2019 Electrical Pyramid

Home centers caught our eye over the past year because of their increasing interest in selling to contractors online and through their stores. While industry analysts say Home Depot is further along in its efforts to court professional customers than Lowe’s, the latter is still a formidable competitor to dis-tributors that sells an estimated $7 billion in electrical supplies and residential lighting equipment to electrical contractors, do-it-yourselfers and homeowners. Lowe’s is also fine-tuning its LowesForPros.com program, an online tool that offers its pro customers easy online ordering and their choice of in-store pick-up at one of its 2,002 home centers in the United States of Canada, or delivery to their job-sites or places of business.

Home Depot has been aggressive in the online arena, too. In its most recent financial report, Home Depot said that online sales, which it defines as sales generated online through its websites for products picked up in one of its 2,287 stores or delivered to customer locations, represented 7.9% of net sales and grew 26.2% during fiscal 2018. Professional contractors have been an important part of Home Depot’s customer mix for years, and today they account for 45% of the company’s $108.2 billion in 2018 revenues. To support and grow this business even more, the company is building a new website exclusively for pro customers, expanding its tool rental program and beefing up its Home Depot Pro program. According to a report at www.nasdaq.com on the company’s 1Q 2019 earnings call, “Home Depot added 35,000 Pro cus-tomer accounts to the website, bringing its total to 135,000, a figure the company believes it can expand to one million by the end of the year. The website will make it easier for the Pro customer to find the materials and supplies they need — in the quantity they want — and find delivery options unique to their requirements.”

The post also said that according to Home Depot CEO Craig Menear, 90% of its professional customers rent tools, but only one in four rent tools from Home Depot. The company plans to focus on this area to increase its share of tool rentals. It’s interesting to note that while the company sells big-ticket equipment such as conduit benders and wire pull-ing equipment it currently does not advertise rentals of this equipment. It would seem that renting these tools, which cost several thousand dollars each, might be an area of growth for Home Depot — and for electrical distributors looking to help their contractor customers.

Home Depot will be selling SunRun solar products in 700 of its stores in 15 states (Photo courtesy of National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL).

Home Depot is also working closely with several contractor trade associations, including Indepen-dent Electrical Contractors (IEC), to build stronger relationships. According to information on IEC’s website (www. ieci.org), Home Depot is the association’s “official retailer of electrical tools and supplies.” “As a proud partner with the IEC, The Home Depot is dedicated to saving electricians time and money,” IEC says on its website. “IEC Members can get 2% cash back  on all qualifying pre-tax purchases when enrolled in Home Depot’s Free Pro Xtra Program. In addition to the rebate for customers, The Home Depot will donate a half of a percent of all of the sales in this program to the IEC Foundation.” IEC members must spend at least $12,500 in a calendar year to receive a rebate.

In a recent post at www.electrical-trends.com, David Gordon offered some insight into two other strategies that Home Depot is using to cozy up to electrical contractors and other pros — next-day delivery and integrating its purchasing and related business services with electrical contractors’ estimating systems. Gordon says Home Depot can already link up with QuickBooks and that if it ever was able to link directly into contractors’ estimating systems, it could be a “gamechanger.”

Home Depot also strengthened its play in the residential solar market with the news this year that it was expanding its relationship with Sunrun Inc., San Francisco, CA, and partnering with an additional solar vendor, Vivint Solar, Lehi, UT. A company press release said Sunrun will be the company’s leading home solar vendor in 15 states. Its PV systems will be sold in close to 700 stores in Arizona, California, Colorado, Con-necticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Wisconsin.

BUILDING YOUR OWN  ELECTRICAL PYRAMID

Depending on how you need to analyze the channels of distribution in the electrical wholesaling industry, you might need to identify companies operating in specific market niches. Sources for this type of information include the Mergent databases accessible for free at many local business libraries. 

While EW’s 2019 Electrical Pyramid is a snapshot of the electrical market as a whole, it can also be used as a tool to analyze the channels of distribution in your geographic market of choice. So, get out your magic markers and whiteboards and start drawing your own electrical pyramids. (See www.ewweb.com’s “10 more Ideas for How to Use Your Own Electrical Pyramid.”) EW’s editors think this article does a pretty good job of summarizing the biggest channels to market in the electrical industry. If you find other bricks that belong in the pyramid, draw them in and send them to us at jim.lucy@ informa.com. We may include them in our next edition of Electrical Wholesaling’s Electrical Pyramid.

One other key thought to remember before you dig into the valuable exercise of building your own electrical pyramid: Remember that there really isn’t any right or wrong combination of channels of distribution. EW’s Electrical Pyramid is in some ways more like a kaleidoscope than a snapshot of the electrical channel, in that the bricks in it shift on a product-by-product or market-by-market basis.

