Five Years on the Customer’s Side of the Counter
From 2003 to 2008 I ran sixteen lumber yards and kept a list of what nail suppliers did wrong. Most of Cordell’s distributor policies come from that list.
From 2003 to 2008 I was the customer. I ran operations for the central region of a lumber and building-supply distributor: sixteen yards, two truss plants, a distribution center and more than 130 trucks. Nails were a small line on our income statement and a large share of my phone calls.
I went into that job as a manufacturing man who thought he understood customers. Five years later I had a list of things my own former employers did that cost distributors money, and most of what Cordell does with its distributors now comes off that list.
Fill rate
We bought nails from six suppliers in those years. The cheapest one was also the one most likely to short-ship us in May, when every framing crew in three states wanted the same handful of items. When a yard runs out of 16d sinkers on a Tuesday morning, the contractor goes down the road, and he buys his lumber and windows there too.
Saving a few cents a pound on nails can cost a dealer a whole house package. I knew that before I worked at a distributor. I felt it for the first time when I was the one taking the call.
At Cordell, the number I look at first in the customer service report is on-time, in-full: the share of order lines that arrive complete on the date we promised. It has been above 96 percent every year since 2022. I want it at 98.
Lead times
Every supplier I bought from promised two weeks. About half of them meant it. The others told me what I wanted to hear and planned to sort it out later.
A distributor can plan around a real four-week lead time. A two-week promise that turns into five is much worse. Cordell publishes current lead times by product family to customers every Monday, and our customer service team knows to give bad news early. Nobody at Cordell has ever been written up for telling a customer an order would be late. Two people have been for keeping quiet about it.
Price letters
The price letters I received ranged from professional to insulting. The worst arrived on a Friday, took effect Monday and explained nothing. The best gave thirty days’ notice, explained the reason and came with a phone call from someone who knew our business.
Cordell gives thirty days’ notice on every change. The rod adjustment follows a published index, so customers can check our math, and when rod falls, our prices fall on the same schedule. Distributors who see the decreases arrive on time tend to believe us about the increases.
Boxes and pallets
After a distributor buys nails, it has to receive them, store them, pick them, load them and explain them to a contractor at the counter. A manufacturer can make each of those steps cheaper or more expensive.
On the distribution side I dealt with labels that changed every year, barcodes that didn’t scan and pallets too tall for half our racking. At Cordell the labels are the same on every box and every pallet. Pallets top out at forty-two inches unless a customer asks for something else, because that fits most yard racking and box trucks. The Jackson plant also builds mixed pallets now for smaller dealers who can’t take a full pallet of every item they stock.
Staying out of their way
A manufacturer is always tempted to sell around its distributors, straight to the big contractor a distributor spent years building up. The margin looks good on paper for a year or two.
Cordell doesn’t sell direct to contractors in markets where our distributors sell. If a contractor calls us, we give them the name of a distributor. We lose an order now and then that way. Our distributors know we do it, and they mention it.
The council
In 2019 we started the Cordell Distributor Advisory Council: twelve customers, large and small, from across our markets. They meet with us twice a year, once in Danville and once in Jackson. They walk the plants, look in the scrap hoppers and spend most of a day telling us what’s annoying about doing business with Cordell.
The forty-two-inch pallet came out of those meetings. So did the mixed pallets and the Monday lead-time report. None of them were complicated. Our customers had been living with the old way for years because nobody had asked.
If you run a manufacturer that sells through distributors, go spend some time on their side of the counter. Ride a delivery truck. Work a Saturday at the contractor desk. Be in the yard on the first warm Monday in April.