Supplier Excellence Awards S
OLD-SCHOOL EXCELLENCE An acute attention to customer detail helps Harris-Teller always ensure it’s filling retailers’ needs. — By Michael Gallant Jon Harris, back row second from right, with the Harris-Teller crew at a recent NAMM show.
T his year’s Excellence Award voters described Harris-Teller as “a fantas- tic, yet ‘old-school’ provider [that] always comes through as promised” — a reputation the Chicago-based company fully embraces. “We are very old-school in that we try to take care of the customer in any way that we can,” said Jon Harris, the company’s president. “Our culture is what defines us, and that culture is that customers come first. That’s true down to a person, in every facet of our organization.” Voters described Harris-Teller as a friendly business partner with superb service, a wide product range and ultra- fast delivery. “They are our rock,” wrote one vot- ing retailer. “We place an order with
them every week, all year. They always treat us right and take [care] of any- thing we need.” Part of Harris-Teller’s old-school excellence is making sure that retail- ers can thrive against huge multi-na- tional competitors. “Part of our company culture and fo- cus is getting our product to music stores as quickly as possible,” Harris said. “We know that the stores we work with are competing against entities like Amazon, and that customers expect next-day deliv- ery. So, when stores don’t have a certain piece of merchandise in stock, we want to get it to them as quickly as possible.” FORGING BONDS Harris-Teller is partly able to accomplish this ambitious goal because they forge strong
relationships with their retail customers. The company keeps a multi-year history of all sales, for example, which allows them to stock deeply in the products their music store customers are most likely to need on short notice. “We want to be known as the one-stop shop, where a retailer can call us and get all their musical accessories,” Harris said. “We work hard to get as close to zero back orders as possible.” Harris also emphasized how this old- school approach to business excellence has yielded great results across the board. “The musical instrument world may be changing, but it’s still a great envi- ronment not just for doing business and making a living, but for making lifelong friendships,” he said. “Working in this industry is quite an honor.” MI
54 I MUSIC INC. I DECEMBER 2024
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