Building Ships

Looking to the past and seeing the future

Kathy Hoyle has been thanking customers and making sales for Hoyle Office Solutions longer than she can even remember. At five months, she appeared in newspaper ads for what was then known as Hoyle Office Supply, the successful home-grown business of her father, James W. “Red” Hoyle. “I’m exactly five months old New Year’s Day, and I’m the first girl in the Hoyle family,” read the caption next to baby Kathy. “Since I’ve been here I hear you have made Daddy’s place first in Office Supplies in our city.”

Now, as the company celebrates its 65th year serving its Western North Carolina customers, Kathy Hoyle is still front and center of Hoyle Office Solutions, this time as president and CEO. While the company continues to thrive and move forward with the grand opening of its New and Pre-owned Furniture Showroom this month, Kathy is turning back the clock to a brand of leadership for which her father was so well known for.

“I saw the need to take Hoyle Office Solutions back to the roots my father used to grow the company by — customer relationships,” says Kathy. “I like to think of myself as a shipbuilder. I build partnerships and relationships just like my dad. He grew this business by building those partnerships and relationships with people and it served him well.”

Kathy gives credit to her executive coach Krista Moore of K.Coaching, LCC  for her coaching, guidance, and strategic thinking to “get back to the basics” of what has made the company so successful in the earlier years. Today, Kathy is ensuring that Krista Moore’s ShipBuilding concept resonates throughout the company and community.

A lot has changed since “Red” Hoyle opened his office supply business on Walnut Street in Asheville in July 1945. The company has twice moved since that time, first to Market Street in Asheville in 1954, and most recently in 1997 to Glenn Bridge Road in Arden. With that last relocation, Hoyle’s moved away from retail to become exclusively a business-to-business supplier in order to meet the challenges of competing with aggressive, national-chain “big box” stores.

After her initial introduction as a five-month-old advertising model, Kathy continued in the family business, helping her father fold monthly account statements and dusting merchandise in the retail store. She took a somewhat more official position in 1976 in the accounting department. From that point, she learned all aspects of office supply business: from taking and filling customer orders over the phone to calling on customers, managing accounts, implementing the more recent changes in office automation and e-commerce, to ushering in the next generation of Hoyle Office Solutions as a local woman-owned business. And it’s still very much a family business; brothers Mickey Hoyle and Tommy Hoyle work right alongside their sister.

“My dad understood the importance of customer relationships, and a return to that emphasis is more important than ever now,” explains Kathy. “The big box stores don’t focus on that relationship well, if at all. It’s essential to learn and understand your customer’s world and what’s important to them. The number one reason you lose a customer is because they feel undervalued and ignored.”

“If we have a customer that needs an item that we don’t have in stock, we’ve been known to pick it up from a competitor and deliver it to them. We value our relationship with our customer more than we value a few dollars,” says Kathy.

Under her guidance, the customer service representatives at Hoyle’s take pains to know their customers very well. “We pay attention to what is going on in their lives as well as their business: birthdays, anniversaries, special events, not just for our customer contacts but also for members of their families.”

But Kathy understands that Hoyle’s customer relationships go beyond growing a prosperous business; it’s about participating in, and nurturing, a prosperous community. Recent economic studies determined that every dollar spent at a locally owned store is usually spent six to 15 times before it leaves a community: one dollar spent locally creates anywhere from $5 to $14 in value within a community. By contrast, spend one dollar at a national chain store, and 80 percent of it leaves town immediately.

Reaching even beyond the community, Kathy is actively involved in supporting other women in business. She was instrumental in the development of the group OPWIL — Office Products Women in Leadership. The group currently boasts over 100 members, and meets monthly via the Web, offering support and ideas for women in the independent office products business.

“Again, it’s shipbuilding,” says Kathy. “We have so many relationships we need to work on all the time: relationships with our customers, relationships within our community, and relationships within our industry. You grow by helping others grow. You build sturdy ships that will weather the storms and enrich the voyage.”

Hoyle Office Solutions is located at 180 Glenn Bridge Road in Arden. For more information, feel free to call them at 828.681.8797 or visit hoyleos.com. You can also follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

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