Attracting younger people to careers in distribution is an ongoing concern. Industry trade shows frequently feature educational sessions on the topic. And many associations have young executive groups to sustain networking information.

A distribution veteran like Bill Currie points to some characteristics a future distribution executive would do well to possess.

“There are a few attributes that are common denominators across the scope of young people making their mark in distribution,” says Currie, director of sales for Birmingham, Ala.-based distributor Perry Supply Co. “One of the virtues I look for is an inquisitive nature. Somebody to whom you never have to say 'Check into this.’ They are constantly digging.”

Mark Magstadt, who founded Hub City Industrial Supply (known as Hub Industrial Supply today), agrees with the need to alert young people to the future that exists for them in distribution.

“I still love the industry and it serves a good purpose to get young people interested in distribution,” he says.

INDUSTRIAL DISTRIBUTION talked with four such individuals, three of whom came into distribution from vastly different careers and backgrounds:

• One earned a teaching certificate, but left the classroom behind to help his parents start a distributorship;
• Another went from the financial and investment world to the hose and fittings world;
• One graduated college with a chemical engineering degree and did environmental consulting before entering distribution;
• And another grew up in a sales-oriented family, started his distribution career right after high school and hasn’t looked back. Today, he owns the company, but will tell you his education never stops.

Such hunger for knowledge is another trait Currie likes to see.

“Curiosity is a great trait—that inner drive and, to some degree, insatiable curiosity to ask, 'How does this work? How is this used?’” Currie says. “[That] prompts them to do more research and try to get the answers themselves.”

Among their many attributes, all four of these individuals possess that curiosity and thirst for knowledge and have tapped into an array of sources and influences to gain it.

Gabriel Curry is one of 10 children. Born in Chicago, he and his family moved to Florida, where his father, Jim, was a salesman for a distributorship selling to tool-and-die manufacturers. Gabriel and his siblings would hear stories around the dinner table of selling and customer service. From an early age, he was hooked.

After high school, Curry worked for a landscaping business and soon started his own business on the side (a small nursery that is still in business.) He also took a job in sales with a then-new company called Hub City Industrial Supply, co-owned by Magstadt and Scott Stewart (who would later become Curry’s father in law).

While Curry wasn’t a typical just-out-of-college hire, Magstadt liked what he saw, both in his eagerness to succeed and his family background. Magstadt looks back on the early years with him fondly.

“When I hired [Curry], he probably was my first outside salesman, in the very early days of the company, around 1995,” Magstadt says. “The company was very young at the time, so we had great opportunity for growth. He was definitely one of the main catalysts.”

No college? No business school? No problem, as Curry soaked up business knowledge wherever he could find it. As a salesman, he would “always be closing,” as the saying goes; as a novice businessman, he would “always be learning.”

“You can never [stop] learning. You’ll go out of business,” says Curry, who is 29. “If you look on the back of our business cards [today], our mission is to become the benchmark in every aspect of the distribution industry. ... We’re not there, but we continue to strive for that.”

Hub’s growth was steady as it accumulated customers from a broad range of industries. Branches were opened in other states and foreign contracts were signed.

Eventually, Magstadt found himself with a problem, albeit a nice one: His company was growing to be bigger than he ever imagined and was turning into a different sort of business challenge altogether.

“It grew bigger than I ever expected it to be,” Magstadt says. “I saw things on the horizon and, if it continued to grow in that direction, it was going to become a lot more work, a lot more risk and a lot more taking it home with me at the end of the day.”

One day, he and Curry were driving back from Macon, Ga., Magstadt recalls, and stopped for lunch.

“I asked him 'What would you think about buying me out?’ We went into this restaurant and he had his laptop with him,” Magstadt recalls. “He’d already worked spreadsheets and [profit and loss statements], salary projections.”

Curry clearly had ideas and ambitions—all of which reinforced the possibility of selling to him in Magstadt’s mind. The sale, with Stewart still owning his share, was completed in early 2005.

“He’s a guy who’s go, go, go and reach, reach, reach,” Magstadt says of Curry. “By pulling out the laptop, it showed he was looking ahead to the next step.”

