Rod Gowett had been president of Bay Tool & Supply for five years when he was invited to join Evergreen Marketing Group. An electrical, plumbing and HVAC distributorship headquartered in Milpitas, Calif., Bay Tool caters to a strictly commercial market, focusing on a service-oriented framework that boasts a specialized philosophy of not being everything to everyone.

Bay Tool was founded by Gowett and his partner, Mark Wilcox, and has grown from a one-location, two-man operation to a three-location, several-people company. A niche distributorship that is consistently fine tuning its place in the market, Bay Tool carries only the products that are necessary to its industry.

"The biggest thing in our lives is relationships and service," says Gowett. "I've been dealing with this customer base for almost 30 years, and I'm still dealing with the largest volume of customers in our company, and that's because of the relationships.

"In this business right now, you are never going to have the best price, so you need an advantage, and ours is the relationships and building them into a successful thing," he says.

As general manager of a similar distributorship for several years prior to starting Bay Tool, Gowett had dealt with Evergreen and its philosophies, and was pleased when the organization approached him about becoming a member of its group.

"It was, and still is, a very big honor to be asked to join the organization," says Gowett. "They don't ask just anyone."

Evergreen Marketing Group, a national alliance of independent distributors in the construction and industrial products industry, was founded in 1989 by six distributors. The founders knew that if they combined their resources into an organization, they could do more for the industry and themselves together than they could on their own.

"Right from the beginning, their focus was on giving something back to the industry," says Kevin Higginbotham, executive director of Evergreen, who has been with the organization since 1995. "At the least was to give those that joined the group something that wasn't being delivered in any other way, and that was primarily training and education."

Through the years, the organization grew from the original six members to 25 to its current membership of more than 60 distributors in the United States and Canada. Each distributor member owns a share of stock in Evergreen, and each has a vote in its major business decisions.

Stockholders continue to focus on training and education, a benchmark for Evergreen. The organization relocated its offices to the Dallas/Ft. Worth area in 1997, and established its own training center for members' employees. The school started with only a couple of programs a year, but expanded its offerings to more than 10 almost overnight.

"This past year, we did 13 different programs and had about 325 people through the center," Higginbotham says. "...Our training effort is an ongoing, comprehensive program designed to help our members develop their people. Big companies invest in training their employees, but it's difficult for the smaller company to have that focus, and we're able to provide that for them."

Evergreen established a certification program and certified eight tool specialists in the first year, and Higginbotham anticipates another eight to 10 in the coming year.

"It's an effort to help the members differentiate their business from the other people out there, but mainly from the national competitors," says Higginbotham, "who are dealing with SKUs and prices. We're trying to focus the members' businesses on having the smartest people out there on the street. Our view is that the smart people win, and over the long haul, the smart ones are the more competitive."

Bobby Williams is president of United Tool & Fastener, Inc., a construction tool and fastener distributor that services the commercial construction industry. Founded 17 years ago by five partners that were originally in competition with each other, United Tool is now owned by two of those partners, Williams and Steve Blackwell.

"There's not a single trade that we don't call on or sell to, so it's across the board in commercial construction," says Williams. "We don't double inventory, so we have very good partnerships with our vendors. We work with them instead of playing them against each other, partnering to go out with the common cause of beating both our competitors instead of fighting against the same product. That has always been our philosophy."

That vendor-friendly and business-savvy philosophy led to United Tool being invited to join Evergreen in 1998.

Headquartered in Houston, with a branch in San Antonio, United Tool is in a unique position to take extra advantage of the Dallas-based training facility, giving the company a direct avenue for training all the salespeople: inside, outside, counter and management.

"That was the most exciting thing, to really get us going in the direction of training," says Williams. "That's hard to do in house. Being only 200 miles away, we have people there every other weekend."

"In this industry, we'll see hundreds or thousands of people that we know," says Gowett. "There is the friendly competition that we have as business associates, but the bottom line is the people that you form relationships with in this organization are people you can trust. You work together and feel comfortable about sending the business their way."

The relationships between members of the alliance are spoken of in glowing terms, and conversations are peppered with anecdotes and stories of how they have helped each other.

"The relationships are unbelievable," says Williams. "When the hurricanes were hitting this past season, one of our members called me up and said that he didn't know if we were getting hit or not, but that he had generators in stock if we needed them, and he'd ship them to us."

