In terms of numbers, industrial distribution is still a male-dominated industry. But that's a perception that is changing, albeit slowly. Trade shows and association gatherings reflect a slightly increasing number of women than, for example, five years ago.

But women entering distribution today do not lack for role models. Industrial Distribution spoke with five women who, according to feedback we've received from colleagues and other executives, have made considerable contributions, to their companies' success and to the industry as a whole.

Kathleen Durbin, CEO of General Industrial Tool & Supply Inc., is treasurer of the Industrial Supply Assn. and is in line to become the group's first woman president in a few years.

Linda Murphy, CEO of Flex Enterprises Inc. of Victor, N.Y., has served on the board of directors of NAHAD—The Assn. for Hose & Accessories Distribution and is a member of the National Assn. of Women Business Owners.

Durbin, Murphy and the three other executives profiled here have all been influential in their companies as far as being more proactive in hiring and promoting women through their organizations. All five are enthusiastic about the professional challenges of running an industrial distributorship and are cognizant of the influence they can have.

“Being an entrepreneur is a wonderful environment and lets us show different ways of making a difference in the world,” says C.H. Briggs CEO Julia Klein, another of the women profiled here. “Growing a company, providing jobs and being active in the community—that's a great model for kids to see.”

How does a former UCLA basketball player go from a photographer's darkroom to working in California real estate … to industrial distribution?

That's the career path travelled by Kathleen Durbin, CEO of General Industrial Tool & Supply Inc. She grew up in suburban Los Angeles and attended UCLA, majoring in fine arts. She also played on the UCLA basketball team in the days before Title IX—a time when athletic scholarships for women were rare.

While playing there she injured her knee and, as part of her rehabilitation, she slowly jogged around the UCLA track. She fell into step one day with the man they called “The Wizard of Westwood,” UCLA's men's basketball coach John Wooden.

The Hall of Fame legend and the young point guard struck up a mentor-pupil relationship of sorts, Durbin says. While Wooden was on his power-walking workouts around the track, Durbin would jog along and listen to him discuss how to motivate athletes and get them to make the most of their abilities—a subject that, years later, Wooden would write about in the bestseller, “The John Wooden Pyramid of Success.”

“He used to tell me then about the foundation of success,” she says. “This was before he wrote his book. It was an experience I've never forgotten.”

Wooden's advice, along with playing for the UCLA varsity, taught Durbin lessons she still lives by, she says.

“That honed my competitive nature and taught me the necessity of being able to control the things I was able to control. In [basketball], I could control my training and conditioning,” Durbin says. “In business, I realized we don't have to be the biggest or offer the most things or have the most inventory. [And] that's how we go to market. We don't overreach on what we say we're going to do. But, in performance, we always try to overachieve.”

After graduation, she worked for an architectural photographer in Los Angeles before moving to the real estate field during the late '70s. It was a busy but profitable time to be in that business.

“The pace was fast and the clients were demanding, but the rewards were high,” Durbin remembers.

When she married and began to have children, Durbin figured she was essentially retired from the business world, although she maintained her interest in real estate. However, in 1983, her father, Charles Sawin, became ill. Sawin had founded, with a friend, what is today General Industrial.

When he passed away, Durbin's mother exercised her option to buy General Industrial. At first, Kathleen remained “retired,” but soon her two sisters (company president Karen Boyle and Joan Hoppock, vice-president of sales and marketing,) who had joined the company, asked her to come in and take care of some of the business aspects of their father's estate.

Their father's former partner was still at General Industrial and was essentially running the business, Durbin says.

“At that point, we were considered a general tool house,” she explains. “General Industrial held a large national cutting tool contract with Rockwell, [which was then] the majority of the business.”

There was a risk-reward associated with having all their eggs in one customer's basket. So Durbin and her sisters—not encumbered by the “we've always done it that way” school of business thinking—began to add more suppliers and product lines.

That was still a novel way to run a distribution company in the mid '80s, she recalls, and some of the company's older, male managers were “rubbed the wrong way,” she says today. The new ideas and guidelines did not go over well with everyone, to say the least.

“Our top three executives quit. My dad's partner, the general manager and … the vice president of sales [too]. These three were [essentially] running the company,” she says. “They referred to us as 'the ladies upstairs.' And never kindly.”

At this time, a consultant they brought in gave Kathleen some advice that she uses to this day.

“Don't do business with people you don't enjoy being with—including suppliers, customers and employees,” Durbin says. “To this day, in working with suppliers, it has to be good for the suppliers, the customer and, ultimately, for [us].”