But looking ahead doesn’t mean Curry has convinced himself he knows it all. He also realizes his limitations and knows when he lacks expertise. For example, he made sure to bring in an experienced controller, Kevin Kock.

“I work with people who are sharper than I am,” Curry says. “He understands numbers better than anyone I’ve ever worked with. [Kock has] worked for several large companies and he’s really sharp.”

Curry remains a salesman first, some days making 20 or 25 calls, he says.

“The thing I love about this business is there are a lot of relationships. If [a customer] is competing with China and there’s something we can change in the supply chain to cut a couple of hundred thousand a year off their P & L and add it to their profit—that’s a big deal,” Curry says. “That’s what I love about this business; being partners with each other.”

Curry makes ample use of business journals and books—not to mention sales tapes when driving to and from sales calls. His education continues in “the school of hard knocks,” as he calls it.

“My father-in-law told me, 'In life, you must have a million years experience to be successful,’” Curry says. “My goal is to get that million years of experience.”

A second-generation member working for the family company is not unusual in distribution. But what sets John Green Jr. apart is that he was there from day one when his family’s business—Green Rubber/Kennedy AG, an industrial and agricultural products distributor—first opened its doors in 1990 in Salinas, Calif.

After graduating with a degree in English that same year from the University of San Luis Obispo, Green had his eyes on a coaching and teaching career and did some teaching for a brief time.

“I loved it and [at the time] it was my career of choice. I fully intended to be a high school teacher and coach for the rest of my life,” he explains.

Meanwhile, both his parents (John Sr. and Patricia) were about to begin trying to fulfill their dream of running their own business, a distributorship catering to the farm and food processing businesses located in the Salinas Valley region of California—“the salad bowl,” as the locals call it.

John Green Sr. was a veteran of food processing-related industries and had been working for what is now a competitor of Green Rubber before setting out on his own.

“So I kind of put the teaching on hold to help my mom and dad get the business off the ground,” Green says. “We had a small office in the middle of town. Within five months we leased a building and crossed our fingers this was going to work.”

He admits thinking distribution would be a temporary detour. But he says he was hooked within the first year.

“Eighteen years later, I still say I’m a temp,” the 40-year-old Green laughs.

While the apprehensions and insecurities of starting a business were unavoidable for the Green family, there was still a palpable enthusiasm and excitement.

“We started with [just an] office, with no warehouse, no employees, nothing,” Green recalls. “But within a year, we saw measurable success and growth. We were struggling, but knew we had something of value.”

He draws a comparison between teaching and those early years in distribution.

“With teaching, you might do something and a kid would come up and tell you he had fun in your class that day,” he says. “That was extremely rewarding. As we grew, we had our customers refer us to others—that was just as rewarding. We all kind of fed off that for the first five or 10 years.”

Now a veteran of distribution himself, Green is drawn to the different challenges of Green Rubber’s work, combined with the independence their success has brought them.

“We enjoy the stability of our long-term successes. We’re not going to the bank every morning and hoping the deposit pays the bills for that day,” he explains. “We now have a little breathing room to reinvest into the business.”

Over time, in addition to food processing companies in the Salinas Valley, Green Rubber also gained business in Yuma, Ariz., where other processing plants are located, including the Fresh Express Co., a longtime Green customer.

“We owe a lot of our success to companies like Fresh Express,” Green explains. “We became a good supplier to them and they became a good customer of ours. We owe a lot of our success to similar situations.”

While he enjoys the business and its challenges, Green says he sees the irony in where he has ended up on his career path.

“I wanted no part of selling conveyor belts,” he laughs today. “But now that I’m on the inside, I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

As Green enjoyed the teacher-student relationships during his brief teaching career, so, too, does he appreciate the employees and their contributions toward Green Rubber’s success.

“I’d never take credit for the company’s success by myself or on behalf of my father,” he explains. “We owe everything to the people who work for us. We don’t have a lot of [employee] turnover. We take care of our people and they take care of us.”