Those partnerships are considered among the biggest benefits of joining any alliance or group. Members speak to each other regularly, and take advantage of each other as sounding boards to discuss the state of their industries, their business and sales. Some recommend each other to customers for state-to-state jobs and remote locations.

"We all know each other's work habits," says Williams. "I know that Rod gets up in the morning, puts on his jeans and goes calling on jobsites just like I do. So I know that if I call Rod, and one of my best customers is over in California doing a job, that he'll handle it just like I was there."

Gowett and Williams are both proactive members of Evergreen, with Gowett having finished his tenure as the organization's chairman, and Williams taking on the responsibility next year. As one of the board member's duties, Gowett made some site visits with Higginbotham to invite other distributors into the Evergreen fold.

Evergreen's criteria has been established since its inception, and with a few minor changes, has been adhered to throughout the years. But the main thing the organization and its board look for is a distributor who is a player in his market.

"It's not just a numbers thing," says Higginbotham. "We look at different markets and try to pick companies who fit: they pay their bills within terms; have outside salespeople; are compatible with the products represented by the group; are computerized; run a solid operation; are perceived by others as those who will partner with manufacturers; and have an orientation towards training and education."

No small list of requirements, but when the driving force behind an alliance membership is the quality of the member, those qualifications are paramount.

"We've talked with some big players, but if they don't fit the criteria, they aren't invited in," says Gowett. "We work hard to make sure that the people involved in this organization are here for the right purpose and reasons."

Joining a distributor alliance can yield big benefits, from partnership, education and networking to many other programs and business practice suggestions. While training and education are major motivations behind Evergreen's operating system, other programs are designed and enacted throughout the organization to foster partnerships and the sharing of best practices.

An annual partnership conference, with mandatory attendance by all members, brings together decision makers in the distributorships and major manufacturers in the industry.

"At the highest levels of the organizations, the distributors are developing contacts with the manufacturers," says Higginbotham. "Many of them couldn't do this kind of meeting on their own. We designed that partnership conference to bring those folks together."

At the grass-roots level, Evergreen designed a program called Planning for Profit, which is designed to get the distributors working with their local vendor representatives to plan and work together better. The program has been in action for more than 10 years.

Higginbotham praises Williams' action in that area, referring to his single-source focus. "Bobby [Williams] has very tight relationships," he says. "This is such a reactive business that we've designed a tool that allows the distributor to become more pro-active."

Williams agrees, and expands on the Planning for Profit program. "You pick, out of the vendors, five minimum that you are going to partner with over the next 12 months....Set up a strategic business plan for that year with quarterly reviews where you track numbers, meet with them once a quarter and discuss how you're doing. Set up ride-along days and counter days.

"Some people just get going along and don't think they need things like that," he says. "I think it's an easy way to refocus and really concentrate on things you should be doing anyway, but also growing and working together with the manufacturers. What we're doing at that point is recommitting ourselves to those vendors in a partnership."

Distributor alliances have become more prominent, and are sure to increase in number and memberships in the future. New partnerships and programs are sure to follow.

Evergreen's focus going forward is to continue to develop training and education, shifting gears from a primarily sales focus to include some more management training. The organization is moving towards a partnership with Texas A&M's industrial distribution program.

"We're hand-in-hand on developing custom programs for Evergreen people, and they are going to hold some of their classes in our training facility," says Williams. "We've offered our facilities, and they're working with us in developing more middle management and outside sales programs."

Adds Higginbotham, "That's a huge opportunity, and we're excited about pursuing it. We've been more focused on the selling side of the business so there's a whole fertile field of things to do with that."

One thing that Evergreen doesn't do is jump from program to program and fad to fad.

"We've stayed very focused on those few things, and work every year to just get better at them," says Higginbotham. "We're not quick to jump to the latest new thing. Companies do that because they're bored with what they're doing.

"We had some very smart founders, and some equally smart board members, and where we've needed to make some tweaks we have, but we've stayed pretty focused on the principles we were founded on."

Williams agrees, "Just because the industry changes, we know what it takes to stay successful: education and training, partnering with vendors, and keeping people in tune with what's going on."

Says Gowett, when initially asked what the best thing is about the group, "This is about what we can do to be the very best at our business, and being partners which each other makes it that much easier."