Being a specialist really means something at Safety Today, a distributor of personal protection equipment and related safety services based in Columbus, Ohio. Just ask Kevin Morgan, MRO sourcing leader at Owens Corning in Toledo. Owens Corning buys protective clothing, eye, hand, hearing, and respiratory protection for its plants across North America, and says Safety Today brings to the table peace of mind, along with the required product offering and cost savings of today's business world.

"Safety Today offers true safety field specialists," Morgan explains. "You can find gloves in any catalog, but the difference is, Safety Today will come in and do fit-testing [and] life testing with the gloves. It's the value-add that you're getting from Safety Today, that you're not getting from the distribution catalog houses."

That kind of specialization is rare these days, especially in a company of Safety Today's size. With annual sales of $35 million, 80 employees, 10 locations across the United States and Canada, and a sister company in Brazil, the company meets the definition of mid-sized by many industry standards, and it is steadily growing. And while Safety Today does, indeed, employ safety specialists, it also offers customers the ease of catalog and electronic shopping that comes with being a larger player in the industrial marketplace.

Still, at the end of the day, safety is all this company does, and it's going to stay that way, says company president Ted Cowie. Cowie joined Safety Today five years ago, when the firm was in the process of reinventing itself. A change in ownership brought the former Twyman Safety into the 21st Century with a new approach to selling, a new name, and a marketing plan designed to show customers the value proposition this distributorship could deliver.

From special services to documented cost savings, that value proposition reflects today's supply chain strategies and moves beyond the old model of high-volume, relationship selling, says Cowie.

"Relationships are still important, but you need to bring the realities of supply chain management to bear in today's marketplace," says Cowie, who's spent the better part of his career in industrial distribution, working for Barnes Distribution and The McGraw Group. "We've slowly, but surely, been doing things differently since [2000]. The business is 180 degrees from where it was."

When Cowie joined Safety Today in August of 2000, the changes had already begun. One of the company's major problems had been its sales force, which was using a sales model he says was at odds with what the market needed. For the most part, the company's salespeople worked on 100 percent commission and were pushing products at the same customers they'd been doing business with for years. There was little thought given to cost-saving strategies or new market development. Safety Today wanted to go in a new direction—one that sold service, integrity and knowledge, and didn't simply rely on long-established relationships to keep the business going.

"It truly was a sea change," Cowie notes.

Andy Mitchell concurs. Mitchell is Safety Today's vice president of operations and has been with the company for seven years, witnessing first-hand the transformation from the old mindset to the new.

"Our customers are demanding a level of service, integrity and technological knowledge that they never were before," Mitchell says. "It's a totally different channel."

Safety Today changed ownership in the late 1990s, and that was the catalyst for the company turnaround. The idea was to focus on bringing knowledge and cost savings to customers, as well as to develop new business opportunities. The new model would require a major change to the sales structure, so they began by studying Safety Today's outside sales compensation plan. The examination revealed that the firm's cost of selling was double the industry average.

As Cowie explains, Safety Today moved toward a team approach to selling, and a compensation plan that aligned the sales reps' goals and objectives closer to the customer's goals and objectives. Today, customer service, inside and outside sales reps work together, where possible, to serve customers. And outside salespeople are compensated based in part on a documented cost-savings plan, which requires them to submit cost-savings ideas to customers and track the implementation and results of those ideas.

While these changes were taking place, Safety Today was changing its vendor philosophy, as well—mainly by developing "key vendor partners." These are manufacturers the company could work closely with to build business. 3M Corp. is one of those manufacturers. Safety Today sells 3M's complete line of safety products and brings a focus to the business that's lacking in many other companies, says 3M national sales manager Mike Martinez.

"First of all, they are very professional, they're very proactive, and they're strategic in their thinking, which you don't find very often these days," says Martinez, who's worked with Safety Today for five years. "They're looking at ways to add value to the customer by not sitting back on the old traditions. Many distributors sit back and do business as usual. Safety Today doesn't take that approach."

The third leg of Safety Today's new philosophy involved customers. The company didn't want to become a supermarket, as Mitchell explains. Instead, it wanted to focus on the product knowledge required to sell safety, and the cost savings that customers were demanding.

All of these changes bore fruit. On the sales side, just one of the firm's 22 sales reps in 2000 is still working for the company today. Cowie says quite simply that those who left didn't like the direction in which the company was headed. On the supplier side, the company increased business with one eyewear vendor by 35 percent in 2004, giving credence to its new key vendor philosophy. And on the customer front, Safety Today is building business via national accounts with big customers like Owens Corning. Nearly 70 percent of Safety Today's business is with multi-location corporate accounts. Morgan, of Owens Corning, points out that its Safety Today account has grown by 35 percent year-over-year for the last three years.

A major tenet of Safety Today's philosophy is, of course, the idea of remaining a safety specialist. That's no easy task, say Cowie and Mitchell, especially when general-line supply houses continue to add safety supplies and equipment to their product lines. But as the competition grows, so does the difference in the level of service each kind of firm supplies, they say. Mitchell explains that, in the last 16 months or so, many companies have begun to take a closer look at safety, realizing that much can be saved—in insurance costs and litigation, among others—by having a safe workplace.

