"The company made a strategic shift from
order-taking to account-selling," Gail O'Roke says. "We came to grips with the
fact that forms business was going away. We began concentrating on different
products and technologies." Today, office products account for approximately $4
million in annual sales at the $10 million distributorship. A rapidly growing
portion of that business is conducted through IBG's new e-commerce solution at
www.ibgsolutions.com. (See screen shot above.)
In January 2001, Gail O'Roke succeeded
her father as IBG's president, and she became CEO this month. Ted, who owns 45
percent of the company's privately held shares, now works part time as the
firm's chairman. He consults with Gail about once a week, he says almost
apologetically, "just to track the money and to feel like I know what the hell
is going on." When he sees Gail in the office, he says, he thinks leader first
and daughter second. "I stay out of her hair because she's an excellent planner
and a great communicator," he says. "I've always told her the toughest part of
running a business isn't figuring out what's happening--accountants can tell you
that. It's figuring out what will happen. We're in the prediction business, and
we're better off today with Gail's vision at the helm."
Leading While Listening
It's 9 a.m., and Gail O'Roke stands in a
small kitchen at IBG's headquarters. She slices a bagel in half, takes a bite
and wipes the counter with a paper towel. She walks toward a table where several
IBG employees are standing. Someone asks her about Julia, commenting on her
daughter's petite size.
O'Roke nods and says, "She still uses a
car seat."
Another person asks, "How long until she
won't need it?"
"Hopefully before her prom," O'Roke says
with a straight face. "That might not be good--my daughter stuck in the back
seat of a car on her prom night."
The kitchen erupts in laughter. O'Roke
bites into her bagel again. It's a typical Thursday morning--droll chitchat that
will give way to customer-focused drive.
"This isn't a high-stress place," O'Roke
says while walking from the kitchen to her desk. She doesn't have an office,
preferring to foster an environment where employees can approach her easily with
questions or ideas. A few feet from the desk is a small partition that includes
O'Roke's scheduling calendar and a few of Julia's drawings, including one of an
elongated cat and another of a Christmas tree. O'Roke purchased the tree drawing
for $1, negotiating down from Julia's asking price of $100.
IBG's family-friendly atmosphere has
helped the distributorship enjoy a low turnover rate since the company began in
1982. Seven of the firm's original 13 employees are still with the company. IBG
employs a total of 40 people at its locations in Hayward and Las Vegas, and more
than half of them have been with the company for six years or longer.
In 1998, when O'Roke was president of
the firm's Independent Business Products and Writeway divisions, she took a
manager-profile test. To gain her attention, the profile concluded, a person had
to be brief, bright and gone. "One of my problems was that I'd multitask in
front of others," she says. "I'd type while someone was talking to me, and I
thought that was just being efficient. Now, I try to slow myself down and
listen. I've learned you can solidify or change your perspective only when you
force yourself to understand the other side." Every few months, she listens to a
CD version of Stephen Covey's book, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People.
The right ideas, she believes, often come from left field.
"No ideas are squashed here," says Brett
Morrison, who was hired as IBG's customer service manager in December 2000. "At
some companies I've worked for, there's the corporate policy and that's it.
Here, ideas are received and discussed in a positive way. I knew that
immediately about IBG."
Earlier this year, in an effort to
recognize staff accomplishments, O'Roke began a system in which employees give
thank-you tokens to each other when they feel it's deserved. Employees save the
tokens to collect prizes ranging from Starbucks gift certificates to weekend
getaways. "I believe thanking people is a big part of management," O'Roke says.
"I don't think that notion was bred into me."
Ted O'Roke prefers execution over
exaltation. While he's a proven entrepreneur, he says he's more comfortable
leading a staff of 20 or 25. "Communication isn't necessarily my strong suit,
but it's one of Gail's," he says. "She's more comfortable leading a larger
company. I'm probably more comfortable anticipating trends."
One management trait Gail O'Roke shares
with her father is an uncompromising view of business ethics. When Ted O'Roke
left Moore, the company offered him a job in California and would have paid for
the move. Knowing of his plans to quit, he left the company first and paid for
the move himself. "He's the most honest person I know, and I hope I emulate
that," Gail O'Roke says. She has: Twice after performing discovery sessions for
Strategic Outsourcing Program prospects, IBG recommended the companies stick
with their current suppliers instead of switching to IBG. "We're not going to
steer customers down a path just to satisfy our goals," she says. "When clients
think of us, I want them to immediately think great people."
