The first two days were rather quiet.
Rose Jenne, her husband, Ray, and her father sat in the rented warehouse in Westlake, folding, stapling and stamping the 6,800 fliers she had ordered to distribute to every interconnect in the country.
“The first day we mailed 1,000 of them,” recalls Jenne, president and CEO of Avon-based Jenne Distributors. “The second day, we folded more and mailed them. By the third day, the first 1,000 that we mailed hit and people started getting them.”
That’s when the phone rang.
“I wanted to answer it and (Ray) Senior wanted to answer. Everybody was arguing over who was going to answer it,” Jenne says. “So they ordered one of the phones, and then all of us wanted to pack it up. We all helped pack it up and put the tape on the box. We shipped it out C.O.D.”
Jenne’s first sale: $37.
From that small order in 1986, Jenne has built a communications products distributors that is on pace to post revenue of $45 million by year’s end. It is a 50 percent increase over last year, which was a 40 percent increase over the year before that.
With an infectious smile and an effervescent personality, the petite blond runs her company like a mother overseeing her loved ones. And, indeed, many family members serve important roles in the business. Ray Jenne Sr., Jenne’s ex-husband, is vice president and sales manager. Her sons, Ray Jr. and Dean, are executive vice presidents and have been with the company since its inception — they used to arrive after school to pack orders for shipment.
But while her family has always supported her, Jenne didn’t always have the support she needed from the business community. In fact, she almost shut the doors on the operation before it ever got off the ground.
Jenne’s success was recognized in June when she was named Entrepreneur Of The Year by Ernst & Young LLP in the category of distribution services. Jenne will be the first to admit it’s been a long road to get where she is today.
Here’s how she’s done it.
Find your niche
Jenne knew she had a good idea for a business. The problem was convincing the telecommunication manufacturers to sell her their products for distribution.
“With the telecom industry, when you go all the way back to Ohio Bell, and all the Bell companies, we were all leasing them (phones) from the Bell company,” Jenne says.
Bell installed new phones and replaced broken ones. But, when industry deregulation hit, the process changed. Manufacturers which made the phones began distributing them to electronics sellers, whose primary products had been televisions and radios. Jenne knew that creating a distribution center that focused solely on communications products would do two things: It would help centralize the highly fragmented industry and help the rising group of interconnects provide better service to their customers.
The one problem: Jenne had to sell her idea to the manufacturers.
“I called all the manufacturers,” she says. “I left my name and number and they said they would have somebody call me back.”
But most of those calls remained unreturned. The ones that did call back didn’t see much value in Jenne’s plan. It got to the point, she says, where “I would almost beg them on the phone.”
Not one to take no for an answer, Jenne finally reached an interested ear at Panasonic. A rep came out and spoke with her for several hours before returning to Panasonic headquarters with a promise to present Jenne’s proposal to company brass.
“About 10 days later, he gave me a call,” Jenne recalls. “It was about 10:30 at night when the phone rang. He said they were interested and the credit manager was going to come out. I was so excited.”
Panasonic not only was interested, it wanted to work with Jenne to get her concept off the ground. It worked with her banker, and even provided the fledgling company with a buy-back agreement in which Panasonic would take back any merchandise unsold after 30 days and reimburse Jenne for her costs. It was the support she needed to move forward with the plan.
Six months later, another manufacturer, Cobra, agreed to supply Jenne Distributors with its product. After that, it became easier to convince manufacturers of the validity of her business model.
Within five years, the roles changed. Instead of Jenne pursuing distributors, asking them to let her sell their products, distributors began to call her, asking if she would add their products to her catalog.
Respond to need
Deregulation opened opportunities everywhere. When Jenne started, nearly 14 years ago, there were fewer than than 7,000 interconnects nationwide. Today, there are more than 30,000. Each of those companies provides product and service, and each needs a reliable vendor.
Electronics stores may understand the intricacies of their electronic devices, but they certainly didn’t fathom the significance of the phone in a business’s daily operation.
“That phone became an SKU number in the guy’s inventory,” Jenne says. “They didn’t realize that telecommunication is something you need every day. Your phone is something you use every day, just like toilet paper.”
That’s why Jenne demands her staff members become experts in the products they sell.