And that brings a new facet to Safety Today's customer strategy: The firm is looking for customers for whom safety is not an after thought. Their logic is that if a safe workplace is important to a company, they'll turn to a safety specialist for advice. Cowie uses a "big box" store analogy: If you're looking for advice or help with a purchase, you don't go to Wal-Mart.

"A lot of our competitors are the Wal-Mart type," he says. "Our difference is, we have the ability to provide the knowledge on the spot."

Safety Today has invested much in training in the last few years to provide that knowledge. For instance, all but two of the firm's salespeople are designated Quality Safety Sales Professionals, a certification program sponsored by the Safety Equipment Distributors Assn., the Industrial Safety Equipment Assn., and the Safety Equipment Manufacturers Agents Assn. The company utilizes factory training by manufacturers, as well, and has also sent employees to other industry training programs focused on customer service and cost-savings strategies.

This approach has helped form a service offering that includes plant safety seminars, product and equipment testing, and programs that help customers adhere to new safety standards and regulations. Safety Today's sales reps can do all these things, which is a boon to customers that have lost in-house safety personnel due to downsizing in recent years.

"That's where a specialist really can be worth its weight in gold," Cowie says.

Mitchell points to government safety regulations as an example. Some of them can be hundreds of pages long, and many customers have neither the time nor the expertise to digest and implement them. With its QSSP certifications and other training, Safety Today can guide customers through the process. Though smaller customers are often most in need of that type of service, Cowie and Mitchell say firms of all sizes are turning to them for it.

Safety Today is always looking for new ways to grow its business. Whether by adding programs and services, or selling new and different safety items to customers, management and sales have their eyes on the horizon.

"We're trying to broaden the scope and involvement of our salespeople in looking at a plant," Cowie explains. "Now, to earn money, they've got to provide more cost savings, and look for more opportunities to solve problems in areas that the customer may not buy every day—but that they need at some time."

A benefit to this approach is that sales reps get to know their customers better and can anticipate their needs. A high-volume glove buyer, for instance, may need to order respiratory protection equipment for special projects a few times a year. That same customer may also want to take advantage of Safety Today's instrumentation rental and repair service, or its sound check program, which measures noise levels within a plant. On another level, a customer may want to make it easier for an employee to have all of his safety products for a particular job in one convenient package. Safety Today offers a kitting service to help with that, putting together duffel bags that contain all of the required items. Owens Corning is one customer that takes advantage of that particular service.

While this isn't a revolutionary new business philosophy, it represents a new way of thinking at Safety Today after years of doing business as usual. Hand in hand with this kind of sales growth goes strategic expansion of Safety Today's territory and market reach. Acquisition is a large part of that plan. The firm acquired a small repair center in Indiana in 2000, which provides services for portable safety instruments and Self Contained Breathing Apparatus' (SCBAs). Earlier this year, it acquired CIP South, a safety distributor in Deerfield Beach, Fla. and over the summer, it added coverage in the Boston area by acquiring some employees and inventory of Julius Kraft Co., a safety distributor that closed its doors earlier this year.

"We believe, with the overall trends in manufacturing, employment, and the push for efficiency, that gaining market share will be best accomplished by making smart and strategic acquisitions," Cowie explains.

In short, the best way to take business from competitors is by purchasing well-established, well-run companies, moving to new markets, and bringing Safety Today's value proposition to bear. Another aspect of that strategy is searching for new kinds of customers. Construction is one potential area. Safety Today does little business in that market today, but its Florida acquisition aims to change that. The company is looking to Texas as another possible place to enter the construction field.

Along those lines, the addition of people and product in the Boston area is aimed at opening the door to "cleanroom" business—selling to high-tech, pharmaceutical and similar firms, in which not only the safety of the worker, but the safety of the product is an issue.

"The cleanroom manufacturing that's there now didn't exist 15 years ago," Cowie explains.

It's this kind of thinking that makes people like Martinez at 3M and Morgan at Owens Corning pleased with their choice of Safety Today as a business partner.

"The way we look at their growth is that it's a positive," says Martinez. "It just confirms that they're one of the more aggressive organizations. They're not just sitting back—and that's important."

Adds Morgan: "They're focused on controlled growth. It's not just, go out and buy whoever is out there. It's a strategic growth, which is very in line with what Owens Corning does."

In the end, all of Safety Today's strategic thinking is aimed at one goal: finding the best way to serve customers profitably. As Cowie puts it, if Safety Today is doing its job right, customers will think of them first when a safety situation arises.

"Customers are quicker to change suppliers now," Cowie says. "Relationships aren't necessarily as long as they used to be, so you can't ever feel confident that everything's OK—even if you believe you're doing everything right.

"We're trying to stay ahead of the curve. We have to find more ways to touch our customers every day, and let them know the full array of support and capability we can bring to their operations."

Safety Today's Ted Cowie says knowledge and service are what sets this company apart from the competition.