Kevin Short joined Tulsa, Oklahoma-based master distributor ORS Nasco in 2020 as company president and CEO, industrial, and in the last year and a half, Short has worked to enhance the company’s culture — which hinges on not just serving customers but delighting them.

Short discussed the importance of this on the latest edition of the MDM Podcast, available by clicking here.

On the episode, hosted by MDM CEO Tom Gale, Short said the pandemic has shined a spotlight on how the most basic customer service won’t cut it anymore. Ratcheting up customer service is imperative not only for a company’s top- and bottom-line performance in the aftermath of COVID but also for building or reinforcing a rock-solid culture.

That’s where ORS Nasco’s focus has been and will continue to be in the months and years ahead.

“Our culture is going to be all around customer delight, and that’s very easy to get excited about,” Short said. “I think about my wife, who says she gets disappointed daily from people in the service industry who continue to blame things like COVID on why they are unable to delight her as a customer. I promised her we would do the opposite of that in our business. We think this is galvanizing. We think this is energizing. A lot of the stuff that you’ll see both ORS and MEDCO do are around how do we create that sense of customer delight?”

ORS Nasco’s path

As ORS Nasco pivots toward the post-pandemic economy, the company feels emboldened by what Short described as the “three P’s.” The first “P” is that ORS Nasco is privately held.

“We have the ability to be more flexible, we have the ability to accept and tolerate more risk than maybe we would have been able to do in the past, and to do new things more rapidly than we otherwise would have been able to do,” Short said. “And as a privately held business selling primarily to privately held companies — in many cases, family-owned businesses — that means we have some DNA in common.”

The second “P” is about people. ORS Nasco has a lot of new talent on board, Short said, but the company is ensuring that those employees are focused on where the company is heading.

And the third “P” is pure wholesale. As a master distributor, ORS Nasco has a clear value proposition relative to its suppliers and distributor customers.

“This is the idea that we understand our role in the supply chain, that we cherish that role in the supply chain and that we sell to distributors in order for them to take care of their customers,” Short said. “And we don’t spend any time pursuing our customers business is something that the business has stood for a very long time.”

To learn much more about Short’s career and where ORS Nasco is heading with its business operation and its culture, click below to listen to the full podcast.