“We’re not order takers,” she says. “(Our sales representatives) are all technically inclined. Every piece of product that somebody’s calling in to buy, we know how it works, what it works with and what it doesn’t work with it. We’re sales and applications.”
Because of this focus, the team at Jenne Distributors tries to anticipate its customers’ needs. Explains Jenne, “We watch TV at night. We can tell where in the United States there are storms. We know we’re going to get a flood of calls from that state the next day.
“You know what’s happening and you know they’re going to need service in that area.”
Manage it all
Jenne’s operational side has undergone recent changes. She’s expanded her personnel and recently brought in a new CFO to oversee the financial direction of the company. He’s also been involved with the strategic plan.
“We just finished our old one,” Jenne says. “We do that ahead of time. We know where we’re going and we’re all on the same page. We’re building the infrastructure as we go along.”
While the operational side is well structured, Jenne must still deal with daily people issues.
“Some days it’s really hard,” she says. “But every day is different. Sometimes it seems like the mood around here is so fantastic, nothing could ever crush it. It’s almost like waves that come in full of energy.
“And then there are other days where it’s more of a challenge. Those are the harder days, where if something is going to go, it will go wrong.”
No matter what type of day it is, customers are always the focus. So when the person on the other end of the line is somewhat surly, Jenne reminds her staff to keep it in perspective.
“People don’t wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and say, ‘I think I’m going to be a jerk today.’ That’s the kind of thought pattern we try to keep in our mind,” she says. “We realize the person on the other end of phone is upset about something and it’s up to us to try and turn them around the best way we can. We remind ourselves of that (and) blame it on the moon.”
With that type of attitude, Jenne imbues a motherly instinct throughout the organization.
“I talk to everybody in the company like they’re my children or my family,” she says. “Maybe that’s what makes it easier. There’s no pretense. We all treat each other the way we want to be treated.”
And, as in any family, you have to forgive mistakes. Oddly, in one sense, mistakes are even welcomed.
“Everybody in the company admits mistakes if they make a mistake,” she says. “Nobody plans on making an error. But you can’t do anything right unless you do make errors. How can you find (anything) out?
“New employees who don’t have that mind frame when they come in, eventually they do, because we’re just all trying to do the best we can.”
To help ensure each employee gives it his or her best effort, Jenne developed an unique incentive program. If the company reaches a certain level in sales revenue for a month, for example, $4 million in June, every employee receives a $150 bonus. That way, even the members of the warehouse team encourage the sales staff to excel.
In June, it went down to the last day of the month. The staff monitored progress by means of a drawing of a cellular phone posted on the wall near the lunchroom. Each button represented about $333,000. With a few days to go, it looked like they would make it with room to spare, Jenne says, but a somewhat off day put that into question.
The team met its goal around 2 p.m. on the last day of the contest.
Maintain the spirit
Anyone who has ever met Rose Jenne knows her passion for her business. She exudes an energy that permeates the company. While some attribute to Jenne’s love of her business, she adds another reason.
“I love God so much,” she says. “I’m not perfect. I screw up all the time. He always grabs me and brings me back. I don’t have a college education, so the chances of me being where I’m at are very slim.”
Jenne also keeps a diary, something she’s done since before founding Jenne Distributors.
“I don’t write in it all the time,” she says. “I asked Him to help start a company because I wanted it more than anything, from my heart. I wanted so bad to be able to start a distributorship because I knew I could do it. I knew with His help, I could do it, so as the things came in line, when Panasonic said ‘yes,’ I knew they said yes because I had asked to start it.”
But Jenne also realizes that her devotion to making the company successful is the driving factor behind its growth.
“What I want to accomplish is to build a really great company so other companies can build great companies and do the same thing,” she says. “I know how it is supposed to be. Everybody is supposed to love everybody and help everybody. Those are things that I know in my heart. I’m trying to do that, and that’s why it means so much to me.
“I’m just amazed, day-by-day, by all these neat things that happen.”
And, if Jenne’s past few years are any indication of what’s to come, she’s got a lot to look forward to. How to reach: Jenne Distributors, (440) 835-0040
Daniel G. Jacobs ([email protected]) is senior editor of SBN.
