“I would go to the library,” Shawn describes, “and I would get the yellow pages and I would photocopy the sections going across the country. There were some days I sat there for 12 hours until I got my sale. I just kept calling.” If they said no, Shawn would ask why. He would listen. Then he would apply that knowledge to the next call.
Shawn’s perseverance paid off when Home Hardware, Canada’s dealer-owned hardware cooperative, became a national customer. “That was a big turning point for me” beams Shawn. We’ve been with Home Hardware ever since.” But he wasn’t yet done with spending days on the phone. He recalls, “At our first dealer show, we only wrote 20 orders, and they didn’t all take both products. It didn’t even cover our flights, for crying out loud. So, I knew I had to get back to calling. For the next few years, I called every one of those 700 Home Hardware dealers ‘til I got everybody carrying our stuff.” Now Trail Blazer is a main Home Hardware vendor and they manufacture all the signature Mark’s Choice gardening tools.
With the Canadian market growing in sales, it was time to look south. “In 2000, I decided I was going to start focusing on the U.S. I went back to basics—at that time there was a yellow pages on the Internet—and I just started calling people in the U.S. It was a little more of a struggle than Canada but it was the only way I knew how to do it. So, I just kept doing it.”
Fortunately, Shawn’s efforts were assisted through government-organized trade missions. It was a trade mission to Chicago that secured Trail Blazer a place on the Ace Hardware vendor list. Shawn remembers travelling with Curtis across the continent, to San Diego, for the first vendor show: “we left the sales team at home. It was just me and my Dad. And we had a ball. We wrote more sales that show than any other show since.”
They’ve now hired a national rep group to manage Trail Blazer’s U.S. sales. As Shawn explains, “It was a lot trickier to sell down there. So we’ve built up a pretty good U.S. sales force and it’s grown quite significantly.” In addition to Ace Hardware, Trail Blazer is now also on the shelves in Sam’s Club, True Value, Menards and Costco.
After years of navigating markets, learning the distribution business and talking to potential customers on phone call after phone call, they had reached a clearing. Sure, there were more options to explore but Curtis and Shawn knew they needed to take a moment and focus. You see, perseverence is important but knowing where to make the effort is what makes all the difference. They returned to advice, from a fellow Nova Scotian, they’d taken to heart years before: Focus on your top ten.