That advice was taken to heart and by the late 1980s, Durbin and her sisters made more staff changes.

“Those were hard, but fair, decisions. But that put us [sisters] front and center. It was up to us to hold things together,” the 56-year-old Durbin says today. “There were a lot of new initiatives and, frankly, having young women involved in a business that was 'old boy' at that point was difficult for a lot of guys. But the industry changed and the iconoclasts that could not change did not survive.”

Today, Durbin's mother, Mary Sawin (87 years old), retains the title of chairwoman, although her day-to-day responsibilities are overseeing the accounting department. And while her three daughters were once among the few women working anywhere in distribution, today they are high-ranking executives.

But they did not lack for female role models growing up, Durbin emphasizes. She calls her grandmother, Sadie Simon, an immigrant from Syria, “My biggest role model.”

Sadie married Durbin's grandfather through an arranged marriage between families.

“She was happy her whole life,” Durbin recalls. “She had four children, my mother being the oldest. And she was a big supporter of women's rights in her own way; a big supporter of education and women having choices in their lives. She always had this invincible faith in my capabilities.”

Durbin is married and has three children, a son and two daughters, all of whom played varsity sports in college.

Durbin is also in the early stages of organizing a focus group with other women executives in distribution. She has spoken to some of her peers who have agreed to participate. It's a project she hopes to get off the ground later this year. Comparing notes and common experiences will be beneficial, she says.

“In business, especially small business, you need to be able to adapt and look at things from different angles,” Durbin says. “Ultimately you need to be creative in allowing people to guide you down a path and not be autocratic in running your own business.”

When Anesa Chaibi was growing up in Weirton, W. Va., she was always interested in the sciences. By the eighth grade, she had already decided to become a chemical engineer.

“I had a good friend whose older brother was a chemical engineer and from there I became interested,” she says.

She graduated from West Virginia University in 1989 with a chemical engineering degree and went to work for General Electric in its Technical Leadership Program. Chaibi spent the first two years rotating among GE's various business units in different roles and responsibilities, such as marketing, manufacturing and production, and research and development.

“It provided an opportunity to gain exposure across multiple industries in numerous functional areas,” Chaibi recalls. “It also let me apply my engineering and business fundamentals. That allowed me to identify what I enjoyed doing versus what I wasn't so excited about. … You have to enjoy what you're doing to be able to perform at the right level of competitiveness.”

After six-and-a-half years at GE, she went to Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, earning her MBA in 1997. Chaibi then went into management consulting for 18 months, until GE called her back “out of the blue,” she recalls. In 2005, she got a call from a former GE co-worker, Joe DeAngelo, who by then was heading up HD Supply.

She had worked for DeAngelo “for about four months” during her early GE days, she explains, and was pleasantly surprised at his call and his offer to have her lead HD Supply's Facilities Maintenance division.

“Anesa adds first-class business acumen, impeccable vision, world class execution and an extreme passion for delivering customer success,” DeAngelo says. “When Anesa joined HD Supply to lead our facilities maintenance team, we knew we had a winning combination that would take our repair, maintenance and operations business to the next level. I am delighted with how our facilities maintenance business is performing.”

It represented a great opportunity for Chaibi, especially when in 2006, the company acquired wholesale distributor Hughes Supply—challenging Chaibi and her staff to integrate Hughes' MRO business with HD Supply Facilities Maintenance.

And then came 2007. Early that year, HD Supply was put up for sale by parent company Home Depot. It made for quite a year of challenges, workload and anxiety, Chaibi says.

“To say it was challenging is an understatement,” she says. “But I think it was also a great opportunity—not only dealing with the divestiture of HD Supply from Home Depot, but my business unit in particular was going through a massive integration of the Hughes MRO division.”

So Chaibi found herself overseeing the integration of one business while simultaneously preparing to divest it from the parent company—something in which she was asked to play a key role.

Chaibi had to keep her luggage constantly packed. It was not unusual for her to receive a call in San Diego, where she is based, from DeAngelo telling her she was needed in Atlanta (HD Supply's headquarters) the next day to help with a presentation for potential buyers from private equity firms.

“I had to be available, at a moment's notice, to drop everything and fly cross country either to help close the deal or present what our business strategy was and how we were performing,” she explains.

In April, 2007, Chaibi was in Atlanta for more than two consecutive weeks, taking part in presentations virtually every day for prospective buyers.

Other than that, it was a relaxing year.