As an attractive female in a
predominantly male industry, O'Roke admits some printing pros probably see her
at DMIA events and immediately think woman. "I realize that diversity in the
forms industry used to mean 'This one has a mustache,'" she says. "Still, I
don't sense much of a stereotype. Have I run into the occasional jerk who makes
rude comments? Sure, but who hasn't? I don't feel out of place by any means. I
feel more like one of the guys, actually. Plus, it's nice to have a shorter line
at the bathroom."
Royal Treatment for Strategic
Accounts
When Gail O'Roke lists IBG's current
offerings--printed products, graphic design services, prepress services,
promotional items, office supplies--she does so methodically. When she discusses
the company's Strategic Outsourcing Program, she does so excitedly.
IBG's Strategic Outsourcing Program is a
procurement plan for clients that purchase at least $50,000 worth of products
annually from the distributorship. The company completes 3-month operational
analyses of clients' buying, warehousing and distribution methods, focusing on
ways to reduce soft-dollar processing costs associated with tasks such as
product research, quote requests, production coordination, shipment scheduling,
invoice reviewing and internal distribution. IBG employees call these analyses
"discovery sessions." If they determine savings potential exists, they customize
a program with measurable, guaranteed savings. In return, clients generally
agree to buy all their office consumables from IBG for at least two
years.
When IBG launched the program in 1998,
three support people worked exclusively on it. Today, nearly all of the firm's
37 support people have some responsibility to maintain satisfaction levels at
the key accounts. (They also support traditional, "non-program" sales.) IBG's
three salespeople--Pat Reilly, Jim Sanchez and Dennis Blair--often explain the
program to prospects. Approximately 80 percent of space in the distributorship's
18,000-square-foot warehouse is used to store products frequently purchased by
IBG's 30 strategic accounts.
O'Roke says ideal prospects for the
Strategic Outsourcing Program include companies that operate multiple locations,
use a variety of printed materials, want a sole supplier, or need a more
efficient way of determining inventory levels and annual printing costs. After a
discovery session, she says, one client was surprised to realize it had been
using 32 vendors for office products. Another with 250 employees was buying 51
different kinds of pens and receiving hundreds of small invoices instead of
summary billing. "What we're basically selling is our expertise and a more
efficient way of buying items," O'Roke says. "We're intent on helping clients
reduce their costs and concentrate on their core business. IBG puts tools in
place, like our e-commerce system, to help them order easily and to give them
more control over how and what they buy."
Just as a queen relies on royal
advisors, O'Roke taps the expertise of her employees. Under Reilly's sales
tutelage, she began meeting face to face with qualified Strategic Outsourcing
Program prospects last year--her first sales experience in the industry. (She
jokes that she "worked her way up to camera manager" while working at Walgreens
drugstore in Chicago.) "Gail jumped in with both feet," Morrison says. He has
accompanied her on sales calls to a few large clients. "She has a natural
ability to make customers feel comfortable," he says. "Her forte is printing,
but she quickly has built a command of the office products business. Watching
her explain IBG's value is like watching a clinic on how to understand clients'
points of view."
|
IBG's web site
(www.ibgsolutions.com) includes a demo of Dealer Station, the
distributorship's e-commerce solution for office products offered by
Dallas-based software developer DDMS. IBG's customers can access an
electronic catalog that includes more than 48,000 office products, as well
as photos and product descriptions. When clients submit orders, picking
tickets are printed automatically in the firm's warehouse. IBG sends a
purchase order at 5 p.m. daily to United Stationers. The next morning,
ordered products arrive at the warehouse and are delivered to clients via
IBG's vans or United Stationers' National Express Delivery service. The
e-commerce solution, which generates approximately $2,500 a day for IBG,
includes customized features, including order approval, maximum-order
limits, and immediate access to frequently purchased and best-value
items.
|
Until it began working with IBG, San
Francisco-based California Savings Bank used an in-house system to distribute
printed products and office supplies to its 18 branches in the Bay area. The
company sells primarily residential-apartment loans and employs nearly 200
people. Richard Wuerthner, the bank's chief operating officer, says delivering
items to the firm's branches was problematic. "Our delivery guy would hit each
branch about once a month," he says. "We needed a way to provide better service
to them and to do so without increasing staff." Wuerthner says he was impressed
with IBG's ability to provide next-day delivery to any branch while providing
contract savings backed up by annual reports. "Today," he says, "we're getting
more production out of the same people because we don't have to worry about
distribution or elevated costs. That's a significant increase in value to us,
and we're more than pleased."
