Relationships before revenue.
One principle, learned the hard way. Five manufacturer lines. Six states. Five people who have spent their careers on every side of this business.
The best thing that ever happened to us started badly.
Nathan Schorr went to work for MasterBrand Cabinets straight out of college and stayed sixteen years. In that time he worked all three channels of the business: builder direct, dealer, and home center. He knew the product, he knew the accounts, and he was loyal to a fault.
Then he was fired. By his own account he would probably still be there if they hadn't done it, and it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened, though it didn't feel that way at the time.
EQ Marketing opened in 2016 out of Waddell, Arizona. Sixteen years of watching how manufacturers treat the people who actually sell their product had made one thing obvious: this business runs on relationships, and everything else follows from there. That has been the operating principle ever since.
Founded 2016 · Waddell, Arizona
“We don't sacrifice relationships for a sale. We build relationships that create sales.”
Four commitments. No exceptions.
People still buy from people. Every account we open, we open with the intention of keeping it for years, not quarters. If a decision is good for the order but bad for the relationship, it isn't a good decision.
If we commit to a delivery, a quote, a training date, or a callback, it happens. This industry runs on a lot of promises that don't get kept, and being the agency that keeps them turns out to be a real advantage.
We ask what a dealer is trying to accomplish before we tell them what we carry. The right answer is sometimes a line we don't represent, and saying so is what makes the recommendation worth something the next time.
When our dealers grow, our manufacturers grow, and so do we. We don't take a win that costs a partner theirs, because there is no version of this business where that works twice.