While John Sr. is still the boss, John Jr. has a growing confidence about being able to assume that mantle someday—not that he’s anxious for that to occur any time soon.

“I know when ownership changes and second generations take over, there is a tendency for hard times,” he says. “But because I’m second generation, and we’ve both really worked this business and grown it together, I don’t fear the future so much.”

When she was studying political science in college, Jennifer Primus saw herself as a lobbyist someday, huddling with Congressional leaders about pending legislation.

But a couple of internships gave her a close look at the political work she’d be going into—and discouraged her from pursuing it any further, she laughs.

Primus grew up near Hershey, Pa. After graduating from Millersville University, in Pennsylvania’s Amish country, she worked in public relations in New York City. From working with investment companies that were clients, she soon became interested in the financial world, she recalls. Eventually, she accepted a position with the Vanguard Co. in Philadelphia, bringing her closer to home.

Her experience with Vanguard was in retirement investing, educating employees on how best to use their employer-funded 401K plans.

“I spent most of my time traveling around the country, meeting with employees about their employer-sponsored retirement plans,” she recalls. “I got to see the country and go to places I would not otherwise have gone. I did meetings at law firms in New York and meetings at factories in Mississippi, standing in front of a group of people at 3 a.m. because that was their shift. It was lots of fun and very interesting.”

These experiences also instilled in her a fascination with people who ran their own businesses. She wondered what went into it and whether she would be in a position to do it herself someday.

After getting married in 2003, she and her husband (Richard) moved back to the Hershey area to be near her family. Her father, distribution veteran Bruce Young, had started his own business, Tennco Co., two years earlier—at a time when more businesses were closing than opening.

“As he put it, he got sick of making money for other people,” Primus says, “and in 2001, he decided that he was ready to have his own business.”

By early 2003, Tennco was making some progress but was still a one-man operation, working out of a small Pennsylvania barn. Back home at this point, Primus herself was ready for a change, she explains, and approached her father about joining the business. She says she had to convince her dad to let her join forces with him.

“He wanted to steer me away from [distribution], wanted me to do other things,” she says. “But the business was getting to the point where he couldn’t do everything himself anymore.”

Like her father, though, “my dream had always been to have my own business, even though I didn’t know what it would be. So what better way to learn about a small business than to go work with my father?”

Once at Tennco, Primus was anxious to learn “the back office things,” as she puts it: profit and loss statements, payroll, accounts receivable—in general, how a business operates.

It was a desire that ran in the Young family. Her grandfather operated an industrial hose and fittings distributorship back in the 1950’s, she says. Her father started his career there after he finished college.

That company (Ronco) eventually went out of business, but Young stayed in the supply chain-related industry, always with an eye on running his own company someday. So it came as no surprise when his daughter expressed a similar desire.

“Now, my dream wasn’t necessarily to get into the hose and fittings, hydraulic and pneumatic business,” she laughs, “but I did want to see how a small business operates.”

So in 2003, she began working at the barn-office of Tennco. In mid-2004, the company was approached by a competitor (F & L Fittings Co.) that was interested in selling. As negotiations continued, a comfort level emerged. The deal was finalized and Tennco moved into F & L’s location in Camp Hill, Pa. Today, Tennco employs eight people, Primus explains, and their slow but steady growth continues.

“We’re still not a huge operation, but considering we started in 2001, we’ll probably do about $2 million this year,” Primus says. “So we’re proud of how far we’ve come.”

The more personal, day-to-day relationships Primus now enjoys were rare in the large corporate world, she says. And she is not just referring to the customer relationships alone. Working day-to-day with her father is another example, she says.

“I really enjoy that. I don’t think many people have the opportunity to spend that much time with their parents,” says the 35 year-old Primus.

In her early months at Tennco, she recalls, a phone call would come in for Young and Primus would call out, “'Dad, phone’s for you.’ I wasn’t sure if he liked that at first,” she recalls. “But I told him, 'You know, Dad, people do like that. They like that relationship we have.’ I think that has benefitted us in a lot of ways.”

