Jim Durkin worked his way through high school and college in his dad’s transmission shop. He hopes that experience, plus what he accomplished at Autopart International, will help him move Advance Auto Parts’ commercial business ahead.
MA: Let’s start with what was your experience with Autopart International?
JD: Durkin’s father was a transmission mechanic, who later owned a two-bay shop. He worked for six years in high school and college in his dad’s shop as a technician.
After college, he worked with Boise Cascade Corp., The Areomark Corp. and Office Max, all in sales/leadership role, and ultimately as executive vice president of Office Max’s B2B division.
“It’s relative to this role, because Office Max is a company that’s similar to Advance. It has a retail business, has a B2B business. It has a 50/50 split.” He worked on the commercial side, but had multiple points of distribution.
He left Office Max in June 2011 to be president of Autopart International. The whole business is focused on the commercial side, and the value proposition at AI is premium parts and expert service. Now expert service is the same at Advance Auto Parts. At AI almost 80 percent of what we sell has AI’s name on the box. It’s a private brand strategy. So an important part of spend time we did there was promoting those brands.
Differently in this equation, we provide branded premium parts, like MOOG, Intermotor, BWD.
MA: Now that you have transitioned into the role of SVP on the commercial side, how will you use that AI experience to move Advance forward?
JD: “I think that a lot of it is continuing to do the things that we’ve been doing and accelerating those things. The business has already seen great progression in the commercial space and having a lot of success. We’ve built that off of … service and the parts that we’re offering. And as I look at the things that we’re doing right now, we’re just continuing to enhance those services, enhance those offerings and provide them more consistently across the entire chain. We’re more focused on parts availability today, expanding those parts, whether it’s Remington doing the daily replenishment in the Midwest, or more of our hub expansion and more assortment going into places that are closer to our customer, allowing us to provide a great service offering. We want to make sure we continue to do that. We want to make sure we continue to focus on the parts knowledge of our team members, keep training and developing and hiring people with a great deal of experience in the business that understand our customers and their needs. They understand the products that we sell and they do a good job of helping the customers find the right applications for what it is they’re dealing with. I think the other thing that we’re going to stay focused on is a lot of the enhancement that Advance has been working on. And a some of those things are services that AI didn’t have available, whether it’s the B2B ecommerce capability that the company has, and we have a growing number of customers using it, increasing the volume that’s coming to us through B2B. We see the customers enjoying it, the search capability is great. The return rate is lower than if they called us. So there is real value to the customer, easy to find parts always available, and it’s a good resource and tool.
Our eservices capabilities, whether it’s MotoLogic or DriverSide, where we’re helping the shop owner or technician promote their business, we’re going to stay focused on how do we keep rolling things out.
It’s not so much what are we going to bring that’s different, but Advance has already been learning the commercial business either through experiences through AI or all the work we’ve been doing up until now. We’ve got a tremendous commercial business going and growing, and we just want to keep doing those things that we’ve been doing.”
MA: Can you please outline what your outlook is for Advance on the commercial side? How do shop owners and technicians fit into this plan?
JD: “I would put it in terms of focusing on helping the shop owner and technician be successful, whether it’s helping them promote their business in the marketplace, so DriverSide, our eservice offering there, gives them marketing tools, electronic marketing tools, helps them build a database, helps them offer services to their customers so one of their customers can create a “My Garage.” So if we’re talking about Jim’s Automotive and I’m a customer of Jim’s Automotive, Jim can now offer me the Your Gargae shows the history of my car, will send me alerts of when it’s time to change my oil, when it’s time to do routine services on my car, and provide the customer with tremendous value, driving business back into that particular shop.
We’re going to continue to be invested in their success. We’re offering them different programs like Anywhere Care, which is our warranty program, which they can buy into and then offer to their customers, which will cover their customers with warranty after they’ve done the work. A number of different services that we have available today, we’re going to continue to offer to our customers and promote heavily to help them be successful and then participate in their success.”
MA: Are there any plans to increase training, awareness or other focus of and on MotoLogic? If so, what? If not, is that a possibility for later in 2013 or in 2014?
