A Chat With Dennis Garvey, chief operating officer, U.S. Cavalry

CS: How did you repair those relationships?

DG: You can talk the talk, but at the end of the day, if you don’t produce results, you’ll go nowhere. If you don’t follow up your statements with actions, it’s meaningless. You have to grow sales, pay your bills on time, and be the company that suppliers will seek out because they know you’ll grow their businesses. It’s performance. And we had some suppliers who took longer than others to come around. And my statement to them was “If you’re not with us now, you’ll definitely be knocking on our door in a year, because you’ll the see the business we’re giving your competitors.” As a broad line distributor, our goal is to grow the lines of our suppliers. We don’t do any private labeling, we don’t knock off our suppliers stuff. We have an approach where we grow their brand recognition and distribution. It’s been about delivering results. Those that came back on board later certainly lost out on a lot of sales.