After Primus’ daughter Claudia (now nine months old) was born, customers said they would enjoy seeing the infant at the office or hearing her in the background. It created a unique, family-experience for the customers, many of whom were also longtime friends. And it makes Primus all the more confident about her decision to leave a large corporation behind.

“At Vanguard, I had one job, one responsibility. Now I have many jobs and many responsibilities,” she explains. “We have employees we feel very responsible for. The decisions we make are impacting their lives, their financial well-being and their families directly. And I never had that responsibility before.”

After he received his degree in chemical engineering from the University of Massachusetts in 1998, Bart Yost began work at Roy F. Weston Co. (now Weston Solutions, Westchester, Pa.). He specialized in land remediation. On one job, for example, Yost was involved in a project to ensure that land once used as an Army base was environmentally safe and could be turned over to the public for general use.

Yost spent three years there and, while he enjoyed using his chemical engineering training, realized he wanted something different.

“After three years, I realized where I wanted to go wasn’t in … a large company,” Yost says.

Yost’s family has been associated with The Rowland Co. since the late 1960’s, when David Yost (his grandfather) bought the Philadelphia-based specialty distributor and fabricator of industrial power transmission components. Rowland has been in business since 1732 and is the oldest continuing company in Philadelphia and the third-oldest in the United States.

Today, Bart’s father Steve Yost is chairman of the board. His mother Helen is president and his younger brother Adam is general manager. Bart worked part- time at Rowland on vacations during high school and college, but working there full-time someday was not necessarily an inevitable move, despite the family connection, he explains.

“I did know it was an option I could get involved in, but I certainly wasn’t forced into it. [Rowland] wasn’t a required thing,” he says. “I was always familiar with the business and realized there were a lot of different options I could do here, in a smaller business.”

Yost started in outside sales and customer service. Eventually he took over a territory in the Maryland/Northern Virginia region. Today, he is vice president at Rowland and does a bit of everything.

“I do more general engineering stuff,” he explains. “A typical engineer in our business is a mechanical engineer, so I’m just using a little of my general engineering background and things I’ve learned being here and from other employees. We have a good core group who’ve been around a long time.”

Rowland has 14 employees and had sales of approximately $5.5 million in 2007, Yost says.

He says he spends less time on the road these days than he did a few years ago, but still enjoys meeting with customers in the Northern Virginia and Maryland area.

Like Jennifer Primus at Tennco, Yost also appreciates the contrasts and advantages of going from a large company to a smaller one.

“In a small business there’s always something to do and something different you need to get done,” he says. “You don’t have one person committed to doing that one thing. A person does a little customer service, some purchasing and some inventory. There’s always something different to be done. And I think that keeps things exciting.”

From visiting customers, Yost has developed a better grasp of the overall company picture, something he will surely put to use down the road.

“I get to see where we fit in with our customers,” he explains. “As I get more involved in the management end of the company, there are other challenges and things to do.”

Among those challenges is ensuring that the company will be prepared for the new, more technologically sophisticated product lines that come along. Clutches and brakes, for example, will always be in demand. But it’s having the right type of clutches and brakes that will enable Rowland to stay successful, he explains.

“A lot of our core products are not the wave of the future,” he says. “So we’ve picked up some new products and lines to increase sales. Those things are heading in the right direction.”

Though Yost says he always had a fondness for the company, he says he appreciates its accomplishments even more now that he is involved with its day-to-day intricacies. For example, he points out that Rowland exported parts to 15 countries on six continents last year.

“[We’re] a small company in North Philadelphia that can sell parts, not only throughout the U.S., but to Chile, Russia or China. We’ve done business all over the world,” he says.

The customer relationships have been beneficial for Rowland in ways other than profits, Yost says. Some ideas that have led to their adding new product lines have originated with their customers.

A few years ago, Yost explains, dialogue with customers resulted in their carrying a line of brakes used by overhead cranes.

“A sales guy might have heard from a customer about something they really needed,” Yost explains. “Sometimes another salesperson will say how their customer needs that sort of item, too. So we can go in and offer it fairly quickly. Being a small company allows us to adapt and change like that more rapidly than a large company.”