“It was a tenuous deal right up until the last minute. The challenge was to stay laser-focused … and keep our associates and customers calm [about] the implications of the divesture,” Chaibi explains. “The way to keep everyone calm was communication and [even] over-communication—and then communicating even more.”

In hindsight, it was an experience she is grateful to have gone through—once. Now that it's all behind her, she says, she's learned a lot about herself and the business.

“Although last year was brutal from the amount of transformational change involved, in the end it was a fantastic experience,” she says. “We're still standing and doing well.”

HD Supply Facilities Maintenance has grown considerably, with sales more than doubling since 2005 to upwards of $1.5 billion annually.

“That's been a combination of things, [including] organic growth across our verticals,” she explains. “And the Hughes acquisition added considerably to that.”

Chaibi oversees six separate verticals: Multi-family, hospitality, health care, commercial, institutional and industrial. Clearly, she has very few routine or normal days.

“If I had two days that were exactly the same, I'd be bored,” says Chaibi, who is 42 years old. “I'm a high-energy individual and I love the diversity of challenges.”

She has begun to see more women getting involved in distribution, especially on the management side, than when she started. While not yet a trend, she hopes the positive signs continue.

“This is a great space, in terms of being able to apply all the business fundamentals that you have,” she says. “I think it will evolve more and more. It's a great business and we're drawing in the right talent to develop and grow. I think we have the right environment to enable that.”

A native of Kalamazoo, Mich., Lori Kneeppel was a self-described “corporate brat,” whose father was a corporate executive who was transferred several times in his career.

Raised in Ohio, Lori and her family made one final move to Baton Rouge, La., just before she started high school. There, her father, Marty Kearns, was working for a man who owned several Louisiana companies, she explains, but reached a point where the two men were going to part ways. As part of the buy-out arrangement, Lori's father persuaded the man to sell him a small welding distributorship.

At the time (early '80s), the company was doing about $600,000 in annual sales, she estimates. Today, that no-longer-small distributorship is Gas and Supply, which ranked 30th this year on Industrial DistributionBig 50 list, with sales of just more than $210 million.

Kneeppel is Gas and Supply's president. But she took a fairly circuitous route before she joined the company.

Active in the Junior Achievement program in high school, Kneeppel “knew I wanted to pursue a business career early on. I'm pretty bossy by nature,” she laughs. “So I thought a [business career] would be the best place.”

She took a job with Procter & Gamble out of college, focusing on sales and marketing. After marrying, she decided to pursue a master's degree in elementary education. However, her husband passed away and Kneeppel took her studies in a different direction—she took a job in the training division of Comp USA.

“I started teaching computer classes at Comp USA and loved it,” she explains. “I evolved from that to sales and took to it rapidly and prospered in it.”

From there she went to work for Microsoft and later for Business Partners Solutions, in San Antonio, a company owned by Avnet. There she was a product manager and later advanced to running that department.

Kneeppel was slowly accumulating a thorough business background and experience that she'd soon find herself using.

“At this point, 2002, my father was starting to retire. He asked me to move back to Baton Rouge and get into that business,” she explains, referring to the company that was by then formally named Gas and Supply.

Today, Gas and Supply is “the predominant local player in the [Gulf Coast] area,” Kneeppel says. “We're very hard-goods, industrial-supply oriented. One reason we've been able to grow is we've been able to focus on strategy and acquisitions and look for what we should be doing to continue that growth.”

Her brothers work with her at Gas & Supply: Jeff Kearns is chief information officer; Mike Kearns is chief financial officer.

The transition from computers (sales or teaching) to running a company like Gas and Supply was not seamless, Kneeppel admits, but says she loves the day-to-day challenges.

“Here my focus is on all the things someone else would have been doing [in her previous companies]. You'd have the corporate that takes care of the HR, legal, insurance, employee benefits—even the recruiting, to a large degree,” she explains. “Now those are things I spend most of my time on, because our managers, who run things on a day-to-day basis, do the things I used to do.”

Her previous backgrounds helped her, but only up to a point, she notes, recalling her steep learning curve.

“I have a background in the financial side of things, the P & L, the planning,” she says. “But I had to learn a lot about other things.”

As an example, Kneeppel points to an area that is the bane of most business owners' existence these days: Employee health insurance.

“The biggest [transition] for me, at the time, was that our health care costs were escalating out of control. We were experiencing 20 percent hits two years in a row. We had to figure out how to change things to minimize that as much as we could,” she explains.

The company's policy regarding employee benefits clearly had to be adjusted and modified. In a decision that might seem surprising at first, Kneeppel and Gas and Supply decided to pay a higher, not lower, percentage of their employees' coverage.

