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Vice President of Marketing
To quote Andy Williams, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” The holidays are a wonderful time both at home and at work. Nothing gets me in a festive mood like the activities and climate from mid-October until New Year’s Day. Fall is my favorite season, and there’s nothing like the trifecta of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.
June is National Safety Month, and here at Stanion Wholesale Electric, we put a little extra emphasis on our safety protocols. Each month, the company has at least one safety training topic. Each employee completes a short safety training course online, and sometimes there are hands-on safety modules. For instance, employees will practice how to properly and safely use a wire cutting machine, change a propane tank, or climb up and down a ladder. Employees are required to complete hands-on trainings that are relevant to their individual positions. They are also required to complete monthly online renewal trainings for standard topics that apply to our company.
Stanion Starting Small
Stanion is proud to be an independent supplier of electrical products. We like being able to run our business as we see fit, and we have spent 60 years doing just that. Our belief is that being independent helps us keep closer relationships with our customers and helps us to be more nimble and agile. However, being an independent does have a few disadvantages. One of the drawbacks relates to our size and scale compared to other distributors. Our larger, national competitors can buy larger quantities from manufacturers and can therefore negotiate lower prices and better payment terms than smaller distributors can. With the goal level the playing field, Affiliated Distributors (AD) was formed in 1981 primarily as a buying group to help companies like ours negotiate lower prices from our vendors. Over the 40 years of AD’s existence, it has grown to become more than just a buying group.
The word “culture” can mean many different things to just about anyone. When I was younger, I didn’t give much of a second thought to a corporate culture. My feeling was that a company’s culture was completely undefinable and that for large corporations, it was something that didn’t even really exist. Now I realize I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way right off the bat: I’m the bosses’ kid. My grandparents, Jud and Bobbe Stanion, started Stanion Wholesale Electric in 1961. Now their daughter and son-in-law, my parents, run the show. So yes, I more or less grew up in this company and in electrical distribution. But neither my grandparents nor my parents ever pressured me whatsoever to join the family business. Still, I always saw myself being in the business world, and around junior high, I started to think seriously about Stanion as a career choice.
