Cook Brothers, Binghamton, N.Y. – Henry Cook

Re-establishing Dominance

Cook Brothers is now stronger than ever having learned lessons from some unfortunate decisions in its recent past.

By Denise L. Rondini, Executive Editor

Rebuilding your business’ reputation is not the easiest thing to do, but apologizing for your actions while at the same time fixing the problem is a good first step. That is what Henry Cook, owner of Cook Brothers, did after he purchased the company back from TransCom, which tried to apply automotive parts distribution techniques to the heavy-duty parts arena.

 After getting his business back, Cook says he did three basic things. “The first thing was I put $1.5 million more parts inventory into the branches in a six-week period. I did radio commercials apologizing to our customers for any disruption the TransCom experience brought to their businesses and I went to see every single customer who had done more than $20,000 of business with us in 1997 and personally apologized to them and asked for their business back.”

 By doing those three things and because he did not lose any of his branch managers during the TransCom experience, Cook took a business that was losing $125,000 a month “and we righted the ship in four and a half months.”

Today, Cook Brothers is growing its business by taking market share away from its competitors, in part due to lessons learned in its past.