“We changed what we paid of our employees' portion. Plus we put a sliding scale in place to encourage our younger people to join the plan,” she explains. “We had been paying so little of our benefits that only those who absolutely had to have [health coverage] and couldn't get it anywhere else were participating. So that was carrying our claims ratio.”

It was also making it harder for her company to hire talented, entry-level employees who might have a strong chance of moving up in the organization. It became a good example of a company spending money short-term to make money long-term, with more loyal employees leading to more consistent growth.

“Since those changes, we've been able to hire better people than we'd been able to get in the past,” Kneeppel explains. “We pay the [higher] amount we spend on employee benefits, but in return we got cost savings because we have more productive employees and less turnover.”

She sees more women in distribution and related industries now than in her early days in the business. Within Gas and Supply, she hopes those increasing numbers will continue.

“I try to make sure that our current management is considering women as potential candidates as much as they are considering men,” says Kneeppel, who is 45 years old.

“When I first started I was frequently the only woman at everything I went to,” she recalls. “Now, even in our own company, we've had many women go into outside sales, branch-management positions. I'm also seeing that in other companies.”

Early in her career, Julia Klein was more interested in being the next George Stephanopoulos than the CEO of C.H. Briggs Co.

Her grandfather, Harry Briggs, founded the distributor of building materials. And while her family worked in the Reading, Pa., distributorship every day, Klein admits she had little interest in the business growing up.

She had more interest in politics and public policy, she explains. Klein holds a master's degree from the University of Chicago in public policy. But she had an early mentor in graduate school who ran for public office and also operated a family business. Klein helped run one of his campaigns, she recalls.

“He gave me great advice to explore the business world and explore the distribution business in particular,” Klein explains.

Actually, the notion of working at Briggs was something she never could fully shake, she admits.

“My grandparents and my father were great models of entrepreneurial spirit,” she says. “That's something that's deep in my DNA. … I knew within the first couple of weeks that I loved it and it was a great place for me to be.”

When she began to think about joining Briggs some 20 years ago, Klein realized that her interest in public policy could come into play in the distribution business, she recalls.

“Running the show, and being able to create jobs as well as having a role in the community—both my geographical as well as my industrial community—had great appeal to me,” she says.

Klein, 46, became president of the company at 29, and its principal owner at 31. On the surface, studying polling numbers and conducting campaign staff meetings is a far cry from discussing plywood or marble prices, which are among the many products that Briggs carries. Yet it was a move Klein was able to manage, she says, although like Kneeppel, she admits she had a steep learning curve early on in her career.

“I'm always grateful and somewhat incredulous that the company came through that well,” she laughs, crediting co-workers for the success.

Like the other women profiled in this article, Klein finds herself energized by the lack of “normal days” in her life. There is no predictable routine, she says.

“I would describe distribution as a very busy business. We're very transaction-heavy, so a lot happens in a day,” Klein explains. “That creates a lot of excitement, but it can also make it difficult to see the big picture. You have to work hard to be sure the business as a whole is growing and not just the orders that day.”

Recently, Klein says, she was amused to read herself described as “an industry veteran.” But that veteran experience has helped her to ease the anxiety of some of her younger colleagues, who have never faced a down cycle like the one residential construction is going through. With residential building supplies among the product lines Briggs sells, the reverberations caused by residential's slump have been felt keenly at Briggs.

“In our industry—residential and new construction, remodeling and commercial—we'd been at the top of the cycle for a long time,” Klein says. “But I have people on my management team who have never been in a down cycle before. So make sure the entire business is making smart choices and remind them that this, too, shall pass. You just have to be smart about where you are.”

Klein was on an extended working vacation this summer. She is married and has a 13-year-old son who is growing up in a time when having a mother as a CEO is unusual, but not unheard of.

Does she see more women in distribution, specifically these days?

“I'd like to say yes. ... Distribution is definitely a family-oriented business. There are a lot of second-generation fathers who are retiring and are looking at where interest and talent is in their families,” Klein says. “Many of them have ambitious and high-achieving daughters. And they'll look to those family members. That's a positive development.”

At the same time, Klein sees only a slight increase in the number of women at the trade association meeting she attends.

“At those meetings, you [still] don't see a lot of women in the room; [you'll see] more than five or 10 years ago, but still not a lot,” she admits.

She doesn't pinpoint any specific reason, but she does have a theory.

“From the outside, distribution isn't a very glamorous business,” Klein says. “It's the kind of business you have to see from the inside to see how interesting and challenging it can be.”

