Growing a regional restaurant equipment and supply business into a national leader requires a strategic vision. With that strong brand identity, expansion plan, market research, sales and marketing strategy, technology integration, talent development, and a focus on
customer experience.
By following these essential pieces of the blueprint, a restaurant equipment and supply dealer can position itself for success and achieve its goal of becoming a national leader in the industry. That is the goal that Singer Equipment has set for itself.
The Fred Singer led company headquartered in Elverson, PA took another step toward accomplishing that goal last month. Singer Equipment acquired Southeastern legacy brand Hotel & Restaurant Supply.
Fred Singer, Singer Equipment’s President and CEO, discussed the benefits and complexities that come with any company merger.
He envisions a combined company with improved market access and customer support, a greater economy of scale, and a focus on fostering dealer-customer relationships.
Singer Equipment’s acquisition of Hotel & Restaurant Supply was, as Singer put it, “a natural fit.” The latter company, founded and run by the Greene family for over five decades, had long run in similar circles as Singer.
Mason Greene, the current H&R chairman, and his father had worked alongside each other in the dealer industry for decades, and Fred Singer has known the family “for practically my entire professional career.”
Setting aside the enormous economic synergies that a combined company could offer, the two executives felt that a joined operation would work on a personal level: “We knew each other, we knew each other’s businesses, we respected each other’s companies enormously, and we knew it was a cultural and strategic fit, because an increasing part of both businesses are national customers.”
The ability to better serve customers and vendors over a greater geographic area is a key benefit that Singer cited as a compelling factor of the acquisition: “Mason and I recognize that this is the future, and that we’d get there faster through this kind of transaction,” he shared.
As larger regional, mega-regional, and national customers comprise a greater share of the demand for equipment, the need for dealers with national customers has increased accordingly.
The merger also improves Singer’s access to the Southeast, H&R’s home market, gaining the company a significant foothold in one of the nation’s fastest growing regions, both in terms of population and economics.
This, however, is no problem – despite slight culinary and cultural differences from Singer’s home market in the Northeast, the company finds many broad similarities between the different regions, like the strength of the school market and large chain restaurant presence.
Another benefit of combining operations is the economy of scale the company can achieve. While many aspects of daily operations, such as buying group programs, are not radically changed in an acquisition of this nature, the scale that results has numerous benefits.
Larger size helps Singer hit better order thresholds, buy in quantities that they could not before which, in turn, allows for quantity breaks, and give customers more generous product discounts.
It also gives the company some excess inventory to allow the flexibility of responding to changing needs and repurposing returned orders.
“There really are so many efficiencies that come with scale like this,” Singer noted, “such as bundling orders and being able to negotiate with bigger amounts of products.”
With the merged company employing more than one thousand people, Singer’s footprint has increased dramatically; it means that Singer now covers a broader area and, with the ability to dedicate more personnel and inventory to clients, can more effectively and quickly access customers.
Better access to local project managers and installers, in turn, positions Singer to assume a more responsive role in its dealer-customer relationships.
Personalized, client-focused relationships comprise an integral part of Singer Equipment’s company culture, and Singer himself looks to build out a company that fulfills that goal.
By filling teams with qualified professionals who are highly knowledgeable, responsive, and relationship-oriented, Singer hopes to reinforce a culture built around the facilitation of long-term relationships.
“Everything we do – our values, our behaviors – is all built on the premise that we can teach people to be stewards of great customer relationships; we are, essentially, a human-centric model in that sense,” Singer said.
As the executive envisions the future, he projects that the company’s customer base will shift to center around larger, more complex corporations, for whom face-to-face interactions and personalized relationships are a critical part of the business dealing.
“These types of companies need the value-added service of a personal relationship – they need people they trust as business partners and with whom they can collaborate and convert problems into solutions,” Singer emphasized.
Of equal importance to the executive is nurturing existing relationships between the company and its employees. In order to best serve its customers, a company needs a team of skilled, entrepreneurial employees.
Therefore, Singer stressed the importance of creating a culture that attracts and retains its new hires: “One of my goals was to create a company that actively enriched peoples’ lives; I didn’t understand building a workspace where people felt like they had to leave their best selves at the door, since we spend so much of our adult lives working.”
Part of this philosophy is giving local and division leaders tremendous autonomy over their sectors. Doing so, cited Singer, helps develop employees’ entrepreneurial instincts while strengthening the personalized dealer-customer relationships and development of unique client-focused solutions.
Despite the challenges that come with mergers and acquisitions, it’s clear that Singer’s focus for his company is unwavering and clear.
With improved ability to serve larger regional and national companies with a larger economy of scale, the combined Singer/H&R offers new and existing customers with increased efficiencies and personalized solutions.
Throughout the entire daunting process, Singer also reaffirmed the importance of developing lasting bonds between the company and its employees.
For more information about Singer Equipment, and the company’s offerings, visit Singer Equipment website.