Looking Ahead and Fostering New
Allies
In January, Gail and her father met in
what she calls IBG's "leather room," a small but well-furnished meeting room
that includes two black leather sofas. The topic: The distributorship's Writeway
division had lost two large hospital accounts to Corporate Express. The accounts
generated 30 percent of the division's annual sales. She had decided to close
the division and save the company about $50,000 a month. He expressed his
backing for the decision and his sympathy for what his daughter was about to do.
"To let 11 people go is not a good feeling," she says. "It meant quite a bit to
me that he was there for support." The O'Rokes reminded each other about the
importance of looking ahead to future business instead of relying on past
successes.
Ted O'Roke says he and IBG's partners
would consider selling the distributorship, but only for the right price. "It's
not salable at the moment because of our downturn last year," he says. (The
company's fiscal 2001 sales were down 14 percent compared with fiscal 2000.) He
and Gail O'Roke say a more likely strategy is forming new alliances with other
distributors and software suppliers. IBG formed a relationship in April 2001
with The Landmark Image, a distributorship based in Vacaville, Calif., led by
former DMIA Board member Ray Goodson and his wife P.J. Landmark touts IBG's
office products expertise to some of its customers, and IBG gives Landmark a
commission from sales received from Landmark's client base. IBG bills those
clients using both its and Landmark's logos. The companies have made joint
proposals to three firms; all three are mutual accounts today. "It's rare to
find someone you can trust, plus has integrity in what they say and do," says
P.J. Goodson, Landmark's president. "It would be easy for Gail's company to
compete directly with our company. But her actions have shown that friendship
and business ethics are more important. We strengthen each other's weaknesses
while not stepping into each other's common product lines. It has become a
win-win."
IBG also partners with several software
companies, most of which develop and market software packages for retailers and
the medical industry. In exchange for promoting IBG as their preferred forms
provider and supplying the distributorship with contact information of new
software users, the distributorship pays the software companies a sliding-scale
commission ranging from 3 percent to 15 percent. To attain top commission,
software firms must meet certain criteria, including placing a link to IBG's web
site on their sites and providing quarterly user-list updates, exclusive product
endorsements and mention of IBG in promotional materials. IBG mails its software
partners monthly commission checks along with statements that describe what the
companies did to earn the commission and how they can earn more the following
month.
Putting Family Into
Perspective
In the next hour, Julia will run to the
refrigerator in Ted and Marge O'Roke's kitchen, looking for sweets. She'll dance
down the hallway, suddenly performing a pirouette. She'll hop toward the
dining-room table, circling it while singing. Now, though, she sits in front of
Gail O'Roke with an intense look on her face. They're playing the card game "Go
Fish!"
Julia's losing. She motions for her
mother to come closer and says audibly in her ear, "Ask me if I have any
fives."
Gail asks, "Julia, do you have any
fives?"
"Ha!" Julia says. "I don't! Go Fish!"
The O'Rokes gather every Thursday
evening for dinner at Ted and Marge's townhouse. It's typically a modest
affair--this evening, Gail's sister Cathy has made pasta and Caesar salad--with
plenty of conversation and good-natured ribbing. Pitner and Ted O'Roke are in
the living room, drinking beer and watching the San Francisco Giants-Oakland
Athletics baseball game. Gail's sister Mary's two daughters, 17-year-old Becky
and 13-year-old Meghan, are looking at a magazine. Marge, Cathy, Mary and Gail
are chatting in the kitchen.
In a while, Pitner asks if anyone has
seen Julia lately. No one has, but moments later everyone hears the quick thud
thud of footsteps down the stairs. Julia runs toward her grandfather, holding
three old and rare books.
A few years ago, after finishing yet
another book about Tudor England, Gail O'Roke considered writing a book of her
own. It was going to be about historical perception, how people draw vastly
different conclusions from the same facts and documents. "The only little
hang-up I had," she said earlier, "is that I really can't write." If history is
written by victors, perhaps O'Roke should be ready to pen a few pages. Her long
hours and sound ethics have led her to the top of a respected distributorship
and now to the top of an industry association.
Gail O'Roke opens the front door and
moves outside to the driveway, where the rest of the family is chitchatting.
Pitner's hands are hanging by his sides. He's not holding a camera, but he's
taking in the scene: Here is Julia in a sundress, jumping by herself in front of
the garage door. Here she is spotting her mother and running to grab her legs.
Here is Gail, his radiant wife of 17 years, the person he first noticed with
that nasty scab, hoisting Julia onto her shoulders. Here, Paul's wide grin seems
to say, is a moment worth capturing.
Darin Painter is managing editor of Print Solutions. Email
him your comments at dpainter@PSDA.org.