Nonetheless, she remains upbeat, both about the future of her industry and about the prospects for women in distribution.

“It's a great place to use all of your skills and fulfill all of your interests. Anything that gets defined that way has definite appeal to women,” she says.

And a sense of humor helps. As she discusses her grandfather, company founder Harry Briggs, she wonders what he'd think seeing his granddaughter in charge.

“He's either delighted this has all unfolded,” she laughs, “or he's rolling over in his grave saying, 'Who in the world put her in charge?'”

Linda Murphy was born in Augusta, Ga. Her father was an engineer with DuPont, a job that required frequent moves for him and his family. In fact, Murphy had lived in 14 states before she was in high school, she says.

Becoming accustomed to change at a young age was helpful years later when she had to make a transition from a career in radio sales—working with such “product lines” as KC & the Sunshine Band—to being the CEO of Flex Enterprises and learning about products such as hoses and belting accessories.

In the mid-'70s, Murphy worked in radio sales after graduating from the University of Delaware. However, some men in the radio industry were unenthusiastic about a woman working in sales.

“In fact, I had been told by my first boss that women cannot sell,” she says. But Murphy finally talked him into hiring her, on straight commission, at a Rochester, N.Y., station.

Not all of her early bosses were cavemen, she says. Another early boss was very supportive of women. And she made sure his confidence in her paid off as she eventually became “the first and, at the time, only female sales manager in Rochester radio,” she says.

An early job was with a station specializing in “Kick Ass Rock 'n' Roll,” she laughs, referring to a popular format in the mid-to-late '70s. Later, she moved to a sister station that specialized in Top 40 material.

She and her husband, Guy Murphy (a salesman for Dayco, a hose and belting manufacturer), were happy living in the Rochester area, she explains. And when Guy received an offer from Dayco to transfer elsewhere, the couple decided on a different course.

“We both had grown to love living in the Rochester area. We didn't want to move. And besides,” she laughs, “I was actually making more than he was then.”

Wanting to remain in the area, the Murphys had an idea. They made a proposal to Dayco to become one of its distributors. The details were worked out and, as Linda recalls, “[Flex] started with a 1,200 square foot [space] and rolls of industrial and hydraulic hose and fittings. The day we opened it was snowing like crazy. The date was January 15, 1986—the best time to start selling products in Rochester.”

Today, Flex employs 32 people and expects its sales this year to be between $5 million and $8 million, she says.

Having made the adjustment from radio to hoses and hydraulics, Murphy was only beginning to face a series of adjustments and transitions as her industry, and her customers' industries, changed.

For example, Kodak is one of many customers Flex sells to. Changes in the photography business, such as the popularity of digital photography, have resulted in less demand for hoses, Murphy explains.

“Back in the '80s, we were selling a lot of 'wet technology,' like tubing used by [film] developers. Now that's turned to electronics,” she says. “We used to see orders from [Kodak] for 100,000 pieces—even 10,000 was a typical order. Today, we'll see orders along the lines of 250 pieces, 500 pieces. The volumes have been vastly cut.”

As a result, Flex has made some changes in its approach, she explains. In recent years, Flex expanded its OEM base, went after smaller to mid-sized customers and emphasized more value-adds, Murphy says.

“For the first five years, we did distribution of parts only. Things were changing and we had to change too. We saw some opportunities to do assembly work. So we approached more small and mid-size OEMs and added more service and equipment to do more things,” she explains.

Murphy has served on the board of directors of NAHAD—The Assn. for Hose and Accessories Distribution and is an active participant in many of the association's programs.

“You can always count on Linda. She was always a willing participant, one of the key figures,” says Sam Foti Jr., president of Hose Master Inc. and former president of the NAHAD Standards Committee. “I remember many times she'd fly to wherever she was needed in order to participate. She's a critical volunteer.”

As someone who knows what it's like to have been “the only woman” at various business meetings in her career, the 54-year-old Murphy says she sees some improvement as far as women in distribution goes. But just some, at this point.

Flex Enterprises had a female general manager who had worked her way up from a secretarial position, Murphy says. And they have many women in production as well as sales and management, she adds.

“But do I see statistically the proportion I think I should see? I'd say no,” she says. “But I don't know what we can do to attract more women.”

Murphy hopes to see more women enter distribution and share her enthusiasm for it as a career. A larger pool of talented employees would benefit her company and all distributors, she explains.

“It can be hard enough to find good people and train them as it is,” she says. “But there doesn't seem to be [a lot of] interest on the part of women and minorities [in distribution].”