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Don't be fooled by their rural setting. The Kelly family presides over a thoroughly modern company.
There's a time and a place for everything. So when a company marks 100 years in business under the same family ownership, it's a time to indulge in large doses of nostalgia. No surprise, then, to find quite a bit of that when I visited Kelly Supply Co. last July for its 100th Anniversary celebration at its home base in Grand Island, Neb.
The bigger story, though, is what I didn't expect to find in this heart of the nation's heartland. That was a wholesaler with a ravenous appetite for modern computer technology and its e-business applications. A rural wholesaler at that, one whose business heart and soul derives from the agriculture that dominates the economy for hundreds of miles in any direction. This is a company that, quite literally, brought the Internet to farm country.
Kelly Supply's main business remains as a distributor of PHCP and various other supplies. "We have to be all things to our customers," is the way President and CEO Jeff Kelly describes the business. There's no place for specialists in a trading area stretching almost a thousand miles east and west, yet whose total population could fit comfortably within the boundaries of Manhattan.
Kelly's $25-million business is broken up into 13 locations spread throughout the wide open spaces of Nebraska (seven branches), Iowa (four) and eastern Colorado (two). While its roots are in plumbing, it also distributes industrial PVF (its largest volume sector) along with other industrial MRO goods, plus cements, hand tools, fertilizer, irrigation and well supplies, along with hydronic heating and electrical goods in some branches. Customers include the trade, farmers, factories, railroads, utilities, municipalities and anyone else in need of its diverse offerings.
Each location carries a different mix of product depending on its local markets. A "fulfillment center" exists in the town of Hastings, about 20 miles south of Grand Island headquarters, to serve Nebraska locations. However, the Iowa and Colorado branches are too far flung for central distribution to make sense. "There's a little crossover, but mainly each state feeds itself," says Jeff's younger brother and co-owner Kent Kelly, better known to everyone as K.C.
K.C....