor and Koehler are evaluating Sanders' role in the integrated supply market and whether the firm can participate in "preferred supplier" deals. Caterpillar is one such customer that works with select, key suppliers rather than a lone integrator.

Mostly though, Sanders looks optimistically ahead.

"We've got a good young management team in place now. I'm proud of them," said Taylor.