 When Angela McDowell is biting her nails, knowing she has to get a particular product to another town in “no time flat” – and also knowing that the product hasn’t yet rolled off the line – she breathes a little easier knowing that Charlotte-based Bonded Distribution is on the case, ready to spring into action once she calls.
Although McDowell isn’t her actual name—in the distribution/logistics industry, competition is so tight that suppliers don’t reveal client names — her situation is very real indeed. McDowell’s company produces folding cartons for pharmaceutical and automotive products, and often those cartons are being redesigned and reprinted particularly close to distribution.
Asked if there’s ever a time when Bonded Distribution has come through in a clinch, she chuckles. “Oh, just about once a week. They’ll stay open longer, or open on a Saturday, if we need them to. That’s just the nature of the business. We try not to let that happen too often, but they take it in stride.”
Such attention to customer service is the primary reason that Bonded Distribution www.bondeddistribution.com has remained a Charlotte success story for over 30 years, according to its president, Scott Carr. “We’re very detailed, very driven to make sure that things get done right the first time,” Carr says, emphasizing that, industry-wide, the typical client contract is renewed every 30 days—so even the slightest slip-up could be costly.
“We’re not perfect, but when something comes up, we find a resolution to it, solving problems as they occur,” he continues. “We’ve had clients on 30-day contracts for over 20 years now.”
Distribution companies traditionally have served as a warehousing and shipping “arm” of their clients — companies that don’t have or don’t want to maintain the massive warehouse space needed to store items. Bonded Distribution, like others in the industry, receives client inventory at the warehouse, sorts it, stores it, then ships it and tracks it to those destinations via full or partial truckload, airfreight, and package services such as UPS or FedEx. Client companies like McDowell’s find it cheaper and more efficient to outsource these functions.
Over the years, Bonded has gone beyond the traditional, adding special services such as returns processing, contract packaging, labeling, and shrink-wrapping. Its clients’ industries are diverse, ranging from grocery, to medical, to health and beauty, to retail accounts.
Client loyalty is “cyclical” throughout the distribution industry, Carr says, especially when the economy gets tight. “There was zero loyalty there for a while,” he says. “People would change [distribution] companies at the drop of a hat, over [savings of] pennies. They didn’t take into account all the intangibles, all the things they’d need over the long haul.” Carr’s pride is obvious when he says that Bonded may have had clients leave because their distribution networks changed or their customer base shifted or their manufacturing sites shifted—“But we’ve never lost a customer to a service issue.”
How It All Got Started
Bonded Distribution has been owned and operated by the Carr family since 1972. Scott Carr’s father, Jim, had started with General Foods as an accounting/ auditing trainee. Subsequently, he worked as export operations manager and then, in 1962, was promoted to manage a new distribution facility to be built in Charlotte, N.C. General Foods was an innovator in distribution at the time with a “new” corporate concept of consolidating freight into single shipments to their customers. Once the startup was completed, he moved onto another facility in Ohio and finally back to New York as distribution development manager.
Jim Carr was partial to his experience in the friendly town of Charlotte, however, and started looking for new career opportunities in the South. His strong resume landed him a distribution management position with a cookie baking company where he stayed for three years, “with designs of trying to start [his own company] in the commercial warehouse business,” says Scott Carr.
He got the chance when an existing company, Terminal Bonded Warehouse, sought a buyout. Carr bought the company and leased its 30,000-square-foot warehouse, keeping the “Bonded” part of the name for its brand recognition, and also because the word itself—bonded—denotes security: client packages would remain as secure as ever in the hands of the new owners.
The new company had five employees: Jim, his wife Robin and three others. Jim is still chief executive officer, and Robin is the company’s executive vice president. In the first year, the company built a strong network of shipping contractors, a reputation for integrity, and sales of $120,000.
One of the Carrs’ daughters, Barbara Woodall, remembers roller skating in the warehouse when her parents would work on weekends. “They’d give me a broom to push while I was skating,” she laughs. Woodall “just kind of wound up” at Bonded after first working the retail floor for a department store chain and then as a travel agent. She started in the warehouse office, answering phones and performing data entry. Today she’s the company’s purchasing manager and also handles the payroll.
Scott Carr, 14 years old and attending Carmel Junior High when his parents started the company, worked summers sweeping floors, unloading trucks, whatever tasks were needed. “Growing up at times you want to do anything but be part of the business,” he recalls, thinking. “You have mixed feelings about it.”
