Rebuild relationships carefully
Brooks takes honesty very seriously. It’s a cornerstone, upon
which he — and his father before him, as well as his grandfather
before him — built the Nelsonville-based footwear and apparel
business.
When he bid adieu to his largest customer in 1992, he didn’t permanently write it off as a bad apple. People can change, after all.
Therefore, companies can change, too.
As it turned out, that customer wanted a second chance.
“They stayed in touch with us and continued to kind of court us,”
Brooks says. “[They’d call and ask,] ‘Hey, when can we come back? We still like your product, and we could sell a lot of your
product,’” he says. “But we stayed away from them for about two
and a half years.”
Finally, Brooks acquiesced.
“I said, ‘OK. Let’s try it again, but we’ve got to follow some rules,’”
he says. “What’s interesting is they started buying the shoes again
and became our No. 1 customer again within 12 months. That
taught me a lesson that sometimes you’ve got to have tough love
with a customer. Sometimes you can go back and rekindle that
relationship.”
But it takes time. And the agreement to play fair requires continuous monitoring.
“They still play some of those games,” Brooks says. “They’re not
a customer I enjoy calling on or have fun with or really look at like
a partner.”
But the relationship remains intact and lessons have been
learned. The jump in Rocky’s sales was a nice byproduct, too.
“It was amazing to see how it skyrocketed from nothing to millions of dollars annually just like that,” Brooks says, snapping his
fingers. “They’re powerful.”
