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COPYRIGHT 2003 Penton Media, Inc.
Moving to expand gas sales and service, Central Welding Supply, Inc., Lynnwood, WA, recently added wireless solar powered telemetry systems to its menu of customer services, boosting customer satisfaction and curbing hidden costs.
Like many businesses the healthy years of the 1990s were good ones at Central Welding Supply, Lynnwood, WA. The firm experienced a growth spurt of up to 15 percent a year while adding stores and staff. Unlike many in today's sluggish economy, the firm still manages to rack up over $17 million in annual sales and a 5 percent annual growth rate.
The firm attributes its success to placing a strong emphasis on technical expertise, customer satisfaction, and cultivating a "can do" company culture of support for its customer base. "Now we aim to transfer the same enthusiasm and energy we developed over many years in our hardgoods business over to gas systems," says Dale Wilton vice president. "The move to add telemetry capability was part of this overall growth strategy."
Founded in 1975 by Dale's father Mickey Wilton and Dwight Sexton, the firm now has eight locations and 65 employees servicing an area that extends nearly 100 miles south from the Canadian border to Tacoma, WA. "It's a fairly vertical territory," explains Joel Sanders, sales manager, gas technologies. "We are bordered on the east by the Cascade mountain range and on the west by the Puget Sound."
Products That Sell
The firm averages 80 percent of its sales in hardgoods with lines that include welding equipment, safety supplies, gas and cryogenic equipment, and tools ranging from ironworkers, band saws, and drill presses down to nuts and bolts. "Most of the other distributors in our area chose to push gases and avoided spending the time, effort, and money developing an inventory of big ticket equipment," says Wilton. "We decided to develop hardgoods as our niche. Along with that decision we cultivated the technical knowledge to support those lines and found we were able to acquire a large customer base in the process. To expand and diversify further, in 1983 we a constructed a fill plant in Lynnwood and now provide a full line of industrial and specialty gases including oxygen, argon, nitrogen, helium, mixed gases, carbon dioxide, propane, other standard industrial gases."
The firm delivers those products with its own fleet. "We have 36 trucks, including a 3,300 gallon liquid nitrogen tanker, a 4,500 gallon liquid oxygen bulk delivery vehicle, tractor trailers and straight trucks, and 13 small pickup trucks that the sales reps drive," says Sanders.
Backing Products with Expertise
Central backs up its product lines with plenty of technical expertise. "We don't look at ourselves as a company with a product on...
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