Scott earned dual degrees in business and marketing from Western Carolina University, then returned to Charlotte to help with the family company. He first led a small trucking company that Bonded owned, often going on the company’s many statewide routes to get first-hand knowledge of the state’s highway system, and also discovering the stumbling blocks particular to trucking delivery services—plus how to overcome them.
When Bonded divested the trucking company in the mid-1980s to focus on building the company’s core logistic capabilities, Carr became a manager at Bonded.
The Company Today
Thirty years after its birth, Bonded retains an extended-family atmosphere—even though it now occupies six buildings throughout the city, totaling more than 900,000 square feet (and another, opening in October, will add 175,000 square feet), and employs 160 people. Some of the management staff has stayed with the company for more than 20 years. Even the “newer” employees, as Carr refers to them, average between eight and nine years’ tenure.
“We put a lot of stock into getting good people, and keeping them,” Carr explains. In the late 1980s, when demand for skilled labor increased as the pool of applicants decreased, Bonded began offering comprehensive benefits to its employees. Carr believes that the company’s high retention rate is more likely due, however, to the work environment: “We create an atmosphere where people can take pride in their work,” he says. “Everybody gets along, and they don’t mind coming to work.”
As a result of this supportive atmosphere, employees tend to feel part of the Bonded Distribution family, responsible for the company and each other. Woodall shares the story of an employee's daughter and her family who lost all their possessions in a tragic house fire just before Christmas 2000. “Bonded employees banded together,” Woodall says, donating food, furniture, new toys, clothes and nearly $2,000 to the young family.
Moreover, the team spirit extends throughout all levels of the company. Robin Carr, for instance, works out of a cubicle, like everyone else. “Some customers probably don’t even know she’s the owner, and she likes it that way,” says Lynn Daniel, whose company, The Daniel Group, is advising Bonded Distribution on business development strategies. He says he has telephoned the offices as early as 6:30 in the morning, in order to leave messages prior to the workday, and wasn’t surprised when she answered the phone.
“She’s unbelievable,” Daniel continues about Robin. “I think she’s been the heart and soul of that organization, along with Jim. They’re an extraordinarily neat team.”
Scott Carr declines to release Bonded Distribution’s current annual sales. Daniel adds that business has doubled since his company began working with Bonded in 1998—all without doing very much marketing or advertising; they have retained enough existing clients, and attained plenty of new ones through word-of-mouth referrals, to remain profitable.
Let’s Talk Logistics
With the pace of business becoming more rapid than ever, Daniel is helping Bonded Distribution through the growing pains that occur when any small company gets larger. As a result, he says, Bonded has added new managers to its already strong management team, controlled its labor costs, helped employees more clearly understand their responsibilities, and added new services, particularly those that easily allow customers to get information about their warehoused product.
The most cutting edge, naturally, are those based on instantaneous transmission of information. Used to be, clients relied exclusively on the telephone or fax machine to learn about their order’s progress or to sign off on authorization forms. Now, Carr says it isn’t unusual for him to get 100 to 150 e-mails each day.
“What did we do without e-mail?” he laughs, remembering that the age of electronic mail began only three years ago. “It’s so much easier, and a lot more convenient than picking up the phone. It’s enabled us to stay closely in touch with our client base, and to get authorization and paperwork done. We depend on it.”
Since clients have become more computer-savvy, Bonded recently added a function to its Web site called LogiView. Using a secure password, warehouse clients can view their inventory status, obtain reports and enter their own orders. Meanwhile, shippers can view receipt, inventory, and shipment information about a single warehouse or across multiple distribution points.
To reflect Bonded’s expanded services and capabilities, the company is in the process of transitioning to a new, “more inclusive” name — Bonded Logistics, Inc.— which will become the company’s official name in the first quarter of 2003. The name change, says Carr, is an evolution, demonstrating to prospective clients that Bonded is a full-service chain management group — much more than traditional distribution.
At the same time, Bonded will push beyond its traditional boundaries, increasing marketing efforts to land new clients beyond the Charlotte market, and beyond the South.
“If you stand still, you don’t grow,” Carr explains with a smile, referring to the old saying that change is the only constant. “It’s a cliché – but it’s true. And if you don’t strive toward that change, then you’re stagnant.” |