JD: “We do have plans to focus on training. It’s a component of what it is that we do today. We’re going to continue to invest there. We do market-specific training where we do it in person. We’ll bring customers together and we’ll either partner with manufacturer or do the training ourselves and make sure we’re focusing on the development of our customers. We’re also investing in elearning capabilities, where customers can go online and participate in training programs. We see training and offering training to our customers as an important part of our offering. We know that they’re interested in it, and looking for our partnership.
MA: One thing today’s owners are very aware of is the backing they receive from their suppliers when it comes to training and support when something goes wrong. They want more than just the part in the box. How is Advance serving today’s shops in this capacity?
JD: “We recognize the importance, too. It’s a little bit of some of the things that I said. Our warranty programs in order for some of these independent shop owners, they need a program to be able offer to their customers. We have something that we’ve packaged that can be available to them, that they can in turn offer to their customers. So we have things that will help them meet the needs of their customer, like a warranty program. We have the training programs, just helping them as cars become more complex and stay current on all of the changing and new developments in the industry. In some cases, it is as simple as making sure we stand behind the products that we sell, whether they happen to have a defective product, we take it back and replace it quickly for them and we make sure we’re providing quality parts in the first place that minimize comebacks and give them the piece of mind of the quality of parts.
MA: I am on the service side of the industry, but will be sharing this with our Aftermarket Business World editor. Can you talk a little bit about Advance’s purchase of BWP? Will Advance be converting BWP to Advance storefronts, and how will distribution change for those customers?
JD: BWP was a terrific acquisition and we’re really pleased with how it’s going. … I would just say first and foremost it was a great acquisition, we’re thrilled to death we did it and it’s going very well. When I say thrilled to death that we did it, first of all, it’s just a company with a great reputation of servicing customers on the commercial space. All of that and the team members’ expertise comes with that, so we see a great deal of value. They have great real estate and it’s complementary to us, so we like that, and their commercial capabilities. They’ve been in the commercial space, they primarily are a commercial distributor, so their team members have a great deal of experience, they are geared to serve the commercial customer. All fo that has been good. Through the integration process, we’ve been leveraging that.
We do see them being Advance branded location. It’s not going to change the distribution. What we’ve seen so far and the work that we’ve done, we’ve only enhanced it. We will have some locations converted to Advance and they’re predominantly commercial locations, and some locations DIY locations. But in all locations, we’ve increased availability as we work through the integration. So we see more parts availability, but leveraging all of the things that they’ve had experience in with the commercial businesses.
MA: For both current Advance customer shops and those that might be considering you as a source, is there anything coming up through the rest of 2013 that these owners, advisors and techs should be aware of to consider sourcing from Advance? (Perhaps any expansion and integration with AI as previously alluded to in emails.)
JD: “I think that the best things for us to stay focused on are making the customers aware of the capabilities that we have today. While you’re familiar with services like MotoLogic and some of what we’re doing with parts availability, we see a great opportunity to bring that message to the marketplace, so some customers would see those things as new. I want to make sure that we keep creating great awareness around the things that we’re doing, whether it’s speed of delivery, parts availability or the eservices that we have available, capabilities of our B2B website and the ease of ordering from us and the search capabilities there that are available to the customer within the eservices specifically, things like DriverSide that help them promote their business. We’ve got so much investment in those things and we’re only at the tip of the iceberg of leveraging those with our customers. I think we have a great opportunity to keep driving those things.
MA: Somewhat tying into that last question, Greg mentioned there are inventory expansions happening. Can you talk about that a little? Will you be offering more brands, SKUs, different lines?
JD: I think it’s consistent with the strategy that we’ve had, but some recent expansions that have really helped us with with availability and frankly quality of parts. We continue to fill out our line with MOOG, and we’ve continued to fill out our line with Intermotor and BWD, so expanding categories like that improves our availability and improves our assortment overall and makes sure we have the parts that our customer is looking for. We continue to invest in our Platinum brake line, and we’re having success with that and getting great feedback from our customer. It’s investments like that in availability, but also in assortment in those specific categories that’s helping us.
MA: Is there anything that you’d like to add?
JD: I would say that we’re very interested in their business. We see them as an important partner to us. We want to be invested in their success, and we see that as the key to our success. As we look to the future of growing our commercial business and continuing to expand it, our focus is going to be on that shop owner, that professional technician. How do we help them succeed, and therefore we get to participate in that success. We’re going to keep them front and center in what we do and be totally invested in their success.
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