Congratulations to Tom Vasile at A.W. Meyer, the recipient of inaugural Distributor Spotlight success story.

I hope the following story will motivate and/or inspire you to get the STI team involved, because as we know… Together Everyone Accomplishes More.

The irony is not lost on me that this story begins on the 31st day of October, Halloween. As many of you may know, A.W. Meyer is the Home of OCTOOLBERFEST; and this year they marked their 31st year of the Biggest Tool Event in the Industry.

It was Friday afternoon and I was on my way home to get the kids out trick-or-treating when my phone rings, “Hi this is John Zalepka with STI Firestop.”

“John, this is Tommy from A.W. Meyer, I think we may have a big an opportunity,” said the voice on the other end of the line. As it turns out, Frank Vega (A.W. Meyer’s paint store manager) had been called in to assist with a sprayer problem that a large drywall contractor on a very large high-rise project in NYC was having. Frank had told Tommy that the contractor had been using a competitive silicon spray at the edge of slab (curtainwall firestopping)… and the machine was jammed up badly. “I’ll call Mark Nunn, he will know what to do,” I assured Tommy.

Territory Manager, Mark Nunn and Northeast Regional Manager, Dave Augello just happened to be within blocks of the job site. With mineral spirits in tow, they set out to find the broken sprayer and also the despondent contractor on the 5th floor. It was explained to Mark & Dave that they were 7 floors behind because of the difficulties that they had been having with the competitive product. Mark explained that STI would be back first thing Monday morning to get them up and running.

After hearing back from Mark, I immediately changed course and headed to Dave’s house to pick up a bucket of our new Generation2 Fast Tack Firestop Spray (check out this awesome video, credit to to James Diverio in STI’s marketing department) to bring to the job site at 7am Monday morning.

On Monday morning, Mark and I met up at the job site with the bucket of spray and some more mineral spirits. We went to work cleaning the machine with careful, pain-staking detail. A few hours later we had the contractor back in business. Now we could finally demonstrate our spray, and after only a few minutes spraying the Fast Tack Firestop Spray the contractor could only say, “Please ask Tommy how fast he can get me a pallet.”

Mark quickly put together a submittal for approval and Tommy was well on his way to an additional $45-$50k in business for the month… and the best part was, price was NEVER even discussed… proving that when you have better products AND better service people will pay for it (yes, even contractors;).

Great work everyone!