The company says five distinct strategic business units (SBUs) have been created to focus resources on specific markets in order to be even more responsive to customer needs and innovative in product development.
New SBUs organized under the Phillips corporate umbrella are Phillips Aftermarket, Phillips OEM, Phillips Connect Technologies, Phillips Asia-Pacific and Phillips Europe. Each SBU will have a separate board of advisors to assist in business and performance planning to promote successful strategies within their distinct markets.
Propelled by a philosophy to provide customers with innovative, solution-driven products, the evolution of Phillips began more than nine decades ago with the design and patent of a reflective turning “signal arm” to make signaling safer for trucks. Since then, the company has continually progressed from a regional truck parts distributor to an innovator and manufacturer of advanced air and electrical components for the heavy-duty trucking industry. Within the last two decades, Phillips has exploded in growth from a few hundred employees and three locations in North America to over 1,500 employees and eight locations worldwide, the company says.
“We are at a place with our business today where doing things the same way will simply not allow us to grow at the pace which we have in the past. We’ve over-stretched our existing organizational structure and are showing signs of becoming ‘too corporate.’ In our business, big doesn’t beat small. It’s the fast that beats the slow, and we are reorganizing in a way that places customer responsiveness and the ability to be flexible as our highest objective. We were raised on ease, flexibility and a TNT (today, not tomorrow) attitude. By breaking into smaller, more focused businesses, we will continue our tradition of being incredibly easy to do business with,” says Rob Phillips, president and chief operating officer, Phillips Industries.
Along with the restructuring announcement come two senior leadership promotions.
Rob Myers has been named president of the newly established Phillips Aftermarket business unit. Under his direction, the sales growth at Phillips has grown exponentially since 2016, with the percentage of growth in the double digits, the company says.
“We’ve grown significantly during this most-recent business cycle and recognize that we’re better for our customers when we’re smaller, scrappier and completely focused on helping them grow their businesses. Whether it’s with the way we innovate new products or we handle rush orders, we are narrowing our focus on just the aftermarket, or just the OEM business in order to continually be easier and more reliable than ever to do business with,” says Myers.
Filiberto Coello will take the helm as president of the Phillips OEM Business Unit. Coello was promoted to the position of general director in 2011 and has maintained director-level positions throughout his career at Phillips.
“We have established a great team that is capable of supporting this new business structure and we are ready for this strategic transformation. We’re confident this new structure will help us to continue growing the OEM sector, and we believe it will increase our focus on customers’ needs,” Coello says.