For instance, a manufacturer that wants to grow in the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area may have entirely different Electrical Pyramids for the five boroughs of New York and suburban Westchester County or Long Island in New York and Bergen, Hudson and Passaic Counties in New Jersey because the channels of distribution and local buying influences can be very different. And the bricks in the pyramid that a local electrical distributor will build to analyze his competition for a slice of that same market will look different from that manufacturer’s pyramid.

The Electrical Pyramid is going to be much more valuable if you build your own and customize it to your own unique market needs. But like lots of things, the devil is in the details. It’s a fun exercise, so don’t be afraid. Here’s how to get started.

Schedule at least a half-day. Invite your management team and best strategic thinkers to this session. If you can do it off-site in a conference room, all the better, but if time or budget don’t allow it, find a quiet room in your building where you can spread things out a bit.

Bring the right equipment. If you are leading the discussion and are a white-board type of guy or gal, you will have fun with this assignment. Bring ample erasable markers — you will be building an Electrical Pyramid brick-by-brick and will be thinking on the fly. Or, if you aren’t into white boards, get hold of a large roll of newsprint from an art supply or craft store and bring along a handful of markers. Other resources you should have on-hand include laptops (internet access is a big plus in this meeting); copies of this article; and sticky notes. If a PDF of this article would be helpful for the session, contact EW at jim.lucy@ informa.com. The analysis in this article will provide a high-altitude overview of the various channels (bricks) in each tier of the pyramid. Your job in this exercise is to bring this analysis down to ground level for the market area under discussion, and identify all the key players in it. 

If you want to get creative and make it a fun hands-on exercise, you may even want to try bringing along some large wooden building blocks, and Legos or Duplo bricks. Assign the person in the room with the most artistic talent with the job of inscribing each brick with the channel of distribution under discussion.

Assign one person to be the “scribe.” If you are going with the build-ing block idea, you have your man or woman. But make sure you have someone who is copying down all the ideas sure to be flying around the room.

Build your pyramid level-by-level, starting with full-line distributors. Here’s where you will need a copy of EW’s Electrical Pyramid illustration shown on page 15. You may find it easiest to start at the top with full-line electrical distributors and work your way down through the seven tiers shown in the illustration. The rest of this article will walk you through each tier:

• Full-line electrical distributors Product niche distributors Service/product niche distributors Hybrid distributors

• Retailers selling electrical supplies

• Distributors from other trades selling electrical supplies

• Other channels

• Web-based companies

If you are a distributor, go around the room and start listing all competitors. Group them by national chain, regional chain or local independent. If you are an electrical manufacturer or independent manufacturers’ rep, do the same thing, but you may want to group them by the amount of business you do, don’t do or want to do with them. Depending on the type of analysis you are doing you may also want to pencil in which buying/market-ing groups the distributors are in, if any.

And don’t forget to factor in the huge role independent reps play in any local market. Depending on your position in the market (distributor, rep, manufacturer, consultant, etc.) you may or may not want to list and profile all of the independent manufacturers’ reps in the market, and possibly the factory-employed field salespeople who cover the market as well.

You may find that creating an Elec-trical Pyramid leads to the creation a “customer pyramid,” where you ana-lyze your market’s key accounts by size, type of company, market focus, the level of service required and how they buy product. And remember psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” pyramid from that Psychology 101 class, which illustrated our basic need for food, water, shelter, companionship, respect, etc.? You could draw up a customer’s “hierarchy of needs,” where you illustrate the importance of price, delivery, education, return policy, etc. And don’t forget to check out the Customer Pyramid at www.ewweb.com.

Okay, now the hard work starts. Com-piling a list of distributors (or reps) in your market may unearth a few surprises and provide some valuable information. But to make this information really work for you, sketch out a profile for each of these companies and drill down to their strengths and weaknesses. The basic company profile should include key management personnel; estimated sales volume; market share; and primary market focus. You also need to get answers from your assembled team to questions such as:

“What value-added services does this company provide that we currently don’t offer?”

On the flip side, “Which services do we offer where we have a clear advantage?”

Who are their biggest accounts?

With which customers are they most vulnerable?

The five largest full-line distributors accounting for 34% of the market. The electrical wholesaling industry continues to consolidate, and as men-tioned earlier over the last few years the five largest national distributors have increased their market share to a third of a $100 billion-plus market, and the Top 200 largest distributors (see EW’s June issue) account for 51% of total sales.

Product specialists. Now move down to the next tier of the Electrical Pyramid. Go around the room and get people to brainstorm about all of the niche distributors in your market area that focus on a specific product category. The biggest product specialists typically include residential lighting, lamps, wire and cable and utility products. Others include fuses, voice-data-video (VDV) products and utility supplies. You may be surprised by how many product specialists in your market area compete with you on a few product lines. Depending on how in-depth you want to go with your analysis, you may or may not want to develop company profiles for each of these product specialists.

Service/product niche distributors. Find out what ESCOs and light-ing maintenance companies are doing in your market. Service/product niche distributors have a heavy emphasis on design, installation or repair. Although they sell electrical supplies, product sales may not be their primary function. These companies focus on providing a complete service solution to their customers.

