The Dan Judge Founder’s Award annually honors a distributor or supplier who exemplifies the group’s core purpose, advocates for NetPlus Alliance, and is passionate about industrial distribution. This year’s award went to ORS Nasco CEO Kevin Short who has put more than three decades into the distribution industry. His most recent six years have been spent at ORS, a company that has been a loyal partner of NetPlus since 2007.
“Kevin has been a valuable member of the NetPlus Advisory Council and a great sounding board for the NetPlus executive team over the years,” said NetPlus Founder Dan Judge, the award’s namesake. Kevin’s vast industry experience and commitment to continuous growth recommended him for the honor. “Under his leadership, ORS Nasco’s sales to NetPlus Alliance distributors has doubled over the last four years,” Dan went on — not to mention, he’s a very understanding golf partner.
“It was a huge honor to be awarded the Dan Judge Founder’s Award. Many weeks after the meeting I’m still touched by that,” Kevin told NetPlus. “A lot of really impressive people have come before me having won that award. If we are making a small difference in the lives of the NetPlus community we’re grateful to be able to do that and honored to have been recognized.”
After the NetPlus Annual Meeting, we had the opportunity to speak with Kevin about what this industry means to him.
Q&A with Kevin Short
NETPLUS: What’s something you deeply admire about industrial distribution?
SHORT: Regardless of the products that we are putting in the hands of our customers, there’s something special about being able to help people run successful businesses from the middle of the supply chain. Success is defined not by the products you supply in all those different verticals as much as the experiences you create for your customers, the things you do to help them be successful, and the fact that in an increasingly impersonal world, relationships still seem to make a difference in the recipe for success.
NETPLUS: What is the key to building lasting partnerships in this industry?
SHORT: A couple years ago we brought a speaker named Stephen Covey in to talk to our team and some key suppliers. He had written a fantastic book called The Speed of Trust and reminded us that trust is not some hard-to-pinpoint thing. There’s an art to it, but there’s also science behind it. Doing what you say you’re going to do. Having credibility along
the way. Being able to talk straight with one another without hurting feelings or crossing lines. There’s a variety of things you can do to create more trust tomorrow than what you operate with today. And you know, that seems to be something that those who get it and build that trust up and down the supply chain seem to be doing better these days than those who are operating without it.
NETPLUS: How has your partnership with NetPlus Alliance benefited your business?
SHORT: Over half of our revenue as a pure wholesaler happens with thousands of distributors that are members of a variety of different groups and co-ops. NetPlus is one of our biggest and more strategic groups, and we enjoy supporting their efforts. We’ve seen some terrific growth over the many years that we’ve been part of NetPlus and so to say we’re all in would be an understatement. When you think about people all across our organization, you know that they care about the success of NetPlus and its members. In return, it’s helped us a lot in that the members have universally leaned into our value proposition. They get what we do to enable and catalyze their businesses. The size of this relationship in my six years has nearly doubled, a growth rate that would far outpace what the traditional market would have allowed.
NETPLUS: What do you focus on when creating strategies for growth?
SHORT: It’s important that we start with customization. When I arrived at ORS, we had a structure that was not as customized, flexible, or responsive as we are today. Most of my career has been spent walking in the shoes of my customers, so I think the empathy that we have for our clients is at an all-time high just because we understand the challenges that they face, the time pressures they’re under, and some of the frustrations that they have to endure.
We try to listen to what each and every distributor is looking for from us, and we try to meet them where they need us to be. I hope and I think that most NetPlus distributors would say that we’re just simply easier to do business with today than we were a few years back.
We take the privilege of taking care of our customers very, very seriously, but we don’t have to take ourselves all that seriously. As we’ve been able to grow and scale, it’s very important to me that we don’t act big; the bigger we’re blessed to get, the smaller and more entrepreneurial we intend to act. And I think that resonates specifically with the NetPlus membership because of the number of entrepreneurs in the group.
NETPLUS: How has the NetPlus community allowed you to explore new ideas and connections?
SHORT: We’re the only company in the room that’s both a customer and a supplier of pretty much everybody else in the room. Because we’re the wholesaler in the middle, it really is a very important community for us to be sure that we’re paying attention to both sides of our business. While most of the time we’re focusing on those distributor member meetings, we also get a great deal of value out of our supplier interactions as well. Putting our heads together with the manufacturing community to ask ourselves if there is a better way to take care of the NetPlus member needs from the supply side of things. Sometimes a direct relationship makes perfect sense. But I would argue that in these more volatile times, more often than not, it makes more sense to choose the wholesale solution. I hope the outcome is that we’re offering distributors multiple solutions, all of which would be in the best interest of their business.
NETPLUS: In what ways are you Empowering Excellence?
SHORT: You can’t have excellence without empowerment. What we don’t do in our business is run things up the flagpole. I recognize from my distribution background that by the time an opportunity or a challenge is identified on the front lines of the business, the centralized control center approach brings nothing but bad outcomes. If I needed to weigh in on everything, by the time that issue got to me it would be bigger and less manageable or that opportunity would have expired.
Our way of empowering excellence is to empower our people. Folks that join ORS are fully empowered as a decision-maker on day one. As we’re calling on the owners and operators of these distribution businesses, they expect that they’re dealing with a decision maker on our side, not just a conduit. Even if someone has only been with our company for a day, a week, or a month, I’m going to expect them to make decisions that far outpace their tenure with the company, and we stand behind them every step of the way. Not every one of those decisions will be perfect, but we like the idea of making 10 nearly perfect decisions in the time it would take one to make one perfect decision. And I think our distributor customers probably operate their businesses with a fairly similar mantra. That agility, that nimbleness, that customization is what will set them apart in their local markets.
