United Rentals Inc. (NYSE: URI), Stamford, Connecticut, has acquired Franklin Equipment LLC, a regional provider of equipment rentals, sales and related services in the Midwest and Southeast United States. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Founded in 2008, Franklin Equipment employs 300 people and operates 20 locations that serve general contractors in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.

“This transaction expands our presence in key markets for our general rentals business, with an experienced team that shares our pride in delivering superior customer service,” said Matthew Flannery, president and CEO of United Rentals.

Sullivan & Cromwell LLP acted as United Rentals’ legal adviser in the transaction. Lape Mansfield Nakasian & Gibson, LLC acted as Franklin Equipment’s legal adviser.

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Mark Dancer might understand better than anyone the different ways that distributors navigated COVID-19.

Dancer, the CEO of Network for Business Innovation, spent much of the past year speaking with dozens of companies about their pivots, their pain points and the positives that might have emerged for some of them during the most significant economic disruption of our lifetime.

Now he’s leveraging that time and those talks into helping more companies grow and prosper in the coming post-pandemic phase and beyond. From his conversations with distribution leaders, Dancer created what he calls a “B2B innovation flywheel for distribution.”

He introduced this concept at MDM’s Future of Distribution Summit, held virtually on April 13. Click here for on-demand access to the Summit’s presentations and panels.

Dancer, who is also a fellow with the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, delivered a keynote address, “Pandemic Innovations and the Future of Distribution,” designed to help distributors act on the lessons learned across distribution during the last year of COVID-19.

His takeaway from the pandemic: While distributors are constantly looking at protecting their business against outside threats — and that remains important — they need to shift their mindset to helping their customers prosper.

“It’s really a call to action for distributors,” he said. “They should say, ‘My best path to the future is not about defending my business — I have to do that, I have to think about moats and I have to know that disruptors are coming after me — but my best path to the future is figuring out how my customers can to get to the future.”

What comprises the flywheel?

Dancer began his Future of Distribution keynote address by noting that COVID-19 revealed three truths about this industry:

• Distribution is a reservoir of resiliency
• Distribution exists to solve problems
• Distribution is at the center of commerce

The goal for the industry now is to leverage the important roles that distributors played during the pandemic and ensure an even brighter future.

Here are Dancers’ steps for creating a flywheel of innovation that will keep your business model attuned to the changing landscape.

1) The first step is to think about the emerging big ideas that are happening to a distributor’s business model. Has your company shifted from managing a portfolio of products and brands to managing a portfolio of customer experiences?

Very likely, and the focus now should be less on how you sell more stuff to customers but rather on how you can improve their business — whether you sell to welders, procurement managers, engineers, facility managers, plumbers, bakers or any industry or end market. “If you can do that, it can align your culture, align your customer experiences and align your business model,” Dancer said

2) The next step is to lean in. Dancer said distributors should find ways to “help customers without hesitation,” including things like providing supply chain visibility, offering self-service options, enabling their workflow and other solutions.

“If you’ve developed digital capabilities around your website or digital marketing, acting on those with your customers can create benefit for your customers,” Dancer said. “It’s a little bit different than selling. You exist to solve problems. If a customer comes to you with a problem, what’s your process for acting on that right away?”

3) The third step is to create pandemic nudges. This means a distributor doesn’t need to make sweeping changes to its business model but instead should look at amplifying culture and working to “instigate” value rather than “add” value. This is a mindset that revolves around creating new value for your customers, Dancer said.

“There are a lot of questions about if the future of business will change distributor strategies, the way they do business with their customers?” he said. “It’s not about absolutely changing your business; it’s more about recognizing the changes and consciously nudging it a little bit.”

4) The last step is focusing on human-first design. That means going out and asking your customers about how they are running their business differently during the pandemic and how they expect to run it afterward. While you may know some things about their business, Dancer “guarantees” that haven’t told you everything. Now’s the time to find out.

“We don’t have to run our business the way the technology overlords tell us we should run our business,” he said. “This is about not just blindly accepting best practices, whether that’s artificial intelligence or CRM or ERP or your website. Human-first innovation is about recognizing the fact that being a real-world company is not your weakness. The fact that you serve your customers where they live and where they work is a distributor’s superpower.”