Pay special attention to ESCOs, which provide the most sophisticated package of design, financing, technical assistance, audit and, in some cases, installation services in the energy market. The sale of electrical products is a relatively small piece of the overall package of products and services that ESCOs provide. Many ESCOs are looking for distributors to provide local warehousing support and logistics for their lighting retrofit projects. The National Association of Energy Service Companies (NAESCO), Washington, DC, offers some good insight into the world of ESCOs at www.naesco.org. 

You should also pencil in lighting-maintenance companies into this tier of your pyramid. These companies, which typically have contracts for the mainte-nance and retrofit of lighting systems in stores, parking lots and other retail or commercial facilities, are emerging as skilled players in the energy game.

If you want to get a sense of how far these companies have evolved, check out the training resources at www.nalmco.org, the website for the interNational Associa-tion of Lighting Management Companies (NALMCO), Ankeny, IA. NALMCO’s training resources help school its members in the latest in energy-efficient lighting systems. Some full-line electrical distributors are members of NALMCO, including Border States Industries, Fargo, ND; Facility Solutions Group, Austin, TX; and Graybar Electric Co., St. Louis. 

Hybrid distributors.  Don’t overlook Grainger and Fastenal. Grainger and Fastenal are tough to categorize because they don’t carry a full line of electrical products. But they are definitely competitors to full-line distributors because of their intense focus on the industrial MRO and facility maintenance markets, rock-solid balance sheets and progressive internal operations. Electrical products account for more than 15% of Grainger’s total sales. But because of its sheer size, willingness to invest in its e-business capabilities, distribution network and branch infrastructure, the company is a formidable competitor. If you have a Grainger branch in your neighborhood, add a brick to your pyramid for them.

By some measures, Fastenal may be a peripheral player in the electrical market. But with almost 4.7% of its $4.97 billion in sales (over $200 million) in electrical products; more than 12,000 electrical stock-keeping units (SKUs) listed on www.fastenal.com and 2,162 branches in North America, you need to keep an eye on them. And if you want to learn about something really interesting, do some research on the company’s FAST Solutions vending program, where it has more than 81,000 vending machines already installed in customer locations. Add another brick to your pyramid for them.

You may also want to include Anixter International Inc., Glenview, Ill., on this tier of your pyramid if they have any locations nearby. They could also be called a product specialist because of their primary emphasis on wire and cable, but they also sell other electrical products and provide some unique customized supply chain services for customers. EW’s editors put them in this tier. With their acquisition of HD Supply they are definitely a hybrid distributor — part wire and cable specialist, part utility distributor and part full-line distributor.

Retailers selling electrical supplies.  While electrical supplies account for roughly 10% of a home center’s total revenues, over 4% of that figure is in lighting, which for the most part are largely residential and may not be of as much interest. 

Distributors from other trades sell-ing electrical supplies. That distributor down the street may be a competitor. When you have at least 1,000 industrial distributors, 1,000 tool specialist distributors, and more than 200 specialists in power transmission products in the United States, you know some electrical sales are flowing through these often-overlooked channels. If you have any of these types of distributors in your market, as well as distributors of electronics components, HVAC equipment, plumbing supplies or other specialty distributors, they may be worth further study to see what kinds of electrical products they might be stocking.

It makes a lot of sense to get to know the distributors from other trades in your local market area. In a sense, you are in the same business but are just shipping different stuff in the boxes. Find some non-competing distributors from other trades and compare best practices in sales, warehousing, delivery, e-business and operations. You may also want to consider joining the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors (NAW), Washington, DC (www.naw.org), which provides some terrific venues for networking with distributors from other trades and an insider’s perspective on legislative issues of interest to distribution firms.

Other channels. Always changing but always growing. Any single brick in this level of the EW Electrical Pyramid may or may not account for a ton of electrical sales in your market. This level of the Pyramid may be toughest to track because it’s where the new and potentially competing channels of distribution first start out.

Do you have any reps in the spec-grade lighting niche selling direct? Pencil them in. And if solar is growing in your market area, find out who is selling the photovoltaic (PV) equipment. It might be a small PV contractor who is also a dealer for a limited number of lines.

Another hotly debated sales channel is the manufacturers selling direct. Outside of providing large quantities of wire and cable for massive projects in the utility market; gigantic turnkey switchgear or automation projects; spec-grade lighting packages; and now LED lighting solutions, this historically hasn’t been a widespread issue in the mainstream electrical wholesaling industry. However, we expect more lighting manufacturers to sell their customized LED lighting solutions direct to end users.

Online merchants. Depending on your market position, these bricks in the pyramid may be changing the fastest. The most obvious bricks here include www.amazon.com, www.ebay.com and online LED merchants.

Summary. After you build your own Electrical Pyramid, check out www. ewweb.com for more information that EW’s editors have posted on some of the fastest-growing alternative channels of distribution over the years. Just type “electrical pyramid” into the search engine.