D&H Co President’s Dan And Michael Schwab: The ‘Most Exciting Time In Decades To Be In IT Distribution’

You posted a 30 percent increase in VAR sales. What was the key to that growth in the bread and butter VAR business?

Michael Schwab: It is reflective of our unwavering commitment to the long-tail of the reseller channel. The manufacturers recognize that they can not have a personal interaction with the vast majority of the channel. They can assign dedicated head-count that can work with the largest resellers, VARs and MSPs. But there is this great swath of the broad channel that we truly focus on. We treat them as well as you would treat any of your largest customers and we do so in a robust way with a dedicated sales rep, credit, competitive pricing, making sure they have good availability. That is where we saw the consistent and incremental growth well beyond what the whole channel experienced.

The number of active D&H partners was up double digits. What was key to that partner expansion?

Michael Schwab: Resellers recognize they can not just rely on one single source of product for any manufacturer. They need multiple sources. They need choices. That really allowed D&H to be a very strong source of supply for a lot of customers that did not know us or weren’t focused on all that we could do for them. D&H was able to really help them succeed where maybe others weren’t as successful. That just continues in this world where there is fewer distributors. When we got into this business there was like 50 distributors. You have seen on-going consolidation. The reality is resellers still want to be able to say I like being able to do business with an organization such as D&H. As long as we can support their needs we win the business.