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The Home Depot (NYSE: HD), Atlanta, on Thursday announced it has opened three new distribution centers in Florida — West Palm Beach, Miami and Fort Myers — to provide faster delivery options for customers in South Florida.

The parent company of HD Supply Holdings Inc. also plans to open two additional Miami distribution centers in 2022. Together, the five Florida facilities should create more than 150 new full- and part-time jobs across the region, the company said.

“Our customers have varying needs — from DIYers renovating their homes to professional contractors on job sites,” said Kyle Dennis, vice president of supply chain development. “These investments are helping us deliver to our Pro and DIY customers across South Florida when, where and how they want.”

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Although there are positive signs about the future, employees have felt something of a COVID-19 hangover the first three months of this year as the pandemic continues, according to Jim Pouliopoulos, but focusing on things that increase happiness benefits employees and employers alike.

“It’s the intersection between three big areas, which is your own personal sense of happiness, your personal positivity and your workplace, and how you as a leader can influence the well-being of your workplace,” said Pouliopoulos, senior lecturer and director of the professional sales program at Bentley University, on Tuesday during the opening keynote of MDM’s Future of Distribution Summit virtual conference. “And how you as a leader, as an executive, as a business leader of all kinds, can implement some career satisfaction for yourselves, but also for the people that work with you and around you.”

While some employees have become burnt-out by the continued Zoom calls and balancing work careers with their home lives, Pouliopoulos used Vice Admiral John Stockdale as an example of someone who focused on what he could control versus what he couldn’t when he was a prisoner of war for eight years in North Vietnam.

As a realist, Stockdale focused on controlling his thoughts, words and actions and not the external things that were happening around him, as opposed to pure optimists who focused on arbitrary dates for being released that were beyond their control.

“His lesson really was that you have to adopt a mindset of realism in your circumstances, and that you can have optimism, but have optimism on your abilities and your ability to control your thoughts, words and actions, and not try to control the external events that are occurring around you,” he said. “And certainly, the external events around us all have been very difficult for the past year.”

As part of his leadership reboot plan for 2021, Pouliopoulos said employers need to think about what works best for each of their employees in regard to making them happy. Pouliopoulos cited research that says 63% of the employees want to remain in a hybrid work environment by working some days in an office and the rest at home. Only 20% of the employees want to work full-time from home while just 17% want to work in the office full-time.

“I implore you, as you start to think about what 2021 brings, to think about how you will design the new workplace and take into account the emotional impact, and also the desires of the people that work for you and work around you,” he said.

For the employees who are continuing to work from home in some capacity, Pouliopoulos said to give them a permanent place to come and go — instead of working from kitchens and bedrooms — so they feel a sense of belonging and can build some rapport with their co-workers.

Happy employees and employers make for happy workplaces, which in turns builds loyalty and enables better performance, Pouliopoulos said. Employee groups that have a happier, more positive mindset are 30% more productive, while salespeople can sell up to 37% more, he added.

“The research all points to some very interesting things about happiness, about inner joy, about well-being and about resilience,” he said. “And that is that happiness is not just a nice thing to talk about, but it can honestly be a strategic advantage to your organization. My argument to you today is that the overall environmental happiness of your organization and your personal happiness as a leader has a huge effect on your organization.”

Work-from-home tips

Pouliopoulos said that pretty much everyone has Zoom burnout at this point, which has led to some employees suffering from a heightened sense of emotion regarding how they interact with others on video calls. Some tips for pandemic-weary work-from-home employees include:

• Lean back, and not into, Zoom or other video conference calls, which Pouliopoulos said literally enables a longer view of a video call.
• Turn off the view of yourself during video conference sessions. Seeing an image of themselves makes users self-conscious and has a negative impact on their psyche, according to Pouliopoulos.
• When people meet face-to-face, they look down while taking notes. People should be comfortable enough to look down and even away during video conference calls, or even get up and move around a bit, Pouliopoulos said.

“Fight the Zoom fatigue. Zoom is here to stay,” he said. “But we need to adapt to it. We need to use it in a more effective way. Not everything has to be a Zoom meeting. You can get on the phone and have a conference call without all of that video.”

Missed the Future of Distribution conference? It’s not too late to register and watch on demand. Content will be available through July 11. 

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